Jozef Israëls

Israëls was born in Groningen, in the Netherlands, in 1824 and grew up in a Jewish household.[1] His early education included Torah and Talmud study, and he knew Hebrew.[5][6] His mother hoped that he would enter the rabbinate, while his father, a banker, planned a commercial career for him.[2] Israëls initially followed his father’s wishes and worked in commerce, but his habit of sketching in the margins of business ledgers helped persuade his father that his ambitions lay elsewhere.[2] He left that work and eventually received permission to pursue art professionally.[2]

His formal artistic education began in Groningen, where he entered the Minerva Academy in 1835.[1] Around 1840 he became a pupil of Jan Adam Kruseman in Amsterdam and attended the Royal Academy, studying under Jan Willem Pieneman.[1] His early training exposed him to classical and Romantic approaches to painting, before his later turn toward the lives of peasants and fishing communities.[2] His studies thus preceded the subjects and settings most closely associated with his mature reputation.[3][1]

In 1845 Israëls traveled to Paris, where he remained until 1847.[3][1] He studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1846–47 and worked with François Edouard Picot; his Paris training also included the academic painters Horace Vernet and Paul Delaroche.[1][2] He lived economically on a small allowance from his father.[2] At the Louvre he copied paintings by Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Raphael, and during his time in Paris he became acquainted with the Barbizon School.[1][4] These encounters brought his academic instruction into contact with older painting traditions and with the landscape art that would later inform his coastal pictures.[1][4]

After returning to Amsterdam in 1847, Israëls supported himself by painting portraits and historical subjects, including scenes drawn from Jewish and Dutch history.[4] His early work included large Romantic historical compositions, but his attempts to establish a reputation through conventional historical pictures and portraits met with little success.[3][1] Among these works was William the Silent of Orange Bidding Defiance to King Philip II of Spain (1855).[2] He subsequently turned toward peasants who came into Amsterdam on market days and toward fishermen in seaside villages near the city.[2]

Ill health compelled Israëls to leave Amsterdam in 1855 for Zandvoort, a fishing village near Haarlem.[3] The change of setting transformed his painting: instead of concentrating on historical narratives, he began making realistic and compassionate portrayals of Dutch peasants and fisherfolk.[3] Visits to Katwijk and Zandvoort in 1855–56 deepened his interest in the poverty-stricken lives of fishermen’s families.[1] Their labor, domestic routines, bereavements, and material hardships became central subjects of his art.[1][2]

Israëls brought aspects of this environment into his working arrangements by constructing a partial replica of a fisherman’s dwelling in a corner of his studio, where he could pose models.[1] His domestic subjects included people sewing, mending, spinning, and caring for children.[5] These scenes placed ordinary activities alongside the more openly tragic experiences that also occupied him.[1][5] The fishermen’s lives he depicted were arduous and often sorrowful, and his realism increasingly emphasized toil, sacrifice, and loss through a strong use of chiaroscuro.[2]

Death, dying, and funerals entered his work shortly before 1860.[1] The Last Breath depicts a woman grieving beside a dead man while an older woman comforts two children, exemplifying the highly emotional domestic scenes he produced in the mid-1850s and 1860s.[1] Other works from this broad phase included Passing Mother’s Grave (1856), which the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts purchased in 1861.[2] His portrayals of fishing communities soon became popular, establishing an audience for subjects that had replaced his earlier historical ambitions.[2]

Israëls married Aleida Schaap in 1863, and the couple lived on Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht.[1] Their son Isaac, born in 1865, also became a painter.[3] Israëls traveled beyond the Netherlands throughout his career, visiting London in 1862, Germany and Switzerland in 1869, Italy in 1877 and again in 1909, and Spain and North Africa in 1894.[1] These journeys accompanied a career otherwise closely associated with Amsterdam, the Dutch coast, and eventually The Hague.[3][1]

In 1871 Israëls moved to The Hague, where he became a leading figure of the Hague School and often worked in nearby Scheveningen.[4][7] The group, known in Dutch as the Haagse School, took its name from the city and included Jacob Hendricus Maris, Willem Maris, Anton Mauve, Johannes Bosboom, and Hendrik Willem Mesdag.[1] Its painters produced realistic landscapes, often distinguished by green tones and grey skies.[7] Israëls occupied a dominant position within the group, whose peasant genre painting flourished in the Netherlands between 1860 and 1900.[3][1]

His coastal paintings showed the influence of the Barbizon School, while his interiors recalled seventeenth-century Dutch painting.[4] Millet, the Barbizon painters, and Rembrandt all contributed to the artistic background of his domestic imagery.[1] The comparison with Jean-François Millet gave rise to the description of Israëls as the “Dutch Millet.”[3] His admiration for Rembrandt was especially important to his handling of illumination and to his interest in figures whose lives could be conveyed through a restrained interior setting.[3][1]

Israëls worked in oils and watercolour as well as etching.[3] Across these media, his later work often expressed a tragic sense of life through broad masses of light and shade, reflecting the influence of Rembrandt’s later paintings.[3] His subjects were not limited to work outdoors: domestic interiors and intimate human encounters remained prominent alongside coastal scenes.[1][5] Isaac Israëls later adopted Impressionist techniques and subject matter, and the son’s painting exerted some influence on his father’s late work.[3]

Among Israëls’s fishing-community pictures was Waiting for the Herring Boats (1875), a representative example of his compassionate treatment of Dutch fisherfolk.[3] Other recorded works included The Orphan Asylum at Katwyk, The Sewing-School at Katwyk (1881), and Alone in the World (1878), which was purchased by the Amsterdam Museum.[2] Frugal Meal entered the collection of W. K. Vanderbilt in New York.[2] In Grace Before Meals, a working-class mother and son give thanks over a modest meal of potatoes, with light playing a significant role in the scene.[6]

Old Friends, a quiet composition of an elderly man and his dog, appeared at the Paris Salon in 1882 under the title Dialogue silencieux.[1] Vincent van Gogh responded enthusiastically in a letter to his brother Theo dated March 18, 1882, comparing the picture favorably with Millet’s Death and the Woodcutter.[1] Van Gogh wrote that he knew no other picture equal to Millet’s work or worthy of being shown beside it.[1] Israëls returned to the composition in several paintings.[1]

Israëls and Max Liebermann were close friends and painted together in Dutch fishing and farming villages each summer from 1881 until around 1903.[6] His work also reached audiences through exhibitions in the Netherlands, Paris, and London, and prints of many important paintings became widely known.[1][5] The international circulation of his images accompanied a succession of official honors and purchases by institutions and private collectors.[1][2]

At the Paris Exposition of 1867, Israëls received a third-class medal and the cross of the Legion of Honor.[2] In 1878 he received a first-class medal at the Paris Exposition and became an officer of the Legion of Honor.[2] His other distinctions included the Belgian Order of Leopold, a second-class gold medal at the Munich International Exposition in 1883, and a first-class gold medal at the Paris Exposition in 1889.[2] At the Paris Exposition of 1900 he exhibited The Merchant of Bric-à-brac and Returning from the Fields.[2]

Jewish subjects formed another part of his career, extending from early historical scenes to later depictions of Jewish life.[4] His depictions of Jewish life also reflected his admiration for Rembrandt.[4][7] One of his best-known Jewish works, The Son of an Ancient People (1889), depicts a forlorn shopkeeper in the Amsterdam ghetto and conveys the compassion characteristic of his strongest paintings.[4] His other Jewish subjects included Saul and David (1898), Jewish Scribe (1902), and Jewish Wedding (1903).[5]

In Jewish Wedding, the groom places a ring on the bride’s finger, and both figures are draped in a tallit.[5] The subject and treatment of light in his Jewish paintings connected them with the older Dutch tradition he had studied and admired.[4] Although Jewish historical themes had appeared earlier in his career, his sustained attention to Jewish subjects developed especially in later life.[5][4] These pictures existed alongside, rather than replacing, the fishermen, peasants, and domestic figures for which he had become internationally known.[3][5]

A visit to Tangiers provided the encounter behind Jewish Scribe.[5] Entering a home, Israëls heard a question in Hebrew asking what he wanted and replied with a greeting identifying himself as a Jew from Holland.[5] Inside he encountered a Torah scribe at work, an experience that inspired the 1902 painting.[5] His ability to conduct this exchange reflected the Hebrew learning that had formed part of his Jewish education.[5][6]

Sabbath observance also remained part of his personal life.[5] Inviting a visitor to see his latest creations, he specified that his studio was closed on the Sabbath.[5] A family-related account linked this observance to a promise made to his dying father.[5] Six of his works were included in the exhibition organized by Martin Buber at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901.[5] Israëls died in The Hague on August 12, 1911, aged 87.[1]

Israëls’s international reputation rested especially on sympathetic portrayals of the difficult lives of Dutch fishermen and peasants, with a style indebted to Rembrandt’s somberness, tenderness, and humanity.[8] His place in nineteenth-century European painting also extended to Jewish cultural life: his 1889 Amsterdam-ghetto subject became an important image for a Jewish public seeking authentic Jewish art after the turn of the twentieth century.[8] His participation in the 1901 Basel exhibition brought his work into a setting where Jewish art was being presented alongside the developing Zionist movement.[5]

His artistic legacy included both a family connection and a broader public reception.[3][1] Isaac Israëls, who lived from 1865 to 1934, pursued his own career through Impressionist subjects and techniques, some of which influenced his father’s later painting.[3] Jozef’s pictures had already achieved wide recognition during his lifetime through exhibitions, prints, institutional purchases, and private collecting.[1][2] Van Gogh’s admiration for Old Friends provides a particularly direct example of the response his quiet domestic imagery could elicit from another painter.[1]

An archival collection at the National Library of Israel preserves materials relating to Israëls and his family.[9] It contains exhibition invitations, menus for celebratory meals held in his honor and that of close relatives, photographs of the artist and family members, and reproductions and prints of his works and family portraits.[9] The photographs include images of his mother.[9] These holdings preserve evidence not only of the pictures themselves but also of the family relationships and public occasions surrounding their creator.[9]

The collection covers the years 1887–1924, measures 0.2 meters, and is described at fonds level.[9] Its listed language is Dutch, while the archival documentation is in Dutch and Hebrew.[9] Members of Israëls’s family permanently deposited the material in stages: his nephew Herbert Schaap in 1932, his daughter Mathilde Anna Cohen-Tervaert in 1935, and his sister’s son, Professor Y. B. Cohen, in 1947.[9] The deposits thus brought together a small body of family and artistic documentation over a fifteen-year period.[9]

A self-portrait given by Israëls to his friend Boris Schatz in 1909 eventually entered the Israel Museum’s collection.[10] After Schatz’s death, part of his collection, including the portrait, eventually became part of the Israel Museum.[10] A second, nearly identical portrait remained with Schatz’s family and was eventually offered for auction through Sotheby’s in Amsterdam.[10] The existence of these two portraits prompted a later investigation into their materials and authorship.[10]

Israëls’s From Darkness to Light (1874) became an important work in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s collection after its donation by Moti Rubinstein in 1996.[11] The painting had previously belonged to the Berlin collection of the Jewish publisher and collector Rudolf Mosse.[11] After Mosse’s family fled to Switzerland, the Nazis took over the family newspaper, and the contents of the family home were offered for sale through the Lepke auction house in 1934.[11] The connection between the painting and that collection was supported by an auction stamp on its reverse, its appearance in the sale catalogue, and an old photograph of the family home.[11]

The painting disappeared from view for approximately sixty years before appearing at a Bonhams auction in London in 1993 and, months later, at Sotheby’s in New York.[11] That year the Tel Aviv gallery owner Meir Stern, himself a Holocaust survivor, bought it from a private collector and later sold it to Rubinstein.[11] After the 1996 donation, the work appeared in several exhibitions in Israel and abroad.[11] Subsequent provenance research led to a financial agreement with Mosse’s heirs that allowed the painting to remain in the museum.[11]

Israëls’s relationship with Zionism does not establish a settled political affiliation: Theodor Herzl visited him in 1898 and tried to interest him in the movement, but, according to some scholars cited by JNS, a Zionist publication’s claim that Israëls had made a financial contribution was later corrected.[5] Interpretations connecting his Jewish identity specifically to his stylistic development likewise remain matters of scholarly interpretation rather than an established explanation of his art.[5]

The two self-portraits dated 1909 raised an authentication question when they were compared at the Israel Museum.[10] The museum’s senior oil-paintings conservator, Ghiora Elon, identified the museum’s linen painting as the original and the family-held cotton painting as the copy, also observing less skillful details in the latter’s glasses and hat.[10] Explanations for the copy’s creation remained unresolved: one account held that Schatz made it to protect the original from the Ottoman official Jemal Pasha during the First World War, while another proposed that Schatz or a pupil produced it as an exercise.[10]

The provenance of From Darkness to Light became the subject of a restitution process after a German university sent the Tel Aviv Museum of Art a thirty-page research document linking it to the Mosse collection.[11] The museum considered returning the painting and ultimately agreed to purchase it from the heirs, with the museum and Rubinstein jointly funding the settlement.[11] The exact sum was not disclosed, although it was described as a few tens of thousands of pounds.[11] The agreement followed the museum’s stated approach of returning clearly looted works or seeking a fair solution with their former owners’ heirs.[11]