Jozef Israëls (Dutch painter) 1824 – 1911
Jozef Israëls was a Dutch painter. He was a leading member of the group of landscape painters referred to as the Hague School and, during his lifetime, "the most respected Dutch artist of the second half of the nineteenth century". He was born in Groningen, of Jewish parents. His father, Hartog Abraham Israëls, intended for him to be a businessman, and it was only after a determined struggle that he was allowed to embark on an artistic career. He studied initially from 1835 to 1842 at the Minerva Academy in his home town Groningen. He continued his studies subsequently in Amsterdam, studying at the Royal Academy for Fine Arts which later became the State Academy for Fine Arts in Amsterdam. He was a pupil of Jan Kruseman and attended the drawing class at the academy. From September 1845 until May 1847 he was in Paris, working in the history painter Picot's studio and taking classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under James Pradier, Horace Vernet and Paul Delaroche. He returned to Amsterdam in September 1845 where he resumed his studies at the Academy until May 1847. Israels remained in Amsterdam until 1870, when he moved to The Hague and became a leading member of the Hague School of landscape painters. He married Aleida Schaap and the couple had two children, a daughter Mathilde Anna Israëls and a son, Isaac Lazarus Israëls, born Amsterdam 3 February 1865, who also became a fine art painter. Israëls has often been compared to Jean-François Millet. As artists, even more than as painters in the strict sense of the word, they both, in fact, saw in the life of the poor and humble a motive for expressing with peculiar intensity their wide human sympathy; but Millet was the poet of placid rural life, while in almost all Israëls' pictures there is some piercing note of woe. Edmond Duranty said of them that they were painted with gloom and suffering. He began with historical and dramatic subjects in the romantic style of the day. By chance, after an illness, he went to recuperate his strength at the fishing-town of Zandvoort near Haarlem, and there he was struck by the daily tragedy of life. Thenceforth he was possessed by a new vein of artistic expression, sincerely realistic, full of emotion and pity. Source: Wikipedia * * * Isaac Israëls (Dutch painter) 1865 - 1934 Isaac Lazarus Israëls was a Dutch painter associated with the Amsterdam Impressionism movement. he son of Jozef Israëls, one of the most respected painters of the Hague School, and Aleida Schaap, Isaac Israëls displayed precocious artistic talent from an early age. Between 1880 and 1882 he studied at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, where he met George Hendrik Breitner who was to become a lifelong friend. In 1881, when he was 16, he sold a painting, Bugle Practice, even before it was finished to the artist and collector Hendrik Willem Mesdag. Two portraits he made in the same year of his grandmother and a family friend, Nannette Enthoven (below), attest the technical ability he had attained by that age. Starting 1878, Israëls made annual visits to the Salon des Artistes Français with his father and in 1882 made his debut there with Military Burial. In the 1885 Salon he received an honourable mention for his Transport of Colonial Soldiers. At this time he was reading Émile Zola, as was Breitner, and following his triumph at the Salon he spent a year travelling in the Belgian mining districts and elsewhere. Beginning 1886, Israëls lived in Amsterdam and registered with Breitner at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts to complete his schooling. Both of them, however, quickly abandoned the academy for the more progressive circle of the Tachtigers, an influential group of writers and artists of the time. This was a group that insisted style must reflect content and that emotionally charged subjects can only be represented by an equally intense technique. Influenced by this philosophy, Israëls became a painter of the streets, cafes, and cabarets of Amsterdam. At this time he met the Dutch engraver and painter Willem de Zwart who also became a lifelong friend. He often spent his summers with his father in the Dutch seaside resort of Scheveningen near The Hague. Guests included Édouard Manet and Max Liebermann. Interested by the changing light of sun and sea, he painted many colourful seaside scenes. Towards the end of the century, Israëls was introduced by his childhood friend and portrait painter Thérèse Schwartze to the Amsterdam fashion house Hirsch & Cie at the Leidseplein. Israëls portrayed the whole range of the world of haute couture, from seamstress to wealthy client, gaining access even to the fitting-rooms. Israëls moved to Paris in 1904, establishing his studio at 10 rue Alfred Stevens, 48.881784°N 2.338651°E, near Montmartre and just yards away from the studio of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec whom he admired, as he also did Edgar Degas. As in Amsterdam, he painted the Parisian specific motifs: the public parks, cafes, cabarets and bistros, as well as such subjects as fairgrounds and circus acrobats. Likewise he sought out the fashion houses Paquin and Drecoll to continue his studies of the world of fashion. However, he only exhibited once in this period, in 1909. At the outbreak of the First World War he was living in London, where he found new subjects in horse-riding at Rotten Row and in ballerinas and boxers. He returned to Holland for the duration of the war, living alternately in The Hague, Amsterdam and Scheveningen, where he worked primarily as a portrait painter. Amongst his sitters was Magaretha Gertrud Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, executed as a spy in France in 1917. Her portrait can be seen at the Kröller-Müller Museum. Other sitters included Johanna van Gogh-Bonger and the feminist physician Aletta Jacobs, although he also portrayed ordinary subjects such as girls in the street and telephone operators. Following the war, Israëls visited Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm and London. He spent the years 1921 to 1922 travelling in India and the Dutch East Indies, sketching and painting the vibrant life of South East Asia and notably the gamelan players of Bali. On his return, he settled at Koninginnegracht 2, The Hague, 52.085924°N 4.315014°E, his deceased parents' home, where he remained for the rest of his life, nevertheless making regular trips abroad to London, Italy and the French Riviera. At the age of 63, he won a Gold Medal at the 1928 Olympic Games for his painting Red Rider, an art competition then being part of the games. He died in The Hague on 7 October 1934, aged 69, as a result of a street accident a few days before. His partner at that time was Sophie de Vries.
