His Truthful Painting of Sheep and Cattle.—Mauve is, perhaps, best known by his flocks of sheep painted under all conditions and at all seasons and times of day; but not less true to nature are his cows in the Melkbocht, that paddock or reserved spot in the meadow where the cows are gathered for milking. His horses ploughing, or at rest, and his coast scenes, showing Dutch fishing-boats about to be pulled across the sands by teams of horses, are no less remarkable performances.
The Early Training of Josef Israëls.—For a whole generation Josef Israëls has stood at the head of modern Dutch art. Born in 1827, at Groningen, the son of a money-changer, he carried money-bags in his early years to the banking-house of Mesdag. He studied under Jan Adam Kruseman, and at first painted historical pictures; lived in the Ghetto in Amsterdam, and nearly starved in Paris, where he studied in the Delaroche school.
The Themes of his Paintings.—It was in Zandvoort, near Haarlem, that he discovered his true bent, and began to depict the seafaring man and the peasant in their homely every-day life. His people are all humble, and most of them are broken by poverty and sorrows. For more than thirty years his pictures have occupied the place of honor in all the Dutch exhibitions; and on his seventieth birthday he was made Commander of the Order of Orange-Nassau, and was the recipient of many gifts and congratulations. In this gallery hang a number of pictures dating from various periods. Among them are Fisherman's Children, Rustic Interior, After the Storm, Passing the Mother's Grave, Margaret of Parma and William of Orange (one of his earliest efforts), Old Jewish Peddler, and a Study of a Head.
ISRAËLS
Fisherman's Children
Veth's Appreciation of Israëls.—The artist himself is represented in a statuette by F. Leenhoff, which stands in one of the rooms, and also in a portrait by J. Veth, who sympathetically writes:
"The choicest pictures by this master are painted in a truly mysterious way, simply by the nervous vigor of an untaught hand with heavy, sweeping shadows and thick touches of paint, which stand out in a wonderful mixture of sharp relief and dim, confused distance; with soft hesitation and touches of crudely decisive certainty; with broad outlines and incisive emphasis. Ruggedness and tenderness, corruption and sweetness, whimsicality and decision, are magically mingled there in dignified depth, with the most refined feeling—the most ductile language of the brush that is known to me.
"And yet, notwithstanding, all this exists, as far as possible, in the clear, simple execution of the old Dutch painters, and there is one great family resemblance between the nineteenth century master and those who are the classics among the petits maîtres."
Each of his Pictures a Harmonious Whole.—"The resemblance—the revived tradition—is to be seen in the fact that Israëls, like the old Dutch painters, nay, even more than they, always aims at the sober, general harmony of the whole work. It is wonderful how discreet the effect is of a picture, for instance, by Pieter de Hooch, with all its elaborate execution; how splendidly it holds together, how strong yet delicate the construction is. It is this great quality of presenting an absolutely organic whole at one impulse which seems to have passed into Israëls from his precursors, who otherwise painted so utterly differently. Indeed, it is in this concentrated power, in this self-contained harmony, the outcome of one glance, as it were, and of one impetus, that we may discern one of the principal features of Israëls's art. There is nothing in his work that asserts itself alone, nothing detached, nothing that plays any part but that of strengthening the whole."
His Aim to paint the Truth, rather than to produce Studied Effects.—"Those who really understand the sincerity of his art know that he rejects everything approaching to working for effect—everything that looks like rule of thumb; and that he in fact never consciously troubles his head about studied effects or beauty. Beauty to him lies in the silent woe with which the survivors stand in a house of death; in the attitude of the old wife left alone, who spreads her hands stiffly out to the fire, as though she might win a spark of life from the smouldering hearth; in the way in which the decrepit old man sits with resigned dejection in his gloomy hovel, staring into his old dog's eyes; in the stupefied wretch who sits on a broken bench, where, behind him, his dead wife lies stretched on her bed; in the woful gleam in the eyes of the huckster who sits in front of his dirty booth, with a motley collection of rags above his head, watching us so mysteriously; in the sad old woman who, with elbows wide apart on her table, her hands quietly folded, sits weary and alone in front of her meal; in the kindly but hard-set woman, who, through wind and weather, tramps along field and road by her jolting dog-barrow, in a cruel struggle for existence; in the business of the fisherman and seafaring folk and their hard and simple labor; in the dignity of the patriarchal peasant family that gathers round the dish; he sees beauty in everything which lays bare what lies mysteriously latent in poverty and privation and suffering, at the very roots of human life."