Jozef Israëls

Origins and early life

Jozef Israëls was born in Groningen on 27 January 1824, the son of Hartog Abraham Israëls, a Jewish broker and money-changer, and of Mathilda Solomon Polack, in an observant Jewish household where his mother hoped he would become a rabbi; he learned Hebrew and the prayers as a boy and remained a Jew all his life.

Work and career

He trained instead as a painter in Amsterdam and then in Paris under Picot and Delaroche, and began with grand historical subjects. The turn came around 1855, when illness sent him to convalesce in the fishing village of Zandvoort: he began to paint the fishermen and their families, and found the subject that made him famous — poor people at their most ordinary and most dignified, a mother and child on the dunes, a widow, an old man alone at a table.

Passing Mother's Grave and The Shipwrecked Man of 1861 made his reputation in Amsterdam and London. He settled at The Hague in 1871 and became the acknowledged leader of the Hague School, the Dutch answer to Barbizon; critics called him the Dutch Millet, and Vincent van Gogh, who visited him in 1882, revered his work and wrote about it repeatedly. He also painted Jewish subjects with an insider's eye — A Son of the Ancient People, the Jewish wedding, the scribe, the interiors of the Amsterdam Jodenbuurt — and travelled to Spain and Morocco to see Sephardi communities, publishing an account of the journey.

Later years

He received the grand prize at the Paris world's fairs of 1889 and 1900 and the Legion of Honour, and died at Scheveningen on 12 August 1911; his son Isaac Israëls became a leading painter of the next generation.