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Historical Artist - Jozef Isra�ls (1638 - 1709)
Jozef Israels studied in Amsterdam and Paris before beginning a career as a portrait and
historical painter. In the 1850’s, he began painting fisherman and peasants doing their
everyday activity. Israels moved to The Hague in 1870 and joined the Hague School. During his
lifetime, he was the most famous living Dutch artist and earned the nickname ‘the Dutch
Millet.’ 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 recruit 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.
Contemporary Dutch Artists
Art Galleries in the Netherlands
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