Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) - Late 19th Century Etching Lost At Sea

Description

An emotional and atmospheric etching depicting a pensive and serious woman sitting on the grassy shore by the sea, staring out wistfully into the gathering grey clouds of the brooding sky. The artist has signed in plate to the lower left and in graphite below the plate line. There is a remarque at the lower left showing a small boat. The publisher's details have been inscribed top and bottom. On vellum.

Condition

The condition is typical for a picture of this age including some discolouration. The original plate lines are in tact. There is a charcoal inscription of some numbers at the lower right.

Size

38 x 28cm (15" x 11")

Artist Biography

Jozef Israëls (27 January 1824 – 12 August 1911) 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 continued his studies 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. Israel's remained in Amsterdam until 1870, when he moved to The Hague and became a leading member of the Hague School of landscape painters.

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.