File:Josef Israels - The Anxious Family.jpg

Identifier: landscapefigurepai00sher (find matches)
Title: Landscape and figure painters of America
Year: 1917 (1910s)
Authors: Sherman, Frederic Fairchild, 1874-1940
Subjects: Landscape painting Figure painting
Publisher: New York : Privately printed
Contributing Library: Getty Research Institute
Digitizing Sponsor: Getty Research Institute

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children on theseashore, playing in the sand, building castlesin the air. Like little voyagers starting out inlife, they are occupied, as others who havetravelled farther on, with the trifles around them,and how serious these seem! Bright and cheer-ful are these scenes; the sea is always calm andpeaceful, and the sky a perpetual azure blue. Then in the pictures of which the BashfulSuitor in the Metropolitan Museum in NewYork is a type, we find the lovers, in thoseyears when to be young is very heaven,absorbed in themselves and their own feelings.The landscape seems to fall into tune and tosympathize with them. Israels has a peculiarway of painting these country roads and fields.The colour, except in his small window-land-scapes, is unreal but imaginative. Such greensand blues and browns are quite unlike any-thing we can see, but what a depth of feelingand wealth of suggestion there is in them!He gives us something so strongly personalwe feel it is a very part of himself; and, like the
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JOSEF ISRAELS 141 Wedding Guest/ we listen and learn newthings or old things in a new guise, from onewho has come through more than the ordinaryexperience, and knows the people who mustsympathize with him and hear him tell histale of life. He also frequently paints the mother withher child, the peasant girl sitting near a win-dow in her home sewing, or, as the twilightfalls and darkness gathers, just looking outand thinking; the fishermans daughter seatedon a knoll of the sand dunes near the sea,waiting for the return of the boats; the oldwoman resting before a comfortable fire, en-joying the evening of life, or her companionlighting his pipe. Israels devoted himself tothe painting of this peasant life, and as thefirst to depict it in this natural yet very per-sonal way, his name will always be associatedwith this branch of art in a very special man-ner. He has a very intimate sympathy withthe toilers of the land, and he portrays theirhomes and occupations in a loving and poeticmanner

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