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Jozef Israels
Groningen 1824-1911 The Hague
Young Child with a Cat in a Barn
Signed lower right: Jozef Israels
Watercolor and gouache on paper mounted on board
8 1/2 x 9 7/8 inches (21.5 x 25 cm)Provenance:
M. Knoedler & Co., New York
Acquired by the father of the previous owner in the 1950s Sale, Sotheby’s, Tel Aviv, 4 Apr 1994, Lot 3.Jozef Israels was born in 1824 in Groningen. He was the third of seven children of Hartog Abraham Israels, a stockbroker, and Mathilde Salamon Polack, the daughter of a chemist. His family had tried to encourage him to become a rabbi, but instead Jozef took drawing classes, which was considered to be part of a good education. At the age of 13, he painted a portrait of a Jewish pipe-bowl merchant whom he often used as a model in subsequent images. Israels also attended private drawing and painting lessons from the two most highly respected teachers of the Minerva Academy in Groningen: C. Buys and J.J.G. van Wicheren. In addition, Jozef Israels often visited one of his father’s clients, Klaas Mesdag, who later became his patron.
Jozef Israels was a leading member of the Hague school and indeed considered by many to be the leader of the Dutch nineteenth century school. He studied at the Beaux-Arts in Paris under the history painter Paul Delaroche and, after his return to Holland in 1847, took up costume history paintings. In 1851 Israels truly began his career as a painter: that year he completed Adagio, a highly praised and large, ambitious canvas (location today unknown). He traveled to Zandvoort in 1855 and began to paint realist genre scenes of the fisherman who lived there. Israels mainly depicted people in common, everyday situations, such as Children on the Beach 1875 or Women Mending the Nets, 1866. It is these paintings that were most influential to Vincent van Gogh as well as to the Glasgow School.
Israels' work was held in high esteem abroad. He participated at the Brussels and Paris Salons and his work was shown at prestigious exhibitions in London and New York. When he moved to the Hague in the 1870s, Israels’ watercolors played an influential role in establishing the medium as fully-fledged in the Netherlands, enlarging the market of art buyers to include the middle classes.
Young Child with a Cat reveals Israel’s mastery at the watercolor medium. The work presents a child in a barn interior shrouded in cool shadow. The toddler, with her back to the viewer, reaches down to stroke the back of a black and white cat. The forms of these two figures are illuminated by a stream of white daylight that enters through an open door at the rear of the composition. Most of the interior remains in a heavy darkness and only vague forms are visible: the brown and white face and neck of a cow standing in a stall at the right of the composition, a rustic, wooden ladder that leads to a hayloft above the stall, and the beams of a wide doorway that lead deeper into the cool interior. The entire composition is painted in subtle degrees of light and shade rather than with line. Here, Israels demonstrates his complete command of the depiction of light and shadow.
