Dutch Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ...Israels in the lives of the fishermen was the natural manner in which these unpolished people displayed their little joys, their sufferings, their fears, against the majestic background of the sea, the source alike of their livelihood and their affliction. A painter, he beheld in them picturesque figures in harmonious surroundings filled with atmosphere and with that incalculable light which is but seldom to be found in a solid, square interior fashioned of bricks and wood; he saw the children playing freely in the pools left behind by the retreating tide; he saw the mothers lulling their children to sleep; he saw death striking at the household; he saw the fishermen in touch with the sea. And his art is great even outside these subjects; and, without speaking of his portraits, which come so near to life, we admire the same breadth of view, the same expressiveness, the same poetry, whether he paints himself under the light of a lamp, or a harpist seated at her instrument, or a fashionable woman at her window, or a woman bathing. Even in his Sexton, that great pendant of the psychological interiors, that remarkable piece which, in its soberness, of all Israels' mighty work perhaps approaches nearest to Rembrandt and, at the same time, is allied to the greatness of our little masters: even here there is not a vestige of what we may call Tendenz. One who did not know Israels and who judged him only by his works could readily picture him as a melancholy man, burdened and bent with the suffering which he reproduces in his paintings. Nothing is farther from the truth. He sees the suffering; he penetrates into the loneliness, the poverty, the very being of forlorn humanity; he has the imagination necessary to exalt his single figures into types, ...