When Israels first espoused the painter's art, the spirit of classicism and her twin- sister, estheticism, ruled supreme in Europe’s literature and were duly reflected in her art. Literary men, the great as well as the small talents, cultivated letters for their mere esthetic gratification, having an eye only to the mere beauty of form or the rhythm and mellifluity of diction. The style, the form of dress, was all-in-all to them, while the tendency or message was nowhere visible or of negligible proportions. Letters and art were both, not unlike the other good things of life, considered as the just heritage of the favored few, the small cultivated and aristocratic minority, and the very thought of the existence of a vast multitude thirsting for the living waters of truth and beauty seems to have never even occured to any of them, much less to make their art the vehicle of some practical social reform and the amelioration of the unbearable lot of the people.
The poet, with but few and rare exceptions, attuned his lyre to sing the effusions of the loves and passions of the great and mighty ones, while his Muse was as deaf as the adder to the passion, longing and woe of the ordinary man in the street, who was not even deemed capable to harbor such divine but capricious guests. The same was true of the novelist of the period and even more so of the painter and sculptor, whose crafts were, by their very nature. in the service of the few favored and powerful individuals or the State, as a means of perpetuating in rich canvas or enduring marble and bronze the fleeting charm or majesty, as the case may be, of corrupting and evanescent flesh, and as they furnished the sinews of war, they also had the invariable choice of the subject to be immortalized. The tone was given by the dainty Salon beauties: the main consideration of the painter was the “Bon Ton” and finish. It was an unwritten law that only things in themselves beautiful and attractive should be painted and that there must be nothing ugly, exciting or thought-provoking in art.
But with the dawn of democracy and the call to a new life on the part of the oppressed majorities, the litterateurs and also the painters—that section of the race that is more bountifully gifted than all the others— with sensibilities attuned to vibrate, like the Aeolia harps, with every gentle breeze.
felt their blood a-tingling with a new message, a message of human brotherhood and love; were carrried along the impetuous rush of new ideals, aloft on the wings of imagery and creation. It was an unmistakable sign of the times that, in the midst of a coterie of the painters of pretty women, sweet, inanimate landscapes and sense- gratifying love-scenes between silken cava- liers and pretty duennas, Millet should build himself a cabin in the woods of Normandy, don homespun clothes and clogs, sustain life on a mess of beans and lentils, and dedicate himself to the painting, not of the serenity of the inanimate nature about him, but, rather. to the depicting of the human beings who form a part of her economy, who toil and battle with her in order to draw a meager sustenance out of her rugged bosom, and should there create his great “Angelus” and “The Gleaner.”
And it was even more a sign of the new and changed time that Israels, having begun his career in the good old conventional way of the classicist, should be chance alight upon the works of the aforementioned painter, and be influenced by him.
Israels was born on June 24, 1824, in the small Dutch town of Groningen, of fairly well-to-do Orthodox Jewish parents, his father being a banker. After receiving the ordinary education in vogue then among his people, his father apprenticed him to his own business, for which, however, the youth showed no more aptitude than his great contemporary, Heinrich Heine, who also was about that time busy in impressing upon his well-meaning relatives the seemingly never-learnt lesson that the man of genius whose soul soars to Heaven's heights and is on terms of intimacy with the Shekinah, can no more be confined to ledgers and counting-room limits than you can harness the heaven-soaring eagle to the humble cart of utility. The folios entrusted to his care had their precious pages all but hidden under a deluge of sketches and di- agrams and his father, perhaps not without a pang in his practical heart. soon had . to grant his son's request to be sent to some art school.
He was twenty-two when he arrived in Amsterdam and began the study of art under the academician, Jan Kruseman, a popular painter of his day. who left however but a scant reputation behind him. Dutch art, as indeed the art of most European