Isaac Israëls

Isaac Israëls (1865–1934) was a Dutch painter and the son of Jozef Israëls, one of the founders of the Hague School, who developed his own distinctive Impressionist style quite different from his father's. Born in Amsterdam, he trained at The Hague Academy and at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. From an early age he was more interested in the modern urban world — cafés, dance halls, fashion, the street — than in the melancholy fishing communities his father had made famous. He spent extended periods in Paris, London, and Amsterdam, painting the women of modern urban life: dancers, café clientele, fashionable women on the streets. Cigarette Smoking Girls (1900), Standing dancer (1900), and his many portraits of women in Parisian and Amsterdam settings show a painter primarily concerned with the visual excitement of modern life. He was deeply influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec and Manet. In later life he travelled to the Dutch East Indies and Japan. His Portrait of Jan Toorop (1904) shows his ability to paint a psychologically complex artistic peer.

Israëls's style is energetic, colourful, and immediately responsive to visual stimulation. His brushwork is loose and rapid — Impressionist in approach — and his palette is bright and varied. His figures are placed in specific social environments rendered with journalistic immediacy. His women have a vitality and independence of spirit unusual in Dutch art of the period.

Isaac Israëls was the leading Dutch painter of modern urban life in the early twentieth century and his work represents the Dutch encounter with French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism at its most vivid. The contrast with his father's rural social realism makes the Israëls family one of the most instructive examples of artistic generation change in European art.