Portrait of H.W. Mesdag

Jozef Israëls's Portrait of H.W. Mesdag (1872) documents the friendship between two of the most important figures in Dutch nineteenth-century art — Israëls, the Hague School's moral center, and Hendrik Willem Mesdag, marine painter and great collector. Mesdag was building his extraordinary collection of French and Dutch contemporary painting that now forms the Mesdag Collection in The Hague, and his portrait by Israëls has almost institutional character — one master acknowledging another. The work presumably entered the collection directly through their personal relationship.

Israëls paints his friend and colleague with the same direct humanity he brought to his genre subjects — warm, slightly informal, focused on character rather than status. The handling is confident and Rembrandtesque in its tonal depth, with the face given priority through careful modulation of light and shade.