Jozef Israëls Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Jozef Israëls Jewish family intended for him to become a businessman, only after a determined struggle to convince his parents, he was permitted to embark on an artistic career. He started to study at the age of eleven, from 1835 to 1842 at the Minerva Academy in his home town Groningen. He continued his studies in Amsterdam for three years, at the State Academy of Fine Arts under Jan Kruseman. He then went to Paris, working in the history painter Picot's studio while also taking classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with James Pradier, Horace Vernet, and Paul Delaroche. from 1845 until 1847.

Jozef Israëls has been compared to Jean-François Millet. As artists, they both saw in the life of the poor and humble a motive for expressing with peculiar intensity their wide human sympathy, Millet was the poor farmers in the placid rural life, while Israels' paintings there is some piercing note of woe.

Jozef Israëls began with historical and dramatic subjects in the Romantic style of the day. By chance, after an illness, he went to recuperate his strength at the fishing-town of Zandvoort near Haarlem, and there he was struck by the life of poor and humble people. Because of what he saw, he started painting in a new vein of artistic expression, Realism.

Among his more important later works is The Zandvoort Fisherman, and his gold medal winner at the 1858 Brussels Salon, The Silent House.

In 1862 Jozef Israëls achieved great success in London with his Shipwrecked and The Cradle, two oil paintings described as the most touching pictures of the exhibition.

Art Movement: Realism.
Artists Influencing Israëls: Jan Kruseman, James Pradier, Horace Vernet Paul Delaroche.
He Traveled To France, England.
Painters Jozef Israëls Influenced: George Paul Chalmers, Robert McGregor.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.