ISAAC

See also:

• BEN (from Old Eng. bennan, within)

BEN

See also:

• SOLOMON, ODES OF
• SOLOMON, PSALMS OF

SOLOMON

See also:

• ISAAC BEN SOLOMON ISRAELI (9th—loth centuries)

ISRAELI (9th—loth centuries)  , Jewish physician and philosopher . A contemporary of Seadiah (q.v.), he was born and passed his life in North Africa . He died c . 950 . At Kairawan, Israeli was court physician; he wrote several medical works in Arabic, and these were afterwards translated into Latin . Similarly his philosophical writings were translated, but his chief renown was in the circle of Moslem authors . ISRA'ILS, JOSEF (1824— ), Dutch painter, was born at Groningen, of Hebrew parents, on the 27th of January 1824 . His father intended him to be a man of business, and it was only after a determined struggle that he was allowed to enter on an artistic career . However, the attempts he made under the guidance of two second-rate painters in his native town—Buys and van Wicheren—while still working under his father as a stock-broker's clerk, led to his being sent to Amsterdam, where he became a pupil of Jan Kruseman and attended the drawing class at the academy . He then spent two years in Paris, working in Picot's studio, and returned to Amsterdam . There he remained till 1870, when he moved to The Hague for good . Israels is justly regarded as one of the greatest of Dutch painters .

He has often been compared to J . F .

Millet . As artists, even more than as painters in the strict sense of the word, they both, in fact, saw in the life of the poor and humble a motive for expressing with peculiar intensity their wide human sympathy; but Millet was the poet of placid rural life, while in almost all Israels' pictures we find some piercing note of woe . Duranty said of them that " they were painted with gloom and suffering." He began with historical and dramatic subjects in the romantic style of the day . By chance, after an illness, he went to recruit his strength at the fishing-town of Zandvoort near Haarlem, and there he was struck by the daily tragedy of life . Thenceforth he was possessed by a new vein of artistic expression, sincerely realistic, full of emotion and pity . Among his more important subsequent works are " The Zandvoort Fisherman " (in the Amsterdam gallery), " The Silent House " (which gained a gold medal at the Brussels Salon, 1858) and " Village Poor " (a prize at Manchester) . In 1862 he achieved great success in London with his " Shipwrecked," purchased by Mr Young, and " The Cradle," two pictures of which the Athenaeum spoke as " the most touching pictures of the exhibition." We may also mention among his maturer works " The Widower " (in the Mesdag collection), When we grow Old " and " Alone in the World " (Amsterdam gallery), " An Interior " (Dordrecht gallery), " A Frugal Meal " (Glasgow museum), " Toilers of the Sea," "A Speechless Dialogue," " Between the Fields and the Seashore," " The Bric-a-brac Seller " (which gained medals of honour at the great Paris Exhibition of 1900) . " pavid Singing before Saul," one of his latest works, seems to hint at a return on the part of the venerable artist to the Rembrandtesque note of his youth . As a water-colour painter and etcher he produced a vast number of works, which, like his oil paintings, are full of deep feeling . They are generally treated in broad masses of light and shade, which give prominence to the principal subject without any neglect of detail .

See Jan Veth, Mannen of Beteckenis: Jozef Israels; Chesneau, Peintres frangais et strangers; Ph . Zilcken, Peintres hollandais modernes (1893);

Dumas, Illustrated Biographies of Modern Artists (1882—1884) ; J. de Meester, in Max Rooses' Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century (1898); Jozef Israels, Spain: the Story of a Journey (1900) .