The Little Domestic

Born into a Dutch Jewish family, Israëls began painting and drawing lessons as a boy and later entered the Academy Minerva at Groningen in the northern Netherlands. By the early 1840s, the artist moved to Amsterdam to continue his studies and visited France and Germany, where he studied the old masters, contemporary academic art, and German Romanticism.

Despite his traditional training, Israëls’ preferred subject matter was not grand historical subjects. Instead, the artist focused on peasant life in the small fishing village of Zandvoort, where he created paintings of its humble residents. Often compared by critics to Rembrandt for his use of thickly laid on paint (impasto) and contrasts of light and dark (chiaroscuro), Israëls gained success and an international reputation for his art.