Landschap met een boom 1834 - 1911

Jozef Israëls made this pencil drawing, "Landschap met een boom", or "Landscape with a Tree", sometime during his career in the Netherlands. Israëls belonged to the Hague School, a group of Dutch artists active between about 1860 and 1890. They rejected the grandiose, theatrical style of earlier academic painting, preferring instead to depict the everyday lives of ordinary people. In his paintings and drawings, Israëls often showed peasants and fishermen in a sympathetic light, portraying the dignity of their labor and the beauty of the natural world around them. We might understand this drawing of a tree as a study for a larger painting, or perhaps as an artwork in its own right. In either case, it reflects the Hague School's interest in capturing the atmosphere of the Dutch landscape. Historians of art look at these social and institutional contexts to better understand an artwork. We might consult letters, diaries, and reviews from the period, to more fully appreciate the meaning of this evocative drawing.