LIBRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 MRS. DONALD KELLOGG
 
 t-i^m')
 
 JOSEF ISRAELS
 
 PORTRAIT OF JOSEF ISRAELS 
 
 From the collection of Edward Dnimmond Libbey
 
 ^oM feraefe 
 
 AN ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE OPENING OF THE 
 EXHIBITION OF JOSEF ISRAELS' PAINTINGS, 
 
 Toledo Museum of Art 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANK WAKELEY GUNSAULUS 
 
 1912 
 PUBLISHED BY THE 
 
 TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART
 
 PRESS OF 
 
 Rbvtew Printing 4 Embossing Co. 
 Chicago, U. S. A.
 
 TO 
 
 00r. (ZBDtoatD ©rummonD iLffificp 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART, 
 
 WHOSE MUNIFICENCE HAS CREATED 
 
 THIS OFFERING TO THE 
 
 MEMORY OF HIS 
 
 FRIEND 
 
 F. W. G.
 
 "'HROUGH his magnanimity and that sense 
 of proportion which has distinguished him 
 whose life and labors will always be asso- 
 ciated with the earliest conception and the 
 proudest achievement of this institution, the 
 Toledo Museum of Art, and because of the nation-wide 
 generosity of the owners of these masterpieces whose kind- 
 ness and whose loyalty to a great name and fame the world 
 of art will not forget, we are here and now permitted lo 
 join with him and them, in calling to mind the charactei 
 and career of Josef Israels. 
 
 Long ago, the essayist in the history of painting has 
 dealt with his accomplishments in the spirit and with the 
 technical care of a student of aesthetics. For more than fifty 
 years, the lover of the beautiful has vied with the student of 
 human nature at its greatest depths, or in its playful and 
 moving surfaces, to find in Israels' hand the plummet, or 
 eye-glass, by which we learn of this great sea called human 
 consciousness. As a scholar of wide and accurate research 
 in the things of the human heart, he has surpassed every ex- 
 pectation which the youthful student of Groningen had led 
 men to cherish concerning his career. Mr. H. W. Mesdag 
 has often told me how, when Israels was a youth, and the 
 banker-friend of his family looked forward to the education 
 and development of a man of genius as to practical afifairs, 
 he was interrupted by some manifestation of the young man's 
 passion for learning; but even then, far above all else, there 
 glowed within him a lofty beacon-light — a search-light in- 
 deed — that revealed more of human nature and man's en- 
 vironment than any banker could ever reduce to coin or any 
 mere pedant could confine in books of learning.
 
 Advancing with a little more of intimacy toward Josef 
 Israels' personality, and especially its aspects in his later 
 career, we may well look into a characteristic chapter of his 
 maturer life, if we seek to find what is true with regard to 
 his openness of mind, the spring and current of his imagina- 
 tion, and the almost unfailing potency of his art. It must 
 have been in 1891 that I first found Mr. Israels seriously 
 reproducing from his mind's eye, and for what he knew 
 was to be perhaps his greatest canvas, the most dramatic 
 episode in the life of Saul, King of Israel. In that auto- 
 biography on canvas — his portrait of himself made for Mr. 
 Libbey, and now reproduced at the beginning of this book — 
 we have a wonderfully wrought moment of that tragic hour 
 in the mighty monarch's history. 
 
 I was fairly well acquainted with the growth of that 
 monumental work, through the kindness of Mr. Israels, from 
 the time of its first really adequate expression, as a draw- 
 ing, to the later days, when this aged and apparently infirm 
 man climbed into the awful sunrise of that picture, and, 
 coming down the wooden steps which he traversed so often 
 to give the sunlight a more dramatic suggestiveness, walked 
 backwards, step by step, into the distance by which alone he 
 could look into the mystery and grandeur of the picture, 
 only to go forward again and touch the face of the mad king 
 with a deeper shade of meaning, or pour from his pencil into 
 the harp-strings of David a more winsome music. 
 
 No one who knew less of him than his closest friends, or 
 those who, from afar, were admitted into the kindness of his 
 literary acquaintance to share his enthusiasms over great 
 books, can ever say how deeply Browning's "Saul," as well
 
 THE NEW FLOWER 
 
 From the collection of Mr. E. Laydeii Ford
 
 as the poem, now almost forgotten, of a comparatively un- 
 known Canadian writer, called "The Drama of Saul," in- 
 fluenced Josef Israels' comprehensive and growing intel- 
 lectual and artistic life while he was painting this picture. 
 It is an unforgettable experience in my own life and always 
 will remain an inspiring reflection that I read to him this 
 passage : 
 
 "Now let hell work (or heaven) its will on Saul! 
 
 I am beset by a new demon; still 
 
 That chorus haunts me, and from every other 
 
 Study my mind reverts to that foul lode-thought. 
 
 I know that I am not in health of body; 
 
 Hence may arise the sickness of my mind. 
 
 For I am seized with ague of the soul, 
 
 Now hot, now cold, now rage, now fear, in turns: 
 
 And sometimes I believe I feel my old. 
 
 My demon-ruled and fatal fit returning. 
 
 O God, give me not up again to that! 
 
 David, young roe, start from thy form, and flee 
 
 Out of the dangerous thicket of my thoughts!" 
 
 He walked to and fro in his studio, and told me that he 
 had been interested in Saul as the most cathedral-like and 
 dolorous character of the Old Testament, most splendid in 
 its ruins. 
 
 Israels knew literature, and made comparisons, the pith 
 and point of which astonished me, as he talked of Macbeth 
 and Lear, and the Faust of Goethe, with reference to cer- 
 tain problems in the career of Saul. I felt then, as I feel 
 now, that Josef Israels would have been known as a great 
 man, if he had essayed literary production. 
 
 After reading over this passage, which represents the 
 king in the consciousness of his overthrown reason, he said
 
 to me: "This man certainly understands the phenomenon 
 of such moral insanity as was Saul's." We went to the 
 Mauritshuis together, and he showed me how unsatisfac- 
 tory, both as a painting and as a work of interpretation of 
 human character, was the Saul there attributed to Rem- 
 brandt. He even doubted if Rembrandt could have made 
 the mistakes, with respect to the dress and attitude, as well 
 as certain anachronisms, which he said any Hebrew student 
 would discover in the picture; and, in general, he pointed 
 out the weakness of that conception of the Hebrew king and 
 the comparative lack of power in technical achievement. 
 
 In the afternoon, he asked me to read more of this poem 
 to which I have referred, and his own conception of the 
 insane potentate of Israel, while under the wooing influences 
 of the shepherd boy's music, was, as he told me, marvelously 
 quickened into vividness and power, by the following lines : 
 
 "Still more, still more: I feel the demon move 
 
 Amidst the gloomy branches of my breast, 
 
 As moves a bird that buries itself deeper 
 
 Within its nests at stirring of the storm. 
 
 Were ever sounds so sweet! — where am I ? O, 
 
 I have been down in hell, but this is heaven! 
 
 It grows yet sweeter, — ' tis a wondrous air, 
 
 Methinks I lately died a hideous death, 
 
 And that they buried me accursed and cursing. 
 
 But this is not the grave; for, surely, music 
 
 Comes not t' reanimate man 'neath the clods. 
 
 Let me not think on't! yet a fiend fierce tore me. 
 
 Ah, I remember now, too much remember; 
 
 But I am better: still methinks I fainted; 
 
 Or was the whole a fearful, nightmare dream? 
 
 Nay, am I yet not dreaming.' No; I wake: 
 
 And, as from dream or as from being born,
 
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 Without the outcry of a mother's travail; 
 Or, as if waking from a revery, 
 I to myself am ushered by strange music, 
 That, in its solemn gentleness, falls on me 
 Like a superior's blessing. Give me more 
 Of this sweet benefit." 
 
 Now, another experience came to him from a more mas- 
 terly mind. For, I had the honor to bring to him Browning's 
 "Saul," and to read with him those haunting lines which arc 
 forever descriptive of the higher and sweeter ministry which 
 is almost an atonement and a reconciliation with the Eternal 
 Harmony. 
 
 Josef Israels possibly needed no help from the author 
 of "The Drama of Saul" to realize his conception of Saul; 
 but here was a distinctly great addition and enrichment to 
 his conception of David, who, of course, shares with Saul 
 the absorbing interest of Israels' masterpiece, as I believe it 
 to be, just as he shares with Saul the interest of the student 
 of that dramatic era whose master-minds they were. In- 
 deed, I might go further, and say that young David rises 
 out of Browning's poem with an eminence of heroism. It is 
 a mental and moral victory, through the ministries of the 
 art of music. If ever the Christian idea, so projected at 
 length at Calvary in David's Greater Son, was manifested 
 in a "proto-evangelium," it is in the effort of the young shep- 
 herd and minstrel, David, playing before Saul, to break 
 through the discords of poor Saul's madness, and restore the 
 man unto himself and the universe and God, by victorious 
 harmony. 'Whzttht'is the atonement? What grander con- 
 ception of the sin-bearing glory of humanity could there be?
 
 THE TROUSSEAU 
 
 From the collection of Miss Stella D. Ford
 
 N a score of his pictures — and I shall refer to 
 but one of them — Israels has comprehended 
 and expressed the very essence of Christian- 
 ity. We have had no greater preacher of the 
 Gospel of that blessed Jew whose philosophy 
 of salvation gives to a world maddened with sin, the music 
 of Calvary, than the painter, Josef Israels, with the possible 
 exception of Robert Browning, whose poem will be forever 
 connected with the great man's picture. 
 
 One day he was painting at the chords — merely indicat- 
 ing the quivering strings of the harp — when he read these 
 words of Browning's: 
 
 "Then I tuned my harp, — took off the lilies we twine 'round its chords 
 Lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide— those sunbeams like swords! 
 And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after one. 
 So docile they come to the pen-door till folding be done. 
 They are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they have fed 
 Where the long grasses stifle the water, within the stream's bed; 
 And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows star 
 Into eve and the blue far above us, — so blue and so far! " 
 
 He went on reading of "tune after tune," to my great 
 amazement, and broke off saying, after "the tune of the mar- 
 riage," "I know nothing finer than this:" 
 
 ' And then, the great march 
 Wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an arch 
 Nought can break; who shall harm them, our friends? — Then the chorus 
 
 intoned 
 As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned. 
 But I stopped here — for here in the darkness, Saul groaned." 
 
 I have often thought that the light in the picture of 
 Israelsdelineating Saul, under the spell of David's music, is
 
 the light which comes after that darkness in which "Saul 
 groaned." 
 
 Mr. Greenshields' interesting remarks on Israels are to 
 be coupled with his charming essay on the author of "The 
 Drama of Saul," the forgotten poet. What a gracious thing, 
 in the history of painting and poetry, it is, that one is remem- 
 bered thus, and that this forgotten poet has some adumbra- 
 tion of his bright but evanescent life in the immortal pic- 
 ture of Israels, and that, long after his death. Browning 
 worked through the tremulous but unerring hand of the old 
 painter, as he touched his Saul, making us read to him from 
 Browning these words: 
 
 "At the first I saw nought but the blackness; but soon I descried 
 A something more black than the blackness — the vast, the upright 
 Main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow into sight 
 Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all; — 
 Then a sunbeam, that burst thro' the tent-roof, — showed Saul." 
 
 Or, pouring out his love upon Saul, as, at last, David cries 
 to God: 
 
 "Oh, speak through me now! 
 Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst Thou — so wilt Thou! 
 So shall crown Thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost Crown — 
 And Thy love fiU infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down 
 One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no breath. 
 Turn of eye, wave of hand, that Salvation joins issue with death! 
 As Thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved 
 Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being beloved ! 
 He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the most weak. 
 'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! My flesh, that I seek 
 In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 
 A face like my face that receives thee: A man like to me. 
 Thou shalt love and beloved by, forever! A hand like this hand 
 Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee.' See the Christ stand!"
 
 •^ 
 
 WASHING THK CRADLE 
 
 From the collection of Mr. Henrv C. Lvtton
 
 REAT and precious was the inheritance of 
 Josef Israels from the Dutchmen of the 
 Seventeenth Century. The main contribu- 
 tion they made to him was an attitude of 
 mind and a point of view with reference to 
 the facts of our common life. No one has more justly esti- 
 mated these values than George Eliot, who says: 
 
 "It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that 
 I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded peo- 
 ple despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these 
 faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which 
 has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals, 
 than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffer- 
 ing, or of world-stirring actions. I turn without shrinking 
 from cold cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls and 
 heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower- 
 pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, 
 softened, perhaps, by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob- 
 cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel and her 
 stone jug, and all those cheap, common things which are the 
 precious necessaries of life to her; or I turn to that village 
 wedding kept between four brown walls, where an awkward 
 bridegroom opens the dance with a high- shouldered, broad- 
 faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, 
 with very irregular noses and lips, and probably with quart 
 pots in their hands, but with expressions of unmistakable con- 
 tentment and good-will. 
 
 "Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, 
 and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a 
 Madonna, turning her mild face upward, and opening her
 
 arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us 
 any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the regions of 
 art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn 
 hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot- 
 house — those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces 
 that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the 
 world — those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitch- 
 ers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this 
 world there are so many of these common, coarse people, 
 who have no picturesque, sentimental wretchedness. It is 
 so needful that we should remember their existence, else 
 we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and 
 philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world 
 of extremes. Therefore let art always remind us of them; 
 therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving 
 pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace 
 things — men who see beauty in these commonplace things, 
 and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls 
 on them." — Adam Bede, Chapter XVII.
 
 
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 EN like Euripides and Josef Israels quicken 
 
 with an earthly immortality, when they seem 
 
 most mortal. In her "Vision of Poets," Mrs. 
 
 Browning has perhaps written the finest ap- 
 
 ^ preciation the world may find, in so small a 
 
 compass, of the poet Euripides: 
 
 "Our Euripides, the human, 
 
 With his droppings of warm tears, 
 And his touches of things common, 
 
 'Till they rose to touch the spheres!" 
 
 He belongs to the morning time, and lives so deeply in 
 the primitive and permanent, that, whenever men in recent 
 days touch the essential and primal, something sings in the 
 spirit of Euripides. Robert Browning speaks of these 
 unique moments in life when the streams at the heart of 
 things flow forth, and when one is enchanted by a "sunset 
 touch" or "a chorus ending from Euripides." Thus one has 
 to go back to an earlier age than ours to find a parallel for 
 the greatest of modern Dutch painters, who just lately was 
 so signally honored as he walked the streets of The Hague, 
 that men regarded him, next to his queen, as Holland's most 
 illustrious citizen. 
 
 Josef Israels, who was an Hebrew of the Hebrews, "of 
 the stock of Israel, of the Tribe of Benjamin," was yet so 
 much more than an "Israelite in deed and in truth," as was 
 Nathaniel of old, that he will ever illustrate, in the sim- 
 plicity and beauty of his life, as well as in the fluency and 
 power of his art, the cosmopolitan spirit. For example, he 
 was Greek. He is the Euripides of modern pictorial art.
 
 No man approaches him in the humanizing influence which 
 he has exercised, to the utter demolition of the inhuman and 
 to the partial destruction of the wnhuman, in the painting of 
 pictures. 
 
 Millet, with the French peasant; and Burns, with the 
 Scotch peasant; touch less strongly and tenderly the chords 
 divine which vibrate through the human. I once asked a 
 distinguished tragedian why he did not reproduce Brown- 
 ing's drama of "Strafford." I did not think that Macready 
 scarcely gave either Browning or "Strafford" a fair chance 
 many years ago. The modern tragedian, whose every look 
 and syllable are art itself, told me that "Strafford" lacked 
 "human interest." No artist is his total self, until he invests 
 all his powers and experiences in the character he portrays. 
 It is impossible to do this in "Strafford," for he and his 
 career do not manifest the primal and ineradicable emo- 
 tions, ideas and purposes of humanity.
 
 THE RAY OF SUNSHINE 
 
 From the rollection of Mrs. H. N. Torrey
 
 N the other hand, Josef Israels has painted 
 the heart of the human child so completely, 
 even in his treatment of the oldest of his 
 characters — for his figures are nothing less 
 than characters — and he has also discovered 
 for us the significance of laborious age, or resistless strength 
 of body and mind, even in the smallest tot playing with 
 boats upon a little ocean of his own, that one must turn to 
 him as one turns to a supreme poet, for the interpretation of 
 himself. The secret of this magnificent sweep of things and 
 of the validity of his interpretation lies wholly in his per- 
 sonality. He is one of those who illustrate the truth of the 
 saying that "we are all human, yet some of us are more so 
 than others." 
 
 Israels' humanity, considered as a factor for discovering 
 and interpreting the human phases of this universe, is an 
 item of character, and therefore is always in evidence. We 
 feel it in his paintings, so appealingly eloquent everywhere, 
 because it is of him; and it is therefore not less convincing 
 when one is admitted into the home and life of this true son 
 of Rembrandt. Whatever a man is by birth and tradition 
 and hereditary equipment, if he lives deeply and broadly 
 enough, he will strike out into the deep, rich humanity 
 which is larger than himself and root himself there. This 
 is illustrated in the fact that there is a Greek element easily 
 discernible when the extremities of Israels' power are called 
 upon. He is cosmopolitan and ageless. It is like living in 
 an age entirely, as Ruskin says, "the greatest men, whether 
 poets or historians, live by constant law," and at the same 
 time, living through the age into the ageless, as did Shake-
 
 speare and Rembrandt, touching the universal, or at least 
 finding a symbolism which helps both the temporal and the 
 eternal to understand one another. Every Dutch item in 
 Israels' product is fruit from the all-human tree. 
 
 As I have watched him, painting with the ardor and 
 devotion with which Isaiah prophesied and David ruled in 
 Israel, he seemed to be uttering that one prayer from one of 
 the Psalms most familiar to his boyhood: "Open Thou 
 mine eyes, and I will behold wondrous things out of Thy 
 Law." Here was a Jew, so intensely living his life that his 
 essential humanity burned through it. He went into the 
 larger from the less, only by being utterly loyal to the less. 
 It took years for Israels to find himself more than a Jewish 
 pharisee in thinking and in art expression. In his emanci- 
 pation from hard formulary, he, like the great Jew Jesus, 
 appealed to the mightier, fresher, and essential Hebrew- 
 dom, which was quite overgrown with the traditions of 
 scribe and pharisee. But Israels has left many a canvas, 
 which shows that he was a true "son of the law." After a 
 few years of laborious legalism (which is always necessary 
 in order that we may get from our Sinai to our Calvary, in 
 anything), there rose a spirit of freedom and power within 
 Israels, which at length got beyond all "the mint, anise and 
 cumin of the law," and found the artistic gospel which was 
 in Franz Hals, Rembrandt and Ver Meer of Delft, as it 
 was a religious gospel in Isaiah the prophet and David 
 the singer. It was love triumphant, not over law, but by 
 law, and through law.
 
 
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 HEN he was a child in Groningen at ten 
 years of age, his attention was given to the 
 Talmud, and for several years he was spoken 
 of as the coming rabbi. He has been cred- 
 ited with keeping up his studies in rabbinical 
 lore, and with a profound mastery of the literatures of the 
 law and the prophets. His art-method has grown only as 
 his character-method. Faithfulness to the few things alone 
 has made him ruler over many things. Personally, and 
 from a literary and philosophical point of view, he was one 
 of the interesting, and I shall say impressive, men of modern 
 times. All the fine experience of soul which the Hebrew 
 nation may have rescued from eloquent prophets, deep- 
 toned psalmists, valiant kings, and aspiring servants of God 
 everywhere, while these have been led through ages of grief 
 and joy, now by the waters of Babylon and now before the 
 marble-turreted temples of Jerusalem, had wrought upon 
 this face and head, creating also the attitude of bodily grace, 
 inspiring the vigor and nobility which were but outward 
 expressions of that inner reality whose influence the history 
 of art will never forget — Josef Israels. 
 
 There is a kind of Anglo-Saxon particularly in evidence 
 today who is so little in spirit and so great in form only, that 
 he preserves for us only the peculiarities of the Saxon. He 
 is very much of a force in a falling market, as life's com- 
 merce goes on. He cheapens everything. Here was a Jew 
 so careless of literalism and form, and so suffused and 
 exalted by the spiritual qualities of that most insistent and 
 self-evidencing race, that we recognize in him, not a single 
 peculiarity of his own people, but a mental and spiritual
 
 cosmopolitanism, fascinating if it were not so nearly ma- 
 jestic. In the drawing which represents his being pre- 
 sented at the Royal Academy in London, by the larger and 
 handsome Alma-Tadema, only Israels' back is seen, but 
 the whole man is there; and no one would mistake this vi- 
 brant and intense physical personality for anything else than 
 the instrument of a high and beautiful soul. It is so in 
 his art, for wherever anything of his appears, it is incon- 
 testably of Israels and of all of him.
 
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 O one who has beheld one of the many attesta- 
 tions of honor and reverence given to him by 
 the people at Amsterdam and The Hague 
 can fail to recognize the fact that he was the 
 indubitable and worthy center of it all. As I 
 saw the vast and brilliant audience which ranged from or- 
 chestra boxes to highest gallery, and observed the blaze of 
 those gems which had long been possessed by the aristocratic 
 families of Holland, I thought only the prima donna might 
 punctuate the glory with a personal presence to be recog- 
 nized. The most charming of modern singers was, how- 
 ever, wisely waiting, to come to her own laurels at a later 
 moment. A greater personality would first give piquancy 
 to the scene. From an unobserved doorway, quite in front 
 of the audience, came an insignificant, trembling figure, 
 crowned with snowy white hair, and triumphant with three 
 score years and ten of achievement. He was in evening 
 dress, and wore medals of his various orders. They seemed 
 almost too numerous, for so slight and unimposing a figure. 
 In an instant, the whole audience was upon its feet. A smile 
 from the venerated artist made the jewels more radiant, and 
 the great assemblage stood until Josef Israels had taken 
 his seat. 
 
 All arts, pursuits and achievements of men were inter- 
 esting to this open-eyed human being. I once sent to him 
 as a gift the "Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson." His 
 letter in reply is so characteristic of vigorous and many- 
 sided mentality that I venture to print it, even with the 
 quaint and charming mistakes which the great Dutchman 
 made in handling English:
 
 My Dear Sir: — 
 
 Many thanks for your kind letter and for your conversation 
 with Joseph Jefferson through which I come in possession of the 
 fine volume of the autobiographies of your friend. He is a very 
 pleasant story teller, and I shall send him reciprocally a book that 
 I wrote in Dutch, but who also is translated in English. It is 
 my voyage in Spain and illustrated by myself. As I do not know 
 the address of Mr. Jefferson, you will, perhaps, be so friendly 
 to send. I was wondered about the fine engravings on the 
 autobiography and how good it is printed and edited. I have 
 not been quite through it, but the part I read is very interesting 
 and amusing, and I would not wait too long for thanking ycfu 
 and the author. Therefore this: — Arl is a commonweal i/i for 
 itself and to deal with members of that community has for me 
 ahvays a great charm. Believe me, dear sir, 
 
 Dr. F. W. Gunsaulus Affectionately yours, 
 
 Chicago Josef Israels 
 
 The commonwealth of which he speaks was broadly 
 represented in his library and studio, on the tables of which 
 one saw magazines in all modern languages of culture, fine 
 drawings from continental and oriental studios, choice bits 
 of sculpture, and the portraits of his friends. 
 
 As an author of the book on Spain, he is luminous, full 
 of humor, and most interesting and instructive when, for 
 example, he speaks of Velasquez and Rembrandt: 
 
 "*Eh bienl' said my French friend. 'Was I exaggerat- 
 ing when I talked to you about the glorious Velasquez?* 
 
 "Erens pointed out that it was the fashion lately to place 
 Velasquez above Rembrandt. 
 
 "That is true,' I replied, 'I have heard it said; but I 
 think the opinion frivolous. For, although Velasquez is an 
 exceptional painter, so is Rembrandt, and he is much more 
 besides. If Rembrandt had never taken a brush in hand, 
 his etchings alone would have placed him among the fore-
 
 IN THOUGHT 
 
 From the collection of Mrs. Nathaniel French
 
 most creative artists. The excellence of his talent as a 
 painter is but a small portion of all that combines to form 
 the enormous genius of this jewel with its many facets, his 
 imagination, his simplicity, the poetry of his somber, mys- 
 terious effects, the depth and virtuosity of his workmanship. 
 Velasquez never painted heads like the Staalmcesters. The 
 hair lives, the eyes look at you, the foreheads wrinkle at 
 you. This is my first visit to Madrid, and I rejoice at being 
 able to enjoy this, to me, new talent of Velasquez. But 
 when I look at his masterpiece, 'Las Lanzas,' and think of 
 Rembrandt's 'Night Watch,' I continue to regard the Span- 
 ish chef-d'oeuvre with the greatest appreciation and delight, 
 but, in my thoughts I fall back before the 'Night Watch' as 
 before a miracle. There you have a breadth of brush that 
 no one has ever equaled. All of which painting is capable 
 is united in that: fidelity to nature and fantasy, the loftiest 
 masterliness of execution, and in addition a sorcery of light 
 and shadow that is all his own. Rembrandt's was an unique 
 mind, in which the mystic poetry of the North was com- 
 bined with the warmth and virtuosity of the South. The 
 work of Velasquez, on the other hand, glows calmly and 
 peacefully from these glorious walls. He works, but does 
 not contend; he feels gloriously, but wages no combat; Rem- 
 brandt's gloomy silence in darkness, his striving after the 
 infinite and inexplicable, are unknown to him; serene and 
 sure, he sits enthroned upon the high place which he has 
 made his; but Velasquez's art embraces only his own sur- 
 roundings, whereas Rembrandt's plays its part in every 
 human life, and in addition strives after the historic and the 
 
 unseen.' "
 
 OLD AGE 
 
 From the collection of Mr. Edward Morris
 
 F the finest thought and enterprise of the 
 greatest of Hebrews have ever disclosed 
 their true roots, it is in the fact that they have 
 led civilization to enthrone the little child, 
 instead of the pretentious scholiast or the be- 
 jeweled monarch. This is precisely w^hat Israels has done 
 with the art of painting. Hebrew of Hebrews, he has "set 
 the child in the midst of them." 
 
 Another phase of the matter is this: he has irradiated 
 life's commonplace with the glory of the human soul at its 
 highest. Fishermen and their toils, plain mothers with their 
 children in cradles, and aged scribes or old-clothes sellers, 
 have marched along in the procession with his wonderful 
 and unsurpassed delineation of the grandeur of Saul, King 
 of Israel. No man, save Robert Browning, has been at 
 once so poetic and philosophic in interpreting the David of 
 Saul's tragic hour. But nature, aside from man, is equally 
 responsive to him, for, paradox that it may be, nature is 
 never separable from man in his eyes. The range of inter- 
 pretation of humanity manifested in the multitude of small 
 and great which he has placed upon his canvases is not less 
 wonderful when the skies, for example, of his pictures are 
 studied with reference to the moods of mind which they 
 indicate.
 
 Children of the Sea 
 
 These be young Newtons playing on life's beach, 
 Sailing Thought's tiny craft o'er sand and shell, 
 Learning Life's secret through old Ocean's speech 
 And new-borne-burdens, therefore learning well.
 
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 SRAELS did not live in a duo-verse, least of 
 all in a multi-vcvse, but in a w«i-verse. If a 
 man is pulling a boat along a canal, and in- 
 dicating to us the long way which goes 
 through age to death, the skies above him 
 are quivering with the moment in which every afternoon 
 drops into eventide. No one, since Rembrandt, has made 
 the physical universe, which both of them have drawn upon 
 but sparsely, so palpitant with human emotion, sympathy, 
 desire and an inspiration entirely human. Israels might 
 have been one of the great landscape-painters of all time. 
 He has the directness of nature. A great painting must be 
 full of vision, but not of r^-vision. He has the visual power, 
 and with it the virtuosity characteristic of Hals. A thor- 
 oughly systematic mind, like every man of genius, he is not 
 a slave to a system. A man who can grow, after seventy- 
 five years have gone over him and through him, to the 
 superlative power which creates the "Saul" and "The 
 Scribe," is far beyond the possibility of mannerism. Israels 
 has lived for this harvest of energy, insight, fluency, and 
 adequacy of expression. In every artist's experience, in- 
 tention and achievement, impression and expression, must 
 be as nearly identical in the moment and motive as possible. 
 In the creation of the mightier canvases of Israels, these 
 were contemporaneous. This is the divine quality of art. 
 "God said: let there be light, and there was light."
 
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 HEN he passed from us, Rembrandt's great- 
 est son had dropped his brush and palette. 
 The hues of these two noblest painters of 
 earth's bravest nation melted into the perma- 
 nent glory, in which the two hundred years 
 which separated them seem but the modulation of some 
 splendid line, or the play of some evanescent color too love- 
 ly to abide. Josef Israels was with his master in the Jeru- 
 salem which he dreamed of as a Jewish lad, and "the boys 
 and girls are playing in the streets thereof." 
 
 As Rembrandt placed little wooden shoes upon his chil- 
 dren, in delineating the glory of that beloved Jew, Jesus, so 
 Josef Israels defied the stilted proprieties of his Hebrew 
 learning by hanging the Christian's rosary from the man- 
 telpiece in the house of "The Cottage Madonna," herself a 
 child of Rachel and Rebekah. 
 
 Genius ranges over the length and breadth of the soul's 
 experience; and genius never reported the deep, sweet cur- 
 rents of the soul's life more adequately than by the pencils 
 of Rembrandt and Israels. 
 
 The primitive and permanent were Israels' and are his 
 forever. To see him at his work, mingling his colors or 
 touching his canvas, was to behold a Prince of the House 
 of David within the Holy of Holies of God's nature and 
 man's life, unafraid and joyous at his priestly task. 
 
 That slight figure, only five feet in height and less than 
 one hundred pounds in weight, when he was painting King 
 Saul's most tragic hour, walking back and forth, meditating 
 and attacking again the problems on the canvas before him, 
 climbed up the stair to the upper ranges of his picture to
 
 touch the distant hills of Palestine with a deeper tint, so en- 
 souled with mastery that you saw only a giant to whom it 
 was easy to fling from morn's drama a beam of light upon 
 the shepherd boy's harp, with all the rapture and force with 
 which Browning wrote his "Saul" and Handel transformed 
 the Hebrew king's melody into immortal music. 
 
 Both these illustrious masters — Browning by his poetry; 
 Handel by his music — set the soul of Israels upon the com- 
 pletion of the task he had chosen for his own consummate 
 work in painting, fifty years before. The achievement will 
 be visited fifty years hence in Amsterdam, when the artistic 
 conscience will say: "I have seen Rembrandt's 'Night 
 Watch'; let me now see Israels' 'Saul and David.' "
 
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 E succeeded at last with the sublime, because 
 he had mastered the simple. At tiie opcninj; 
 of his career he sought to paint in "the grand 
 style." He became only grandiose. There 
 was hope for the young man from Holland, 
 when he left Paris and went back homeward to the seashore 
 and the ordinary life of true-hearted men, women and 
 children. 
 
 Failure and sickness conspired in vain against him. A 
 new character was wrought within him, when he left the 
 complexities and delicacies of feverish art which was 
 only artifice. 
 
 He followed instead "the little child." 
 
 This has led him to greatness and an imperishable name. 
 He was an aristocrat in birth and breeding and culture. The 
 life of the common people taught him the democracy of 
 sweet sentiments and noble heroisms. 
 
 When the archbishop of Paris saw his "Cottage Ma- 
 donna" in the Salon, he said to the eminent Jew: "Mr. 
 Israels, you are a great Catholic." 
 
 Even then, he appeared not more noble than when I saw 
 him touch for the last time one of the pictures of childhood 
 reproduced in this memorial, and say: "'Except ye be- 
 come as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of 
 heaven.' "
 
 The Long Way 
 
 So long and urgent is man's destined way 
 
 Why must it shadowy be? 
 There blows at waning of a labored day 
 
 Life's bud of mystery. 
 
 A flower with mellow tints alive; 
 
 The violet flush o'er gold. 
 The sky abloom for them who strive 
 
 In youth of hope, being old. 
 
 O Rembrandt's son, in days more wrought 
 
 Than his with light and shade — 
 More sad with introverted thought: 
 
 Thanks for thy faith displayed ! 
 
 For darkness palls not luminous as thine, 
 
 The light hath healing balm; 
 Leaving to eyes disturbed no garish sign; 
 
 Instead unwonted calm. 
 
 The darkness on thy palette censured oft, 
 
 Like to the psalmist's rune, 
 Holds suDJect streams whose advent bright and soft 
 
 Whelms clouded hearts with noon. 
 
 Thou Hebrew prophet, mage of sighs and tears, 
 
 Singer of joy with pain 
 And hours of prayers and mother-hopes and fears, 
 
 And childhood's glad refrain. 
 
 By Babylon's high towers and rivers bright 
 
 Thy fathers sang and toiled. 
 While strings of pure and vitalizing light 
 
 Within their sadness coiled. 
 
 Soul, struggle on in shifting shadows born 
 
 Of light and hearten care: 
 Till labor wake in all-revealing morn, 
 
 Fair and forever fair.
 
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 THE COTTAGE MADONNA 
 
 From the collection of Mrs. H. N. Torrey
 
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