File:Fifty years of modern painting, Corot to Sargent (1908) (14750992896).jpg

Identifier: fiftyyearsofmode00phyt (find matches)
Title: Fifty years of modern painting, Corot to Sargent
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors: Phythian, John Ernest, 1858-
Subjects: Painting Painting
Publisher: London, G. Richards
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries

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early days he wished to become a rabbi, and studiedearnestly with this in view. However, when school dayswere over, it was to his fathers business that he went.But he was to be neither rabbi nor banker, but painter, andhe went first to the studio of Jan Kruseman, an academicpainter at Amsterdam, and then to Paris, where he studiedunder Picot, a pupil of David. That is to say, this youngDutchman, with the original works of the old masters ofhis own country around him, painters who were the pioneers,if not the founders of modern art, must needs turn hisback upon them and go to a foreign city to become animitator of imitations. Such for a time he became. FromPicot he passed to Delaroche, and returned to Amsterdamin 1848, having been about three years in Paris. He atonce set himself to paint historical pictures of the approvedpattern, taking his subjects from the Old Testament,Shakespeare, the history of his own country, and similarsources. These pictures are regarded now much as are re-
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PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 239 pented sins after conversion: as things to be forgotten andnot repeated. The whole character of his art was changed, however, bya compulsory return to nature, which, like that of theBarbizon painters, was much more thorough than the returnof Holman Hunt and Millais. Israels had been delightedwith the picturesqueness of the narrow streets of the Jewishquarter of Amsterdam, and yet he had become an academicpainter. The change came when illness compelled him toleave the town, and he went to Zaandvoort, the village onthe coast near Haarlem, which is now a household wordamongst artists. Here, away from galleries and studios, hediscovered the sea and the sky and the lives and surround-ings of simple folk to be both intensely interesting inthemselves, and also the very best of material for art. Israels, then, did not learn these things from Millet; helearned them direct from life and nature. His plot in theaesthetic map of art has not to be marked with the Fre

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