Jozef Israëls

In the second half of the 1800s the most respected painter in the Netherlands was often called a Dutch answer to France's Millet, the great painter of peasants. That was Jozef Israels, the leading figure of the Hague School, a group who worked in soft greys and browns and low light.

Israels painted the poor of the coast and countryside with grave sympathy, fishermen's widows, a mother alone with a cradle, an old couple sharing a plain meal in a dim cottage. He had turned to these humble subjects after a stay in a fishing village while recovering from illness, and never left them.

Born into a Jewish family in the northern town of Groningen, he became wealthy and honoured, his studio a stop for visiting artists. He kept working almost to the end of his long life and died in 1911, in his late eighties, by then treated as a grand old man of Dutch art.