Passing Mother's Grave

Israels made this in 1856, and it changed the direction of his life. Until then he had been painting historical and biblical scenes that got him nowhere in particular. Here he turned instead to ordinary hardship, a widowed fisherman walking his two small children past the fresh grave of their mother. This plain sympathy for peasant and fishing life was fairly new in Dutch painting, borrowed from the Realists then working in France. Shown at the Brussels Salon the next year, it won him a medal and finally made his name. Years later a young Vincent van Gogh, who loved painters of the poor, counted it among his favourite pictures.