Shop Window

In 1893 Isaac Israëls rented a small room above a haberdasher's on the Nieuwendijk, an old shopping street in the centre of Amsterdam, so that he could watch the street from indoors. Across the way stood Bahlmann & Co., a shop for children's clothes, and here he painted its window after dark. The little dresses glow in rows of red, pale blue and white, arranged so neatly by colour that they fall into diagonal stripes. A window lit up like this in the evening was still a novelty in the city at the time. A man and a woman stand with their backs to us, looking in. At the edge of the canvas a small girl in a hat walks into the scene, caught mid-step as if she had no idea anyone was painting her.