Young Girl Sewing

Around 1900 the quiet grey interiors of the Hague School had a strong following among American collectors, and many paintings by Jozef Israëls crossed the Atlantic. This one belonged to William R. Wilson of Boston, and it came to the museum with his bequest in 1915. The museum gives it no date. A girl sits sewing by a curtained window, with a basket on the table near her. Israëls returned again and again to women and girls at needlework in plain cottage rooms, and this is one of those scenes. In the lower left he signed it Jozef Israels, without the two dots his surname usually carries in print.