Gite in asino sulla spiaggia

While the older Hague School painters, his own father among them, painted the Scheveningen fishermen and grey weather as hard labor, Isaac Israëls went to the same beach and painted the holidaymakers instead. Around 1898 he was renting near the resort each summer, and he became fixed on one motif. Of roughly 100 beach pictures he made there, about 35 show children being led on donkeys along the sand. He worked fast and loose to catch the movement, almost the way a snapshot would. The riders here were people he knew, two young women and a little sister he asked to pose.