life and vigour to figures, trying to paint them in a way that would reveal their thoughts and feelings, and he brought into his pictures new ideas of light and colour. Like most innovators, he was laughed at, but he persevered in his own way, and he has now the satisfaction of seeing his ideas and opinions about art prevailing and gaining general acceptance, and his paintings admired and highly valued. Israels painted in rich, deep colours in his early and middle period. His pictures in recent years, owing to their breadth of treatment, and his desire to secure what he considers the essentials, are in lower tones. Each period of his work has qualities peculiar to itself, and they cannot be found together. The lover of brilliant colour, careful drawing, and attention to detail will not find these in his late work, but in their place more atmosphere, more life, more feeling, wider and truer knowledge, perhaps really greater art. Certainly it was Israels' opinion, as he grew older, as it was that of Constable, Turner, Corot, James Maris, and Mauve, that greater freedom from the trammels of accurate realistic drawing than they had at first imagined, was necessary to enable the artist to thoroughly express himself. "Josef A critic has drawn attention to the fact Israels' Art that Israels is not a master draughtsman nor from an Viewpoint." Frederick Analytical a distinguished colourist, and that he has not a sense of beauty, simply as such, and that W. Morton. decorative treatment does not appeal to him: but he goes on to say, "Yet by an interpretative sense and a power peculiarly his own he has made himself the central figure in his nation's art. It is a supreme tribute to his genius that the artist should be able to dispense with so many of the elements of popularity and power on which other men are accustomed to rely, and still have his canvases so grandly impressive, so wonderful in their simple appeal." Surely this critic has answered himself. It is this very appeal to the feelings of the audience to which he is speaking through his pictures that he is anxious to secure; this impressive personal sympathy of his own with the scenes he paints that he unconsciously reveals. If a certain amount of apparent craftsman's skill must be dispensed with to secure these results, he decides to let it go for the sake of the higher truths. But his broader and more generalized treatment of his subject reveals always masterly ability on the technical side as well. Meester in the Nine The late Mr. J. S. Forbes, of London, at a banquet given in Holland in Israels' honour, "spoke of the greater things of life as small, J. de and the smaller things as great, in alluding "Dutch to the pictures of the master; and said if his Painters of humble men and women, and their poverty- teenth stricken homes, speak to us apparently of the Century." smaller things of life, for all that, the greater things lie hidden within them, and it is our want of intelligence if we do not perceive them." Can we judge of Israels' views of life from his pictures? It is an interesting and fascinating study. His work, like that of Rembrandt, the artist with whom he has most in common, is that of one who ponders over what he sees, and it reveals as much as he cares to tell of his thoughts. He paints all the various stages of life. When representing the springtime of existence, he sees, as is only natural, the joy of mere being, and he thoroughly enters into it. He shows us the happy children on the seashore, playing in the sand, building castles in the air. Like little voyagers starting out in life, they are occupied, as others who have travelled farther on, with the trifles around them, and how serious these seem! Bright and cheerful are these scenes; the sea is always calm and peaceful, and the sky a perpetual azure blue. Then in the pictures of which the “Bashful Suitor" in the Metropolitan Museum in New York is a type, we find the lovers, in those years when "to be young" is "very heaven," absorbed in themselves and their own feelings. The landscape seems to fall into tune and to sympathize with them. Israels has a peculiar way of painting these country roads and fields. The colour, except in his small window-landscapes, is unreal but imaginative. Such greens and blues and browns are quite unlike anything we can see, but what a depth of feeling and wealth of suggestion there is in them! He gives us something so strongly personal we feel it is a very part of himself; and, like the |