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is shown in being able to delight us with what in other less imaginative hands would only be realistic copies of cold interiors of churches, or peasants' homes, with no living interest in them. Yet such ordinary material this alchemist is able to turn into pure gold.

Bosboom was of a very sociable and agreeable disposition, and was very much liked and looked up to by his fellow artists. It is cheering to hear of his remark when no longer young, "You do not know how many nice people I have met with in my life." Thus happily went by the too short years of this peaceful revolutionary.

the Nine

tury."

Mr. P. A. M. Boele Van Hensbroek gives “Dutch a very charming account of the celebration Painters of of Bosboom's seventieth birthday by the mem- teenth Cenbers of the Pulchri Studio, a society of artists, literary men, and lovers of art, in March, 1887, in their domed-shaped room, with its wooden ceiling and carved chimney-piece, and its walls hung with sketches by the members. In the middle of the feasting and toasting there appeared through an open doorway the picture of a church such as Bosboom

had so often painted, and streams of music at the same moment filled the room.

Would that the artist could have lived for many years to enjoy the position he had earned for himself!

"But no,

Death will not have it so,"

and four and a half years after he passed peacefully away.

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CHAPTER VII

JOSEF ISRAELS

JOSEF ISRAELS has long occupied the position Born 1824. of leader and father of the Dutch school of painters. He comes in order of time only a few years after Bosboom, and contemporary with Weissenbruch. He was born fourteen years before Mauve and is twenty years older than William Maris. He is the leading figure painter in Holland, and paints also many landscapes, seashore scenes, and other out-door subjects, but always associated with men and women, and these are the more important parts of the pictures. But the chief reason of his prominent position is that Israels, besides being a great artist, is in every way a striking character. A Jew by descent, he has many of the strong qualities of his race; a painter, he has shown his originality in departing from conventional methods and adopting a style and depicting subjects of his own choosing; a man intellectually powerful and well informed,

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