Isaac Israels Reading nude (Sjaantje van Ingen)

Isaac Israels (1865 - 1934)

Reading nude (Sjaantje van Ingen)

Oil on canvas 65.5 x 81 cm, signed lower left

Provenance:

Coll. J.P. Glerum, Amsterdam; Coll. B. de Geus van den Heuvel, Amsterdam Jun. 1976, nr. 270.

Literature:

D. Welling, Isaac Israels, The Sunny World of a Hague Cosmopolitan, The Hague 1991, image p.. 25.

Exhitibion:

Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Van Romantiek tot Amsterdamse School, Jul.-Sep. 1958, cat. nr. C112; Laren, Singer Museum, Keuze uit de collectie De Geus van den Heuvel, 1964, cat. nr. 80; The Hague, Kunsthandel Van Voorst van Beest, Isaac Israels, 1989.Note:In the seventeenth century, the Dutch Rembrandt and the Flemish Rubens painted very realistic female nudes for which their own wives and women respectively. mistress had served as a model. After that, for a long time nudes were painted only in an idealized way, preferably in the context of a biblical scene or with classical goddesses. In the nineteenth century, female nudes had become extinct in the Netherlands, with a few exceptions. Dutch painters abroad painted them, Alma Tadema in England for example.In the Netherlands, Jozef Israels sometimes painted a naked woman, but rather blurred and almost certainly not from life. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did the female nude become important again in Dutch painting. From around 1885, Breitner, with Isaac Israels in his wake, made the first full-fledged and realistic nudes since the seventeenth century; this proved controversial, as the painters were accused of indecent lasciviousness. As models they used young women from Amsterdam's working-class neighborhoods or acquaintances from the artistic environment.The woman painted in this painting by Isaac Israels is not a classical goddess or a biblical woman, but her name is simply Sjaantje van Ingen. She lies unemotionally and is aware of no wrongdoing, but unabashed and absorbed in a book. Careful reading of this book is a cultural act that neutralizes any thought of 'indecency', even though the painter has paid full attention to the feminine curves and the beautiful color of the skin. The woman has been caught in an intimate moment, a moment for herself.