NOTES
Charming scenes of children at the beach were an especially popular theme for Jozef Israëls. In his native Netherlands, the sea is never far away, and the subject recurs often in his work. Variants include fishing and seafaring to more everyday subjects such as this view of a boy and girl playing on the beach. Israëls was a founding member of the Hague School, a group of 19th-century Dutch painters who looked back at their illustrious 17th-century predecessors such as Rembrandt for inspiration. At the same time, they absorbed new trends toward naturalism and direct observation evolving in France.
Even though Israëls himself pronounced copies of paintings to be “potboilers,” at least three painted versions of this composition survive, in addition to the Museum’s pastel. The earliest version, from 1863, was exhibited at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, France.
