Riding Donkeys on the Beach
Isaac Israëls
ISAAC ISRAËLS, c1899. OIL ON CANVAS.
Visually striking, the three girls and their donkeys are little more than coincidental in this work. Instead, it is a classic of Impressionism in that is more a study of light that of anything so concrete as human figures. Israël captures an essence of summer, and the fact that the girls he painted were real people, children of his friends, does not negate from the universality of his depiction. Nature, childhood, sun, sand, and sea - these are the top line ideas, the qualities that across the globe we associate with the warm months, and with a sense of freedom. Israëls philosophy supports this idea, he believed in painting quickly, never working too hard or too long on a piece lest it began to take on a feeling of laboriousness. Instead, he painting quickly, no more than two hours at a time, in doing so was able to capture a sense of urgency and vitality that can come only with the extreme present.