Masterpiece Story: Donkey Rides on the Beach by Isaac Israëls

Isaac Israëls

Isaac Israëls (1865–1934) was the son of the successful Dutch artist Jozef Israëls (1824–1911). He was taught by his father and had teenage success with grim and muddy depictions of military and industrial subjects. The Transport of Colonial Soldiers was exhibited at the French Salon in 1885. Its scale, complexity, and almost monochrome palette harked back to mid-century Realism, as well as to the work of his father.

Early connections with artists like Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and the pull of the French capital led to Israëls leaving Holland for Paris in 1904. His palette lightened as he focused on fashionable city life and leisure, often choosing locations familiar from Impressionist works, like the Moulin de la Galette, which had been a favorite subject for Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919). Later in his career, Israëls traveled more widely around Europe and as far afield as India and South East Asia.

Israëls developed a loose, impressionistic style, with boldly visible brushstrokes generating a sense of observed immediacy and barely captured movement. Unlike many French artists, he was less interested in color and light and more in spontaneity. Donkey Rides on the Beach comes from a period where he was breaking away from his father’s more traditional genre style, to explore these ideas in plein air (outdoor) painting.

On the Beach

Donkey Rides is one of a series of works painted on the sand at Scheveningen, a seaside resort just outside The Hague in the Netherlands. The Israëls family spent their summers there and it was at Scheveningen that Isaac Israëls met Manet and the German Impressionist Max Liebermann (1847–1935), who was also to become a major influence. Scheveningen had attracted Dutch painters since the 17th century, when seascape specialists like Adriaen van de Velde (1635–1672) painted there. It was also a popular haunt of Hague School genre painters, like Isaac’s father, who focused on the village’s fishing community.

These artists would have sketched outdoors and gone back into the studio to work up their finished paintings. Isaac Israëls took a different approach. He worked on the spot, painting in short bursts to maintain what the artist himself described as “freshness.” His models were family friends enjoying a summer on the coast. Donkey rides were a feature of several works, including others in the Rijksmuseum collection.

Traditional Beachscapes

Beaches had provided subjects for artists since landscape painting first became popular amongst Dutch artists and patrons in the 17th century. Big skies, clear light, and the drama of the sea combined with attractive narrative elements like boats and fishermen. However, the focus was firmly on nature, with human elements restricted in scale and rarely the centre of attention.

As landscape painting boomed during the 19th century, artists like J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851)—who actually visited and sketched at Scheveningen—and David Cox (1783–1859) in England, and later Charles-François Daubigny (1817–1878) and Eugene Boudin (1824–1898) in France were drawn again to the coast. As Boudin’s Boats at Scheveningen shows, their technique was becoming looser, and increasingly these artists, like Israëls, were working their canvases on the spot, but subject matter and composition remained largely traditional.

The Hague School

By the mid-19th century, beaches were increasingly becoming sites of leisure. Easier travel, the health benefits of the coast, and the growth of wealthier middle classes all contributed to the development of the seaside resort. Alongside these changes, industrialization and urbanization were putting pressure on traditional communities and their livelihoods. In Holland, the Hague School of artists sought to represent what they saw as threatened ways of life, bringing the men and women who worked on the beach and on the land into focus.

Jozef Israëls’s breakthrough painting had taken a beach scene and transformed it into an epic tragedy. Fishermen with a Drowned Man is on the scale of a history painting. The sombre grays and blues suggest not just the awful event itself, but the impoverished lives of the people shown. Most importantly, the beach has become just a backdrop to a very human story.

Jozef Israëls’s dramatic narrative was not typical of the Hague School. Fellow artists, like Anton Mauve (1838–1888), took the same human focus, washed-out coloration, and beach setting and instead recorded deliberately unremarkable, everyday scenes.

Fishing Boat with Tow Horses shows Scheveningen as a working environment, not with donkeys for tourists, but horses doing the hard labour of towing a boat ashore. There is nothing picturesque about this beach: the sand looks muddy, the air is chill. The black mass of the boat, which dwarfs the men standing in its shadow, looks impossibly heavy and the horses hang their heads with long-suffering tiredness.

Donkeys

Heavy horses are replaced by donkeys in Israëls’ beach scenes and labour is replaced by leisure. His works retain the washed-out palette of the earlier artists, but they have none of the bleakness. There is perhaps a lingering hint of the Hague School’s interest in ordinary workers in the familiar blue smock of the donkey-keeper, and the weariness of his rounded shoulders and downward gaze as he trudges behind the children in the Donkey Rides on the Beach.

However, Israëls is not in the business of social commentary. The shadows on the sand and the warmth of the light suggest sun that is about to break through hazy clouds, and there is a festive dash of color in the children’s clothes. We are most definitely on holiday by the sea.

Impressionism

The biggest difference between Israëls and his Hague School predecessors, however, lies in his borrowings from French Impressionists, like Claude Monet, who painted a series of beach scenes at Trouville early in his career. The carefully grouped composition and sense of space which Mauve creates is abandoned by Israëls in favor of snapshot cropping, with the figures brought right to the front of the canvas. In Two Donkeys, the animals could almost trip over the resting figure in the bottom corner, and in Donkey Rides on the Beach, we feel close enough to hear the children’s laughter.

Nostalgia

The apparently careless brushstrokes and lack of finish, which Israëls borrows from Impressionism, also generate a sense of immediacy. We can feel the breeze, smell the salt in the air, hear the waves as they foam white in the background. The painting feels like a casual glance across the beach, slightly unfocused and unconsidered. Israëls has worked hard to create a very deliberately constructed “freshness” and it is very effective.

The imprecision also creates generalization. Although the four figures are painted from life, the lack of detailed features gives them a universal resonance. The barely even sketched-in background could be any beach, anywhere, anytime. The sketchiness becomes like a blurred memory of the viewer’s own childhood.

Isaac Israëls’ Donkey Rides on the Beach is every seaside holiday you remember. Like all memories, it is almost too perfect, simplified down to the essential—white dresses, red hats, sun, sea, and sand. It is fleeting and transient, and all the more precious for it. It is summer captured on canvas.