Isaac Israels on location

Art connoisseurs and dealers were a lot easier a century ago in naming paintings. Recent research has shown that dozens of works by the impressionist painter Isaac Israels were then given the wrong titles. The locations to which these works are named often do not match the actual locations.

You sometimes read a book that makes you think:I want to know more about this. The book Isaac Israels in Amsterdam from J.F. Heijbroek and Jessica Voeten is such a book. It came out this summer with the exhibition of the same name in the Amsterdam City Archives (the exhibition can be seen until 9 September 2012). The authors discuss the life of the impressionist painter Isaac Israels, the son of the already famous artist Jozef Israels.

Around the turn of the century, the eternal bachelor Isaac lived in Amsterdam, where he made many sketches, drawings, pastels and oil paintings. His favorite subjects were the always bustling city and its (female) inhabitants. Busy streets with maids, shoppers and working workers, but also children in the Oosterpark. Amsterdam in all weathers. Amsterdam by day and by night, with entertainment on the Zeedijk and in the smoky dance halls:again mainly women.

Casual passers-by

The main part of the book deals with the Amsterdam works of Israels (1865-1934) per location or subject. The painter usually made several drawings and paintings from one place, often the top floor of a corner house. After receiving a permit from the city council in 1894 to work in the open air, he also set up his easel on the street to paint from life.

His models were mostly casual passers-by or maids who made a few cents by posing for him. What you might not expect from an impressionist painter, who immediately depicts what is happening at that moment, is that Israels portrayed the environment quite accurately. If a house had three windows, he would also paint three, and if a canal house had a bell gable, he would not make a simple version of it. This would be very useful in the research that preceded the book.

In the book itself, this preparatory research is discussed quite briefly, despite the fact that it has taken a lot of work.

Many of Israels' drawings had unclear names such as Three maids on a canal. The exact location was not known and for this book, and also for the exhibition, it was desirable to find out which canal the visitors were looking at.

Curator Bert Gerlagh set to work on this and made some spectacular discoveries. Not only did he find out the location of dozens of drawings without a name, he also discovered that a number of known locations were incorrect.

The investigation

The authors of the book started a large-scale investigation into Isaac Israels' time in Amsterdam. For the first time, they tapped into all possible sources, studied his sketchbooks, read his correspondence and dug through newspaper articles from that period. Titles of paintings and drawings appeared in the newspapers and in letters that could no longer be traced. Other paintings appeared to have changed titles (indicating the location) over time. It gradually became clear that the titles of the works formed an uncertain factor for the exact locations. In-depth scientific research was necessary here.

Bert Gerlagh has compared many of Israels' works for his research. With each other and with photos, maps and literature. For example, at the end of 19, ^de . appeared century an Amsterdam address book containing tens of thousands of people. Not all Amsterdammers are mentioned as they had to pay for publication. In particular, shops, companies and wealthy individuals are listed in the books with name, address and profession. A handy source:drawings of which the location was unknown, but where a store name could be read on the drawn facade, could be partially traced with this. The painter's precision did the rest:a kink in the street, facades accurately reproduced and curbs all around can be recognized in old photos and on city maps.

No Kalverstraat

In this way the Vijgendam at night (c.1894) discovered. This drawing with shoppers, made of black chalk, was previously located as the intersection of Kalverstraat and Spui. On closer inspection, this could not possibly be true because of the kink in the street, at the bottom left of the drawing:the Kalverstraat and the Spui are straight.

After it became clear that the illuminated shop front belonged to the clothing store Magazijn de Leeuw (this could be read in another drawing with the same composition), the address book from 1894 was looked up. De Leeuw warehouse was not addressed in Kalverstraat, but at Vijgendam 7.

By way of comparison:the map of the Vijgendam also showed a kink in the street. This map of Amsterdam from 1909-1910 with a scale of 1:1000 is very detailed:you can read the size of the plots, the house numbers, trees and even lampposts. A photo from circa 1911 completed the comparison. The storefront of the white building with the round front on the right side of the street is exactly right, as are the kink in the street at the bottom left. In real life unfortunately it can no longer be found:the shops had to make way for the expansion of Dam Square.

Until now, no one had doubted the work's location, as the title dated from the painter's time. Israels apparently has not bothered to rectify this either. Could the title Kalverstraat sometimes sold better?

In any case, Israels wrote in his correspondence with his good friend Frans Erens that he had been drawing in the Kalverstraat while no work by his hand can be located in this shopping street until now.

Experts were wrong

In the same way Bert Gerlagh started working on several works. For example the pastel Guest, which has been linked to various locations in East over the years. Israels connoisseur from the very beginning Anna Wagner had designated the Eikenplein as the location, but the Kastanjeplein has also been reviewed.

The Dapperplein comes to the fore in Gerlagh's research. Where one initially assumed concatenated housing blocks, the researcher discovered a recess (top left on the pastel). Old photos and the floor plan from that time confirm this view of the kitchen extensions of the houses behind. This is also the only block in that neighborhood where three narrow houses of only two windows wide are next to each other (left of the storefront). On the other squares there are wider houses with three windows. Because Israels depicted the buildings in detail, we can be confident that he would not have drawn narrow houses if they were not there.

Servants at the canal

Israels depicted maids in many of his works:they are talking to each other or walking along the canal. Which canal is often unknown, including the above work from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Bert Gerlagh has compared the facades in this painting (and a related work in terms of buildings) with the facades from, among others, the Amsterdamse Grachtengids by Tim Killian. In this book, all facades of the four main canals are drawn exactly. After the comparisons, the researcher was left with six potential locations. Upon further research into these locations in the image bank of the City Archives, the photo of M.M. Jansse out immediately.

For comparison:between the heads of the maids, a red and a green door can be seen, at different heights. These doors can be found exactly on the left in Jansse's photo, including the stripe on the green door. This stripe is the division between two doors within the same jamb. This was the Leidsegracht, a place that has hardly changed today.

Clap to the top

Israels' sketchbooks contained many drawings showing workmen and maids in the same, unknown place. Constantly recurring were two bridges lying one behind the other with buildings on either side. Check that out. The facades did not match the facades from the Amsterdamse Grachtengids. After comparing with old photos in which Bert Gerlagh had found the same facades, he was convinced of his discovery:this was the Brouwersgracht, seen from the bridge at the beginning of the Herengracht and towards the Keizersgracht. With this find he was able to locate dozens of drawings for the first time.

Now there was another bridge and the researcher couldn't put his finger on it. The convex bridge can be seen in some works with maidservants, with large trees in the background, a row of cobblestones in the pavement and a high side wall without windows on the right side. Gerlagh could not place this view anywhere. Until he once walked through the city and saw the completely plastered side wall of Herengracht 2. This was on the corner with Brouwersgracht, near the same bridge as in the series of previous drawings.

This was quite striking:there are few plastered side walls without side windows and certainly not at such a prominent angle. Old photographic material (1916) showed that even when the wall was already completely plastered and that there were large trees on the canal. Only the bridge was no longer convex:it had been replaced by a flat bridge a few years earlier. But when you look at photos around 1900 by the photographer Jacob Olie, you see how the bridges from that time were paved. Rows of large boulders separated the pedestrian section from the roadway. This type of pavement was therefore most likely also used in the bridge over the Brouwersgracht.

Israels clearly made many drawings at this location:both towards the Keizersgracht and turned it a quarter turn, along the Herengracht towards the south.

Further research is needed

With the publication of the book, the research is completed but not yet complete. There are other works by Israels of which it is unclear exactly where they took place. For example, the nighttime performances in smoky dance halls cannot be precisely located. They were located on the Zeedijk, but where…?

Unfortunately, the address books from the 19th century do not contain the names of dance halls. Bert Gerlagh subsequently consulted the police archives in the hope of receiving reports from police officers who had served on the Zeedijk. Unfortunately, the archives have since been cleaned up and no longer contain these kinds of helpful details. The riddles are not yet all solved.