Maaiers

Jozef Israëls's Maaiers (Reapers or Mowers), catalogued here with a year of 1500 but a nineteenth-century work, depicts agricultural laborers at work in the fields — a subject central to the Hague School's program of dignifying rural and working-class life through serious pictorial attention. Israëls was among the most important Dutch painters of the second half of the nineteenth century, and his scenes of peasant and fishing communities in the Netherlands established a visual language for social empathy in art that influenced Van Gogh and the broader European naturalist movement. The image of figures laboring in the harvest fields carried associations with the traditional rhythms of Dutch rural life threatened by industrialization, and painters like Israëls treated such subjects with an elegy for a vanishing world as well as genuine sympathy for the physical labor of agricultural workers. The Rijksmuseum's Israëls holdings are central to understanding the Hague School's contribution to European painting.

Israëls composes the harvest scene with the loose, atmospheric brushwork characteristic of his mature style, the figures of the reapers integrated into the landscape through the warm, golden tonality of the summer fields. The influence of the Barbizon painters — Millet in particular — is evident in the monumental dignity accorded to the laboring figures and the expressive freedom of the landscape handling.