Turning homewards

Jozef Israëls's Turning Homewards, catalogued with a year of 1500 in this database but a nineteenth-century painting, depicts figures — likely fishermen or rural laborers — making their way home at the end of the working day, a subject that carried the elegiac weight of the Hague School's meditation on the rhythms of ordinary Dutch life. Israëls was the most celebrated painter of the Hague School, a group of Dutch painters who, in the spirit of Barbizon and Courbet, treated the lives of fishermen, farmers, and workers with the dignity traditionally reserved for history and mythological painting. The subject of returning home at day's end was among the most resonant in nineteenth-century social realism — laden with associations of labor, family, and the cycle of daily life — and Israëls treated it with the empathetic warmth and tonal mastery that distinguish his best work.

Israëls renders the homeward figures in the soft, atmospheric light of evening, the warm Hague School palette of ochres, greys, and muted blues creating a tonal unity that envelops figure and landscape in a shared atmosphere. The loose, confident brushwork of the background landscape tightens around the figures to give them the dignity of primary subjects within a subordinate but atmospheric setting.