The Shepherd’s Prayer
Artist: Jozef Israëls (Dutch, 1824-1911)
Date: 1864
Dimensions:
Painting: 35 3/8 × 49 1/4 in. (89.9 × 125.1 cm)
Frame: 50 1/4 × 64 1/2 × 5 1/2 in. (127.6 × 163.8 × 14 cm)
Medium: oil on canvas
Place of Origin: Netherlands
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey
Object number: 1914.116
Label Text:In 1901, nearly 40 years after painting The Shepherd’s Prayer, Jozef Israëls wrote in a letter to the owner (Edward Drummond Libbey, glass industrialist and Toledo Museum of Art founder): “I believe it possesses what I like best in my pictures, the feeling of quietness of the country, far from the madding crowd.” He also described the subject: “The shepherd is praying a little prayer before he takes his sober bread and coffee that is brought to him from the dwelling nearby, by an elder sister, while the vast campaign of the green and the sheep gives to the scenery the sentiment of the moment.”
Israëls was the leader of a group of artists known as the Hague School, who emerged in The Netherlands around 1870. Seeing themselves as the heirs of the great Dutch painters of Holland’s Golden Age in the 17th century, these artists were interested in expressing the peaceful solitude of nature, rather than capturing a fleeting moment as seen in the works of the French Impressionists.
Israëls was the leader of a group of artists known as the Hague School, who emerged in The Netherlands around 1870. Seeing themselves as the heirs of the great Dutch painters of Holland’s Golden Age in the 17th century, these artists were interested in expressing the peaceful solitude of nature, rather than capturing a fleeting moment as seen in the works of the French Impressionists.
Not on view
In Collection(s)