Woman in profile, with bare breasts, in front of Sunflowers
Het Parool wrote about the exhibition Captivated by Vincent at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, featuring works by artist Isaac Israëls who used paintings by Vincent van Gogh as backgrounds for portraits. The exhibition was organised to coincide with the publication of Israels Letters (read more), a digital edition of letters from Israëls to Jo van Gogh-Bonger, edited by Hans Luijten in collaboration with the Huygens Institute.
The friendship between Israëls and Van Gogh-Bonger was close for a while, perhaps even too close to be preserved for posterity.
From Het Parool:
“Dear Madam” has now become “Dear Madam”. Van Gogh-Bonger visits Israëls’ studio and they go to the theatre together. In her diary she notes: ‘I wrote nothing about that afternoon with Isaac Israëls – it was just a whim, we played with fire. (…) he pretended to love me – it was wonderful anyway.’ The three dots mark where three lines were cut from the diary by Jo or her son Vincent; what was written there was not intended for posterity.
But Israëls was not a man for marriage, according to himself.
From Het Parool:
‘So the best advice I can give you is this: leave me alone,’ he wrote to her in the summer of 1897.
Read the article here (behind a paywall).
Woman, in profile in front of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Isaac Israëls (1917). Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle.
