legerpissaro

israels

  • Issue: December 1970
  • Plate no.: 302-304
  • Sheet of 12 stamps Tabs: 4
  • Method of printing: Photolithography

Flowers In A Vase By Fernand Leger (1881 - 1955), Signed And Dated 1954.

One of the foremost French painters of the 20th century, Leger was the son and grandson of French peasants. His art is simple, strong and human. It looks to a better future (industrial and technological) and the human figure is permeated with this optimistic view. After his Cubist period, Leger adopted primary colors: yellow, red, blue and black. His compositions became monumental and his subjects popular, including studies of construction workers, picnics, parades. His art, which was socially minded, influenced a great number of artists of our time.

Flowers in a Vase, painted one year before Leger's death, reflects his conception of art: it is a clear, simplified composition of shapes and colors. The vase stands against a background of stylized constructive elements, blocks of concrete, and a large steel wire. The harmony between these different elements is perfect.

The painting was given to the Tel Aviv Museum by Mr. George Friedland of Philadelphia (USA) in 1957.

top top

Landscape With Bridge By Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Signed And Dated 1867.

Pissarro was the son of a French Jew, a merchant in St. Thomas, in the Antilles Islands. One of the leading French Impressionists, he was a wise man, loved and respected by all his contemporaries. Pissarro arrived in Paris in 1855. He admired the Romantic Delacroix and the Realists, Millet and Courbet, but above all, the great painter of landscapes, Corot. Towards 1870, he became an Impressionist. On the strength of his impressionist experience, he arrived at a solid and subtle art, possessed of a strong line and great chromatic richness. A landscape painter first of all, Pissarro also executed several portraits, still-lifes, and everyday scenes. Landscape with Bridge is from his first period; the colors are sober - gray and beige - and the brushwork is solid and strong.

The painting is a gift to the Tel Aviv Museum from the late Mrs. Lily Schocken of Tel Aviv.

top top

The Jewish Wedding By Joseph Israels (1824-1910), Signed.

The son of a Jewish family, Israels is one of the outstanding Dutch painters of the 19th century. He followed the intimate, humanistic tradition of the genre painting of 17th century Holland to which he gave a new spiritual impulse. His paintings, devoted to describing the life, landscape and surroundings of Dutch fishermen, inspired generations of Dutch painters, among them Van Gogh, who admired his humanism. The Jewish Wedding is a result of the keen observation of real experience, which Israels learned from the French Realists, but it is also a tribute to Rembrandt. The great master's lesson is felt in the deep and mysterious treatment of light and shade and in the simple and dignified conception of the subject.

The painting was presented to the Tel Aviv Museum by Mr. Jacob Epstein of Baltimore.

top top

Painting 1970