Mid-Morning Art Thread [Kris]

Last Breath
Jozef Israels

Israels paints a powerful painting about grief and peppers the scene with symbolic imagery of sudden death and a life cut short before its time. The painting is divided into two halves. On the left is the deathbed and a mourning relative — a mother or wife. It’s difficult to determine her age. The age or sex of the deceased is also uncertain. According to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the figure is male but doesn’t say what his relationship is to this family. I’ll just refer to him here as “the man”. Anyway, he looks old enough to work and is most likely the breadwinner of the family. Looking around at the state of the room, this family was not well off. This painting shows a great tragedy and implies a depressing future.

The younger woman (the mourner) has been reading as the man lies on his sickbed. This seems like a vigil. When the man finally dies, the mother rose from her chair and calmly lays her head on the corpse. Notice how the book was laid gently down onto the chair. It wasn’t flung out of her lap. It’s still open. I think she expected him to die, that he had been ill for a while, and he finally took the titular last breath. She reacts, but in a way that won’t scare the children.

The older woman seems to be the main caretaker for the children. Notice how they gather around her, not their mother. To me, this is another sign that the man has been sick for some time. The older woman, maybe a grandmother, has taken on childrearing as the mother tends to the man. The mother sobs but she muffles them to protect the children. Notice how they aren’t crying. Children tend to pick up on cues from the adults. Here, they are quiet and concerned. One sucks its thumb. The other was playing on the floor but left its toys quickly. They are very young and don’t understand what happened. Something made their mother very sad however, so they draw close to the older woman.

I like how the lighting is used here. The sun is shining through the window and lights up the man’s dead, pale face. It also shines on the mother, and the grandmother and children. Israels is highlighting the range of human drama — the tragedy and those that will be affected by it. In the dim light I can also make out objects that symbolize life and mortality. On the left is a clock and an unlit lantern. Clocks and other timekeeping pieces have symbolized the passage of time since ancient times. An unlit lantern can mean that a light has been extinguished. Another unlit candle sits on the right near the window. The book the woman was reading might be a Bible. If you zoom into the painting, one of the pages seems to have a picture of a saint – you can make out the halo around the head. She was finding comfort in The Bible and may be reading to the man as he died.

A dog lies in the bottom center of the painting in shadow near the man’s feet and looks so sad. The internet is full of photographs of dogs at their masters’ funerals and almost every one of them looks just like this. It’s heartbreaking. It too reacts to the death. This dog may also be symbolic. Since ancient times, dogs have symbolized loyalty and their devotion to their humans is cliché. Israels could have included it to represent the love, loyalty, and fidelity within this family unit. They are not well-off, but they had each other. Now one of them is gone.

For me, the dog represents the true emotional weight of this scene. The mother weeps but she is trying to protect the children. The grandmother’s emotions are also subdued for the same reason. The children react to the adults’ emotions, sure, but they cannot fully grasp what is happening so aren’t really doing anything. The dog, however, has no such concerns or responsibilities. Like those dogs from the internet, it stays by its master’s side as the very image of loyalty. It is the Greek chorus for this work, displaying and amplifying pure, raw grief.

posted by Open Blogger at 09:30 AM

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