Reuven Rubin 1893-1974

Richard Kauffman (acquired directly from the artist circa 1924)

The bold contours and earthy colors apparent in this painting are typical of Reuven Rubin's oeuvre from the early 1920s. In this work, the artist chooses to portray a magnified view of the images he usually painted from afar in broader landscapes. In this he emphasizes the narrative of the subject. The figures shown from behind mirror those in the foreground, returning from their tasks after a long work day. This clever device enables the artist to capture the passage of time in pictorial terms. The rhythmic placing of these figures along the winding path all contribute to this intriguing composition.

Dr. Haim Gamzu described the period from which this work dates as a time when the artist enjoyed "the creative intoxication which he felt from the time of his return [to Eretz Israel] in 1922 until his first exhibition at the Bernheim Galleries in Paris in 1926. He painted without pause. He depicted the landscape of Galilee with roads and paths, winding and twining uphill and down dale, the Arab fellah at work ploughing, sowing, harvesting, at the vintage, gathering olives and threshing... He made pictures of life of the Yishuv, both old and new... His works are honest in their range of experience, and innocent and simple in execution. They were charged with that primitiveness which Israel artists borrowed from Henri Rousseau, and with an additional flavouring of Orientalism infused by the spiritual and physical changes going forward in the renewed Eretz Israel. Rubin supplemented this primitiveness with the approach of Persian miniature artists and Byzantinian mosaic workers. It is not enough to look at Rubin's pictures during that period; it is necessary to read them. For they tell in a simple and stylized fashion the history of the country, its earliest period, its romantic youth." (Dr. Haim Gamzu, Painting and Sculpture in Israel, the Plastic Arts from the Bezalel Period to the Present Day, Tel Aviv, 1951, page 33).