Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)
The
Romantic master is the first French artist to visit North Africa - Algeria and
Morocco - as part of the first
French diplomatic mission, led by the duc de Mornay, to enter Morocco after the
conquest of Algeria. He came into contact with the Jewish communities in both
countries and produced a great many watercolors on the spot. The “Jewish
wedding in Morocco” presented to the salon of 1841 is his most famous painting
of the Jewish community of North Africa.
Theodore Chassériau (1819-1856)
A
very talented member of the French Romantic generation, Chassériau first
visited Algeria in 1846. His Orientalist sketches and watercolors and visions
dark-eyed oriental beauties are very much inspired by Delacroix’s.
Alfred Dehondenq (1822-1882)
This
painter, sometimes called the “last romantic”, eventually settled in Cadiz in
southern Spain from where he frequently visited Tangiers. His rich colors and
fluid brushwork owe a great deal to Delacroix.
“The
execution of the Jewish girl” c. 1862 is an illustration of the legend of Sol Hachuel who was condemned to death
after reneging on her supposed conversion to Islam.
Jean Léon Gérôme (1824-1904)
One
of the most famous Orientalists in French 19th century art, Gerôme
was the ultimate salon and academic master of his time, known for his
meticulous style and verisimilitude.
He was passionate about the Orient which he visited on numerous
occasions, notably, Egypt, and the Turkish Middle East.
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1865-1953)
Very talented, but little known
Symbolist French artist of the turn of century, he first visited Morocco in
1901. His “Blind Men in Tangiers” is a rare Orientalist or Jewish-themed work.
William Wylde (1806-1889)
Son
of an English merchant and late starter in art, Wylde is one of the first
English Orientalists. His “Departure of the Israelites for the Holy Land” 1841
records the departure of the Jews of Algiers for Palestine shortly after the
French conquest. There they will be called the “Moghrabis”.
Thomas Seddon (1821-1856)
One
of the best British landscape painters of his generation connected to the
Pre-Raphaelite movement. He travelled in Egypt and the Holy land with William
Holman Hunt in the 1850’s going “native”, learning Arabic and living in Bedouin
tents.
Gustave Bauerfeind (1848-1904)
Lately
rediscovered German artist who settled in Palestine in 1896 after travelling
frequently in the Middle East in the previous decade. His Middle Eastern watercolors
are among the most accurate and detailed of street scenes and local types of
the turn of the century.
Alexandre Bida (1823-1895)
A
student of Delacroix’ and a committed Orientalist, who first visited
Constantinople in 1847. In 1861 after having met Ernest Renan, first
”biographer” of Christ he worked on an illustrated bible for Hachette. His
oeuvre is essentially composed of drawings.
Vassily Vereshchagin (1842-1904)
First
Russian 19th century artist to acquire an international reputation,
Vereshchagin, was an inveterate traveler. Inspired by Gerôme’s paintings in
Paris he visited Syria and, Palestine and Egypt on several occasions in the
1860’s and 1880’s.
Horace Vernet (1789-1863)
Son
and grandson of celebrated 18c landscape painters, Horace, is best known as a
battle painter. He was, however part of the first French photographic
expedition to the Middle East in the 1840’s which inspired him to paint a
number of Biblical scenes in the new “Arabized” manner, considered more
authentic, of the 19th century.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912)
Dutch
artist who settled in London and went on to become in many ways the British
Gerôme. He specialized in meticulous reconstitutions of the ancient or biblical
worlds using the latest archeological finds for his rendering of ancient
architecture, furniture and costume.
William Holman Hunt (1827-1910)
Founding
member of the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Holman Hunt was also the most
intensely religious artist of the group. He spent long periods in the Middle East
in the 1850’s and 1870’s, settling in Jerusalem in order to totally absorb, the
atmosphere of the Holy land for his Biblical pictures. His colors have an
almost hallucinatory quality and his forms an extreme linear sharpness.
James Tissot (1836-1902)
Better
known for his paintings of elegant society young women this French artist,
friend of Degas, who had a brilliant professional career in London was also
drawn to the Bible. He produced a famous set of 356 gouaches and watercolors of
biblical figures and scenes in 1896-1902 after visiting Palestine and the
Middle East in 1886. They were produced in the detailed documentary style made
fashionable by Ernest Renan, using contemporary Arab architecture and costume
to evoke more “authentically” Biblical times.
Henri Lehmann (1814-1882)
Neo-classical
artist, pupil of Ingres, of German origin he produced many salon-style
mythological and biblical pictures and portraits.
Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889)
French
salon master celebrated under Napoleon III’s Second Empire. His most famous
work was the “Birth of Venus” a highly erotic nude, produced the same year
(1863) as Manet’s Olympia.
Henri-Léopold Lévy (1840-1904)
Successful
“official” painter of the Second Empire and the Third Republic, pupil of Picot
and Cabanel, he is very much part of the first generation of successful Jewish
professionals of the later half of the 19th century in France. His
success, however, came to an end with the break out of anti-Semitic tensions of
the Dreyfus affair.
Gustave Moreau (1826-1898)
Celebrated
early Symbolist painter whose “Salome” of 1875 proved one of his most popular
compositions, launching the fashion for the most notorious Oriental temptress
of the “fin de siècle”. He was most particularly popular with great Jewish
collectors like the Rothschilds.
Eduard Julius Friedrich Bendemann
(1811-1889)
“On
the Banks of the Rivers of Babylon” made the young artist famous when shown in
Berlin in 1832. This neoclassical painting in the German Nazarene style of the
period became one of the most famous in the German Jewish community and was
constantly reproduced and copied as was his “Jeremiah on the ruins of
Jerusalem.”
Maurycy Gottlieb (1856-1879)
Gottlieb
is a Hungarian painter who died very young (at 23 of pneumonia). He studied in
Vienna in the early 1870’s and very soon specialized in Jewish subjects,
notably the reinterpretation of Biblical and new Testament scenes in historically “authentic”
Jewish settings.
Lesser Ury (1861-1931)
A
soulful Polish painter celebrated by turn of the century Zionists whose
“Jerusalem” became an iconic, more up to date and Symbolist representation of
Jewish sorrow and nostalgia, the “fin de siècle” equivalent tof Bedemann’s“On
the Banks of the Rivers of Babylon”.
Boris Schatz (1867-1932)
Lithuanian
artist who studied in Vilnius and Warsaw, and later settled in Bulgaria. With
support of Theodor Herzl he founded the Bezalel
workshops in Jerusalem in the early 1900’s to promote the renaissance of
Jewish arts and crafts in the future Jewish homeland.
Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874-1925)
Best
known Jewish illustrator, of the turn of the century, of Polish origins, worked
widely for Jewish publishers and press, he created heroic images of biblical
figures.
Reuven Rubin (1893-1974)
Romanian
artist who first visited Palestine to work in the Bezalel workshops in 1912,
later settling permanently in Tel-Aviv in 1923. He brought a distinctively
modernist-naïve style to Jewish painting of the 1920’s, exploring local
landscape and middle eastern characters. This the period when Zionist artists
are consciously trying to create a national style for their new homeland,
breaking with 19th century academic traditions but introducing into
Palestine features of European 20th century Modernism.
Nahum Gutman (1898-1980)
Gutman
moved to Palestine with his parents from his native Russia at the age of 7. His
father was a well known publisher of the early Zionist years and he studied art
in the Bezalel school and various European capitals in the 1920’s. An idyllic
vision of the Orient painted with Modernist (and Rousseau-ist) simplifications
constitutes the basis of his style.
