A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art

Michelle Facos, Dana Arnold, MIchelle Facos

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781118856352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

A comprehensive review of art in the first truly modern century

A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art contains contributions from an international panel of noted experts to offer a broad overview of both national and transnational developments, as well as new and innovative investigations of individual art works, artists, and issues. The text puts to rest the skewed perception of nineteenth-century art as primarily Paris-centric by including major developments beyond the French borders. The contributors present a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the art world during this first modern century.

In addition to highlighting particular national identities of artists, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art also puts the focus on other aspects of identity including individual, ethnic, gender, and religious. The text explores a wealth of relevant topics such as: the challenges the artists faced; how artists learned their craft and how they met clients; the circumstances that affected artist's choices and the opportunities they encountered; and where the public and critics experienced art. This important text:

• Offers a comprehensive review of nineteenth-century art that covers the most pressing issues and significant artists of the era
• Covers a wealth of important topics such as: ethnic and gender identity, certain general trends in the nineteenth century, an overview of the art market during the period, and much more
• Presents novel and valuable insights into familiar works and their artists

Written for students of art history and those studying the history of the nineteenth century, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art offers a comprehensive review of the first modern era art with contributions from noted experts in the field.

1
Moses Jacob Ezekiel’s Religious Liberty (1876) and the Nineteenth‐Century Jewish American Experience

Samantha Baskind

Sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844–1917) was the first Jewish American artist to earn international acclaim. Despite his occasional discouragement due to lack of patronage, Ezekiel persevered because, as he wrote in his autobiography, Memoirs from the Baths of Diocletian: “The race to which I belong had been oppressed and looked down upon through so many ages, I felt that I had a mission to perform. That mission was to show that, as the only Jew born in America up to that time who had dedicated himself to sculpture, I owed it to myself to succeed in doing something worthy in spite of all the difficulties and trials to which I was subjected” (281). His best‐known work is a commission from the Jewish fraternal organization, B’nai B’rith: a freestanding marble group from 1876 depicting Religious Liberty (Figure 1.1). Ezekiel’s unique Jewish experience imbues this sculpture with elements of both his Southern and religious roots, shaped by his proximity to one of the most radical and influential rabbis in America, Isaac Mayer Wise. While Ezekiel’s Religious Liberty is fully “American” in theme, the artist also subtly addressed alternate, “Jewish” tensions beyond his celebration of religious liberties in his homeland. Indeed, Religious Liberty alludes to an essential contemporary concern of both Ezekiel and many of his nineteenth‐century coreligionists: fear of assimilation amid temptations confronted because of the very freedoms they were enjoying.

Figure 1.1 Moses Jacob Ezekiel, Religious Liberty, 1876. Marble, 25 ft. high. National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia.

Photo: Samantha Baskind.

Ezekiel’s American background differed substantially from his peers—not only the few other known nineteenth‐century Jewish American artists, but also the general Jewish population of his day, primarily immigrants. Ezekiel, one of fourteen children, was a second‐generation American—his paternal grandparents immigrated to Philadelphia in 1808 (in 1820 fewer than 2750 Jews lived in the United States). The Ezekiels were Iberian Jews (Sephardic) rather than Eastern Europeans (Ashkenazi). The earliest Jewish immigrants to America were Sephardic Jews—many came to the New World after several generations as refugees in more tolerant Holland, first arriving in New Amsterdam in 1654. Sephardic Jews dominated American Jewry until the massive influx of German Jews, followed by Jews from other Eastern European countries as the Jewish population surged in the nineteenth century; 15,000 Jews lived in the US in 1840, but by 1880 the population had swelled to over 250,000 Jews, largely of German origin (Glazer 1972).

After several years in Philadelphia, the Ezekiel family moved to Virginia. Ezekiel, born in Richmond, was the first Jew to attend the Virginia Military Institute. Serving as a cadet in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, Ezekiel fought in the Battle of New Market. Although his family owned no slaves and did not advocate slavery, Ezekiel allied with the Confederacy because, as he wrote in an after‐the‐fact evasion, he believed that each state should make its own autonomous decisions: “None of us had ever fought for slavery and, in fact, were opposed to it.… Our struggle … was simply a constitutional one, based on the constitutional state’s rights and especially on free trade and no tariff” (Ezekiel 1975, 188). Regrettably, while coming from his own place of oppression, and grateful for the freedoms afforded Jews by living in America, Ezekiel was not immune to prejudicial thinking.

Following the Civil War Ezekiel graduated from VMI and studied medicine because he felt that a career in art was impossible and that medicine would provide financial security. Meantime, his childhood interest in art nagged at him; as a boy he had experimented with drawing and painting before he began sculpting at age thirteen. After a year at the Medical College of Virginia, Ezekiel dropped out, but not before he took several anatomy classes, which doubtless influenced his later study of the human figure as a professional sculptor.

In 1867 Ezekiel moved to Cincinnati, where his parents had relocated from ravaged postwar Richmond. His father’s dry goods business had burned to the ground and the family’s attempt to rebuild was fruitless. Cincinnati seemed hospitable because of its large Jewish population, including relatives of Ezekiel’s mother. For the younger Moses Ezekiel, Cincinnati held promise as an artistic center; among others, sculptors Henry Kirke Brown and Hiram Powers were once based there, as was one of the few successful nineteenth‐century American artists of Jewish heritage: the painter Henry Mosler, whom Ezekiel knew. Mosler, who joins Ezekiel and Solomon Nunes Carvalho as the small cadre of nineteenth‐century Jewish Americans who made names for themselves as fine artists, began his career as an artist correspondent for Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War. Mosler studied in Europe at the Düsseldorf Academy and the École des Beaux‐Arts in Paris, and soon became a painter of genre scenes, frequently picturing peasant life in Brittany. He contributed entries to the French Salon from 1878 to 1897; his 1879 submission, Le Retour, received Honorable Mention from the Salon jury and was purchased for the Musée du Luxembourg, the first painting by an American artist bought by the French government. When Ezekiel visited Paris he spent some time in Mosler’s studio. Carvalho worked as a painter, and based on similarities in the artists’ painting style, technique, and subject matter, it has been surmised that the well‐known portraitist Thomas Sully may have trained him (Berman 1990–1991, 68–71). Carvalho’s fame, though, rests on his daguerreotypes for John C. Frémont’s 1853 exploratory expedition through Kansas, Utah, and Colorado.

Encouraged by artists he met in Cincinnati, Ezekiel—eager for more extensive education—went to Europe to study at the Royal Academy of Art in Berlin. His training there—from 1869 to 1871—shaped his academic style, his propensity for allegory and historical subjects, and his belief in the central role of the faithfully rendered human figure in his art. Ezekiel later moved to Rome, where he was surrounded by ancient and Renaissance sculpture, particularly by Michelangelo, which reinforced his classicizing tendencies. Committed to what he understood as a timeless style already regarded by some modern artists as outmoded, Ezekiel readily condemned his own celebrated contemporaries. About Auguste Rodin Ezekiel wrote, “I saw Rodin’s Victor Hugo bust, which is simply a hurried, pretentious affectation by a talented man.… Rodin did some good work in earlier times, but his fragments and sketchy works today show only that he caters to a false taste in art” (Ezekiel 1975, 399, 400).

After five years in Berlin, Ezekiel became a permanent expatriate, living in Rome for the next forty‐three years of his life; his studio in the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian became a fashionable gathering‐place for artisans of all persuasions, as well as for royalty and politicians. Internationally known, Ezekiel received numerous honors: the cavalier’s cross of merit for art and science from the Grand Duke of Saxe‐Meiningen in 1887; an award from Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany in 1893; a visit from Theodore Roosevelt in 1902; and knighthood from the King of Italy in 1907. At the same time, Ezekiel remained devoted to America and its ideals. He never surrendered his American citizenship, and his will specified that his body return to the US after his death. He was buried with full military honors beneath the 32.5 foot Confederate memorial that he designed for Arlington National Cemetery (1914); a eulogy by President Warren Harding, read at his funeral, lauded Ezekiel as “a great Virginian, a great artist, a great American, and a great citizen of world fame” (Cohen and Gibson 2007, 26). His gravestone reads: “Moses J. Ezekiel, Sergeant of Company C, Battalion of Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute.”

Ezekiel’s fervent patriotism and his grateful commitment to his native country were affirmed by his portraits of American political luminaries. A proud Southerner, Ezekiel was disappointed when he was not asked to sculpt Robert E. Lee, whom he knew personally and socialized with after the war. According to Ezekiel’s autobiography, Lee had encouraged him to pursue a career in art. He quoted the general: “I hope you will be an artist as it seems to me you are cut out for one. But whatever you do, try to prove to the world that if we did not succeed in our struggle, we were worthy of success. And do earn a reputation in whatever profession you undertake” (Ezekiel 1975, 124). A few of the sculptures Ezekiel did carve of prominent American figures—all produced after his move to Europe—are three portraits of Thomas Jefferson, a fellow Virginian. He first carved a marble bust (1888) for the Senate’s Vice Presidential Bust Collection. A later commission—from two Jewish philanthropist brothers—resulted in a 9‐foot bronze statue of Jefferson, originally placed in front of the Jefferson County Courthouse in Louisville (1901). Jefferson stands atop the Liberty Bell, as drafter of the Declaration of Independence, holding the document outward. Ezekiel depicted Jefferson in his thirties, the future president’s age at the time when he wrote the Declaration. As a man who epitomized democratic ideals and who authored the Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, Jefferson stood for the very religious liberty that Ezekiel celebrated with his own marble group. A smaller replica of the Jefferson sculpture (1910) was erected near the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, founded by Jefferson in 1819. Ezekiel also produced a full‐length bronze statue of General Stonewall Jackson (1910), on commission from the Charleston, West Virginia chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (1909), with a replica at the Virginia Military Institute (1912). He executed a bronze Christopher Columbus (1892) for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, the Chicago world’s fair celebrating the discovery of the New World.

In 1874, Ezekiel began his first major commission: the neoclassical, 25‐foot allegory Religious Liberty. This project came as a surprise, with an invitation to submit a design ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Moses Jacob Ezekiel’s Religious Liberty (1876) and the Nineteenth‐Century Jewish American Experience
• 2 The Lure of “Magick Land”
• 3 Mining the Dutch Golden Age
• 4 “The Revenge of Art on Life”
• 5 Show and Tell
• 6 Networked
• 7 German Art Academies and their Impact on Artistic Style
• 8 “Orientalism” in Art
• 9 Wall to Wall
• 10 “Like a Dog, Just Looking”
• 11 Aesthetic Religion, Religious Aesthetics, and the Romantic Quest for Epiphany
• 12 The Wanderers and Realism in Tsarist Russia
• 13 Thomas Cole and the Domestic Landscape of the Hudson River School
• 14 Sculpture and the Public Imagination
• 15 Capturing Unconsciousness
• 16 Impressionism and the Mirror Image
• 17 Roots
• 18 Australian Art in the Nineteenth‐Century
• 19 Tradition and Modernity in Nineteenth‐Century Catalan Art
• 20 Principle and Practice in Nineteenth‐Century Danish Landscape Painting
• 21 Art and Multiculturalism in Estonia and Latvia, circa 1900
• 22 Nationalism and the Myth of Hungarian Origin
• 23 In the Service of the Nation
• 24 Facing Modernism
• 25 Identity Tourism
• 26 The Meaning of the Verb “To Be” in Painting
• 27 Cassatt’s Singular Women
• 28 Fashion, Lithography, and Gender Instability in Romantic‐Era Paris
• 29 Racist or Hero of Social Art?
• Index
• End User License Agreement