Jewish Heritage Report
Vol. I, Nos. 3-4 / Winter 1997-98
Portrait Exhibition at Jewish Museum, New York
American Jewish Portrait Exhibition at Jewish Museum,
New York
The most remarkable thing about the 87 portraits of prosperous
American Jews recently on view at the Jewish Museum in New York in Facing
the New World: Jewish Portraits in Colonial and Federal America, is
that there is nothing in any of the portraits to indicate that the sitters
are, indeed, Jewish. The works - often by the finest artists of the colonies
and young Republic - were painted between 1700 and the 1830s and show a
cross section of the small, elite, mostly Sephardic American Jewish community.
Curator Richard Brilliant, better known for his insightful publications
on ancient Roman portraiture, makes a case for the use of the portrait
by Colonial Jews as a means of expressing their status, but also their
assimilation into the egalitarian society of early America. There are no
Jewish insignia, no Hebrew inscriptions, no religious suggestions in any
of these works, but one would be wrong to think that religion was meaningless
or insignificant to the sitters. In other aspects of their lives these
same men and women -- they are the ones described in Stephen Birmingham's
1971 bestseller, The Grandees (considered too general to be included
in the bibliography?) -- were founders of America's earliest congregations:
Shearith Israel, Mikveh Israel, etc.. But in these portraits, religion
is put aside in favor of social respectability.
The Jewish Museum exhibit allowed the viewer to come face to face with
some of the most notable Jewish personages of early American history such
as Rebecca Gratz, Harmon Henricks, Mordacai Manuel Noah and Major Mordacai
Myers. For those who value Jewish monuments, two of the individuals included
have special meaning - Commadore Uriah Phillips Levy and Abraham Touro.
Levy is one of the founders of historic preservation in the United States,
and is credited with saving Thomas Jefferson's estate, Monticello. Touro
set an example (too rarely followed) for synagogue founders and their descendants,
by leaving an endowment for upkeep and repairs in perpetuity for the Touro
Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. Due to his foresight, the synagogue
still stands.
Some of the early portraits retain stylistic elements of Italian and Spanish
Baroque painting. One thinks of the life-size portrait of bewigged Yoseph
de Yitzhak Barukh Caravalho from Venice, painted in 1697, or the portrait
of one of England's founding Sephardim, Dr. Fernando Mendes (1647-1724).
The American portraits, however, are mostly more severe, reflecting northern
European taste, and particularly the portrait tradition of Holland and
England. There too, Jews often commissioned portraits from prominent artists
such as Rembrandt (Dr. Ephraim Hezekiah Bueno) and Gainsborough (Dr. Isaac
Henrique Sequeira). Rarely, except in the cases of engraved frontispiece
portraits of (often religious) authors, were indications of the sitter's
religion included.
This collection of American Jewish portraits contains works by many leading
artists, with more than a few by John Wesley Jarvis, Gilbert Stuart, and
Thomas Sully. The choice of the artist as much as the demeanor and accouterments
of the sitter demonstrate the extent (or desire) of Jewish entry into early
American society.
Facing the New World was accompanied by the publication of an elegant
well-illustrated catalogue, published for the Jewish Museum by Prestel
(ISBN 3-7913-1863-2). It is informative about the subjects and the artists
without being long-winded. Richard Brilliant and Ellen Smith have contributed
stimulating essays to this Who's Who of American Jews.
- Samuel Gruber
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Updated: 23-July-98