Patrick Bade
Isidor Kaufmann: Portraitist of Orthodox Jews

Patrick Bade | Isidor Kaufmann Portraitist of Orthodox Jews | 04.28.22

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

- Well, my, familiarity with Isidor Kaufman is relatively recent. I had my first encounter with a portrait by Kaufman in 2013. I use that word encounter, very deliberately, cause that’s what it felt like, was this portrait of a young rabbi. And it was in an exhibition at the National Gallery in London of Viennese portraits of the turn of the century. And I saw this picture from the other side of the room, it’s quite a small picture, and I was drawn towards it. And then I found myself standing in front of it and locked into a kind of mutual scrutiny. Not an entirely comfortable experience, I would say. Cause he’s a young man. He’s a, with a complicated state of mind, I would say. He’s, wary, and suspicious. But it was an extraordinary sensation, because I really felt I knew him. The painting has an incredible presence. Well, this is what great portraits do.

This is the miracle for me of portraitures. Why I find portraits so fascinating. What you’re looking at is a piece of canvas with sticky coloured stuff smeared on it. But you, a great portrait can really make you feel as though you’re standing in front of a human being and that you’re communicating with that human being, who may have died centuries before. So, perhaps the two greatest examples of this are Rembrandt and Velázquez, that, here is a, an early Rembrandt on the right hand side of an old one. Always so astonishing with, with Rembrandt, cause he makes you so aware, even in an early picture like this, that you’re looking at sticky, muddy, gungy, stuff on a surface. And how about this for an encounter? Wow. That would be interesting, to be in the same room as these two, weighing each other up. Pope Innocent the 10th by Velázquez on the right hand side and the Young Rabbi by Isidor Kaufman.

Now, for me, Kaufman is something of a mystery, cause I think there are times where he really does touch greatness as an artist. But there are many other pictures where he seems to me completely banal and without any kind of, aesthetic or artistic interest. It’s, he’s really only great when he’s painting Orthodox Jews, particularly Hasidic Jews. Otherwise, so much of his work is just banal, trivial, second rate. Well, I know, probably I can… Oh, there are still, there’s only three questions so far on the Q and A, but I’m sure there’ll be people at the end who will say, “Well, how do you judge that? What, what makes a work of art great? What makes a work of art, a work of art? But now, how do, what is first rate? What is second rate?” Well, of course it’s all, very, very subjective. There are no hard and fast rules. I’m just telling you my impression, of him. I think this is a great picture. And I think many of his portraits of young Jews, particularly young rabbis, are extraordinary in their presence.

So, this is how he put it. He says, “Since it was my conviction that the strength of every artist is rooted in its people, I became the painter of Judaism. I strove to reveal its beauties, its nobility, and tried to make the traditions and institutions that speak of such great religious devotion and reverence accessible to Gentiles as well.” So that was his programme as an artist. In the same show, in the same room was another small painting, an early painting by Gustav Klimt, dating from the early 1890s. So, there’s about four or five years difference in date between the two pictures. But it was also very interesting, in that exhibition, to go back and forwards between the two. I certainly, from a point of view of the humanity of the subject, I find that Kaufman actually, much, much more interesting than the Klimt. But there are very interesting stylistic similarities. Klimt of course moves on and goes in other directions. But at this point in his career, that the extreme fineness of the technique, this, rather fascinating combination of incredibly meticulous observation of reality with abstract elements, a strong sense of pattern.

The way you’ve got, in both cases you’ve got these, embroideries or tapestries or whatever they are, carpet, I think, in the case of the Klimt, on the back wall behind the sitter, parallel to the picture surface. So, creating a rather flat, abstract effect. And the other very interesting thing is this very, very powerful sense of contour of the figure, that is created by the dark or black clothing. And this little painting also was in the exhibition by Klimt. It’s a tiny picture. And it’s Klimt on the left and it’s Kaufman on the right. The one on the right was not actually in that particular exhibition. But again, I think you can see quite interesting similarities between the young, well, relatively young Klimt, Klimt was a rather late developer. So, he would’ve been in his, around 30, early thirties when he painted that picture on the left hand side. And, again, it’s the, precision.

And in this case, a kind of lucidity, and I would say, despite the fact we’ve got two very pretty young girls, that the paintings are both of them in this case, remarkably lacking in, sentimentality. So, Isidor Kaufman, he’s born in 1853, in a town called Arad, which was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. Today it’s in Romania. And this is what it looked like. I don’t know what is left of it after two world Wars. It was multiethnic, so that you would’ve heard many languages, German, Hungarian, there were plenty of Jews, there were Roma, there were, Bulgarians. And he was born into relatively comfortable circumstances. The date, 1853, that’s another thing I want to stress, cause that’s interesting, because that makes him near contemporaries of these, three artists. Gauguin was born in 1848, so, just, five years earlier, than Kaufman. Van Gogh is an exact contemporary. He was actually born eight days after Kaufman in 1853. And, Klimt is nine years, in fact nine years younger than Kaufman.

Here he is in middle age. And this photograph, it shows him of course as a very dapper, bourgeois character, with his very neatly tended moustache and beard, very smart clothing. But it’s, this photograph helps me make the first really important point, very important point about him. So yes, his great paintings are all inspired by Jewish tradition, the Jewish religion, particularly Hasidic Jews, but he wasn’t one. Yes, he may have have been of Jewish origin. He certainly wasn’t brought up as a Hasidic Jew. His father was a captain in the Austro-Hungarian army. That would not have been possible, of course, if if he’d been religious. And although Kaufman devoted a very large part of his life, or career, the best part really, to the depiction of Jewish traditions, he was doing so as an outside observer, not as somebody who had been brought up in that tradition or belonged to it.

That’s a very important point that I wish to stress. And you can compare him with Chagall in that sense. And they’re two great masters of the imagery of Hasidic Jews and Hasidic worshipers. Chagall on the left hand side. Of course Chagall did come from that background. And so Chagall here on the left, and Kaufman on the right,. I don’t think the original of this Sauvage, but this is, I’m afraid, a rather poor reproduction of a work that he did when he was 21 years old. It’s itself, a copy of, of a detail of an old master. And it’s not 21. It’s not, a particularly remarkable, or precocious work for a 21 year old. But he was shown in a shop window, locally, and it attracted attention and some praise. And because of that, in 1875, when he’s 22 years old, he’s sent off to Vienna.

In some ways, of course, it’s a wonderful time to arrive in Vienna. Things are beginning to bubble away culturally. You’ve got the, by now quite elderly, Franz Joseph, who, as you’ve heard in many, many lectures, particularly from Trudy, as he got older he mellowed and he became a very benign figure, a liberal figure, and somebody who was actually a protector of the Jews and sympathetic towards the Jews. But in 1875, the very year that Kaufman was, arrived in Vienna, you had Karl Lueger elected to the city council. This is his statue on the Ringstrasse, the part of it that I think, I’m not sure if, I think it’s been changed now, but until certainly a year or so ago, that section of the Ringstrasse was called the Karl Lueger Ringstrasse, which, and Karl Lueger in many ways, a brilliant man, a successful politician, but like so many ambitious populist politicians, when we’re seeing it everywhere at the moment, the way the whole issue of immigration is being exploited by cynical, popular, populist, politicians.

So, he used the issue of anti-Semitism to rise to power and eventually to become mayor of Vienna. It was always a good vote-getter, to blame somebody else coming in from, somewhere else. And it was the art student flocking to Vienna that excited his ire. So, Kaufman enrols at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, currently, well, when I was last there just before lockdown, it was all closed down for radical refurbishment. The last time I went to it when it was still open. It’s a real warren, you know, warren of dusty corridors and so on. So, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. And when I go back to Vienna, next, well, it will be next month, no, June. Next, but one month. And so he studied there for a year, but he was not precocious. He was not obviously gifted. And after a year of study there he was actually rejected for lack of visible progress. But he was determined to carry on. And he enrolled with a well-known, respected older artist, who you see on the left hand side.

This is Joseph Matthäus Aigner, and who had, it’s a pretty dull picture really, that one on the left hand side. It’s a very academic painting. Could be done by almost anybody in the mid to late 19th century. And you can see that Kaufman learned certain academic skills from him. This is a portrait of a stockbroker that Kaufman painted later that’s in a rather similarly sort of dull academic style, but it’s been pointed out that Aigner, he was quite an elderly artist by this time and he’d been rather more interesting in his youth. And he had trained with a well Biedermeier artist called Amerling. You see a work by Amerling here on the right hand side. And there is a work by Waldmüller. These were leading portraitists of the be Biedermeier period. And some of you may have heard my talk on Biedermeier last year. Biedermeier is the period 1815, between the end of the Napoleonic wars 1815 to 1848. And it’s known for its petite bourgeoisie values, moral values really.

But the, the portraits of the Biedermeier period are really very interesting. They have this, a kind of honesty, meticulous technique and a kind of truthfulness and usually a lack of, of flattery. And so I think this is maybe an interesting connection for Kaufman, because these are qualities that we value in his, in his mature work. So after, for after a time with this Aigner, he moved on to another academic artist, called Joseph Trenkwald, who was a sort of very conservative at the time. And we were talking about the 1870s. This is a picture that could easily date from the 1830s or forties. This is by Trenkwald and it’s in a belated Nazarene style. And Nazarenes are sometimes talked about as though they’re the German or Austrian equivalent of the Pre-Raphaelites, that they were very interested in the Middle Ages, but their actual style of drawing was a neoclassical style of drawing.

So, we actually have the academic records, the comments, that Kaufman’s teachers made on him as a student. And he got rather lukewarm praise from Trenkwald who felt he didn’t draw well, that he hadn’t really learned the technique of drawing. Well, he didn’t draw like this, that’s for sure. So, by the 1880s, he had graduated and he was beginning to make a reputation. He was exhibiting, and he exhibited for the first time at the Künstlerhaus in 1886. The Künstlerhaus was like the equivalent to the Royal Academy Summer exhibition, or the equivalent of the Paris Salon. It was the big exhibiting body in Vienna. And it was, it had more or less a monopoly, until of course in 1897. The famous Vienna Secession was founded and all the more interesting artists, or most of them, abandoned the Künstlerhaus and they moved over to the Vienna Secession.

But, it says really something about Kaufman’s position, his artistic position, that he actually didn’t move over to the, the Secession. He stayed with and continued to exhibit at the more conservative Künstlerhaus until the end of his career. On this, the right here, you can see what exhibitions looks like at the Künstlerhaus. They’re very similar to the way things were exhibited at the Salon in Paris or the Royal Academy in London. These heavy gold frames, pictures exhibited frame to frame, floor to ceiling, a dreadful kind of aesthetic clutter. And that was one of the reasons, of course, that Klimt and the younger artists abandoned the Künstlerhaus, because they wanted their works to be shown with more space around them and more advantageously. So, these are the things that he was, the kind of pictures, that he was exhibiting at the Künstlerhaus in the 1880s. Small scale, anecdotal, genre pictures that were incredibly popular everywhere in the western world, in the 19, in the mid to late 19th century. Sort of cosy domestic scenes, telling a story and usually with a feel-good element.

So, you feel this is an artist with not particularly original. He’s got certain skills, but they’re, these kind of skills, so many artists had them at the time. There are any number, but paintings like this, they come up for sale at Christie’s and Sotheby’s all the time in 19th century picture sales. As I said, they made money. If you wanted to earn a living, this was a good way to do it in the 19th century. And yes, cosy, mildly humorous paintings of eccentric gentlemen and their hobbies. Got Spitzweg in the background here. This is again, a kind of painting that goes right back to the Biedermeier period, popular throughout the 19th century. And Kaufman in the middle, doing the same kind of thing. And, as I said, you could, there so many of these pictures were produced.

This Kaufman on the left, and I can’t actually read the name on the right hand side there. I just took that Rembrandt as randomly. Pick up any catalogue of 19th century pictures from Christie’s and Sotheby’s and you find endless examples of the pictures. And so little, funny, haha anecdotes. This one is called, There’s No Fool Like An Old Fool. This one actually had considerable success and was exhibited in the 1893 World Exhibition in Chicago. It’s the kind of thing that middle class people liked, and it’s an elderly gentleman proposing marriage to a young girl who’s not taking him terribly seriously. This one, this is so like the kind of things you would’ve found at the Paris Salon at the time. So, it’s historicist, cause it’s set back, in the late 18th century. But it, and it’s anecdotal, it’s telling the story and it has the kind of a slightly, I think dubious sexiness, that’s typical of French painting, of this, a lot of academic French painting of this period. It’s called The New Lady’s Maid.

So, we look at this, you spend a lot of time looking at a picture like this, and you work out the story. And what is the story? There’s this young girl, she’s applying for a job as a lady’s maid and she’s being inspected. Well, I think the two gentlemen, particularly the one that’s seated in the chair, he’s actually undressing her. He’s looking at her in a rather, in a rather libidinous way. And you can see the lady of the house is perhaps not so pleased at perhaps such an attractive lady’s maid. This type of picture, with the, very immense effort has gone into the historical detail, the costume, the furniture, the trappings and so on. These paintings, usually on a small scale, they’re very, very detailed. And as I said, there were many, many artists who did this, but the most famous, the most successful of all, was this artist.

This is Ernest Meissonier. He was internationally, incredibly famous. Those of you, anybody listening from England, if you want to see his work, there are large numbers in the Wallace collection in London. And I always say about him, he probably earned more money output per square inch than any artist who’s ever lived. These pictures sold for, they were very, very, very, popular. They sold in huge sums. And also they were reproduced with photograph viewers and so on, so they would’ve been a very good source of income. And I think that at this stage of his career, this is what Kaufman is aiming for. Completely bland, nothing really personal about it. Can you really tell the difference between the Kaufman on left hand side and this French artist called Soulacroix, doing, you know, flirty pictures of people dressed up in historical costume.

So, but I think that gradually, he obviously thought, “No, I’ve got to do something, a little bit more interesting this. What can I do to get my, to set me apart? How can I create a niche for myself?” And I think this is where the first idea came for. So, you see, basically we’ve got the same subject here, haven’t we? Got two middle-aged men engaged in a, in playing chess. And one of them is very puzzled and he other one is triumphant. We’ve got the same thing here, but now, we’re looking at two poor Jews. Now this is a phase in his work in the 1890s that I personally don’t feel terribly comfortable with. He’s depicting exactly of course, those art student that were the, the subject of such suspicion and hostility, not only from Christians, but also very often from more successful assimilated Jews. And the, the kind of cliché depiction of these art student in these pictures is actually uncomfortably close to the images of Jews you find in anti-Semitic postcards and caricatures all of the same period.

I mean this one. And you can see that on the right hand side, this is actually a postcard that’s taken from the picture. So, and this, the title of this one is, the title is A Business Secret. So, it’s again, this clichéd idea that the Jews are sly and, and dishonest and probably up to no good, and more clever than they should be. And the same idea, I think, a little bit in this picture, which shows an elderly Jew teaching business tactics to a Jewish boy. So, if these two pic, if these pictures were not painted by a Jew, I would take them as being anti-Semitic pictures. This is a little bit different. This shows a Yeshiva boy, receiving or being tested on his knowledge. And here I like this picture better, because I feel this is not cliché humour caricature. This has, to my mind, a greater truthfulness to it. And it’s got, you know, it’s interesting touches of observation that the maid who brings in the refreshments, of course, is not Jewish. She’s, she’s depict, she’s depicted as a Christian girl.

This picture called The Rabbi’s Visit was one of his most successful of this phase of his career. And it was actually bought by, Kaiser Franz Joseph, and was a part of the Imperial Collection. Now it’s in the, in the second half of the nineties that I think there’s a real important change in Kaufman’s work. And that for the first time for me, he really becomes interesting. Once again, I can see that somebody’s probably going to ask me at the end and I’ll be stumped, “What do you mean when you say a picture is more truthful?” Now, this picture looks to me, this picture, has for me, has a truth that the ones I’ve shown you up to now don’t have. In the mid to late nineties, Kaufman embarked on a journey, It actually involved lots of physical journeys, cause he made many trips to Central and Eastern Europe in search of Hasidic Jews, Orthodox Jews still living a lifestyle that went right back to the Middle Ages.

This shows the synagogue in the town of Brody on Friday night. I find this a fascinating picture, actually. It captures sort of a moment, that moment the French call “entre chien et loup,” between the dog and the wolf, at the end of the day where the natural light is dying and you have the artificial lights lighting up already. And I believe this even though, actually, apparently he’s taken some artistic liberties and he was inclined to do this, in that he’s put a dome on top of the synagogue in the distance. And it didn’t actually have a dome. So, this is, this is just a few years earlier than this Chagall on the right hand side. And, I think for me it has some of that poetic, it anticipates, some of that sense of nostalgia and that poetic feeling that you also find in very much in the best paintings of Chagall.

Oh, here is the synagogue in Brody, which is in the background of this picture. And as you can see, this is how it was when it was still fully intact. It never had a dome on top of it. And this is how it looks today, in its ruined state since the Second World War. So, he’s very interested in, in historic synagogues. This is the interior of the synagogue at Brody, which you can see has a wonderful Baroque altarpiece. That must be a mid 18th century Baroque altarpiece. And, filled it with very similar, really, it lacks of course the, figurative sculptures that you’d find in a Christian Church.

But you’ve got the use of, of classical vocabulary of columns and tableture, rich colours created by the use of scagliola. Scagliola is fake marble, which is very, very popular in South Germany and Central Europe in the 18th century. And for comparison, there’s a little church, which is my local church when I lived in Munich. This is St. George in Bogenhasen. And you can see how similar it is really, apart the fact that you’ve got a life size sculpture of St. George on horseback sort of trotting across the altar. So, he’s very interested in the interiors of these historic synagogues. This is a 16th century synagogue. Where is this? This is in a place called, Holãsovice. It’s a 16th century interior, but you can see the iron, this wrought iron work, which is 18th century and exceptionally, this synagogue actually still exists.

Most, as you know, were destroyed in the Second World War. And this is the rabbis portal. And this is from a, a synagogue. Where is this? Can’t find it in my notes. Anyway, you can see how fascinated he is by all the detail, the Hebrew proverbs on the wall and the abstract decoration, decorative patterns. Now of course, these pit synagogues were, that were throughout Poland, Silesia, Central and Eastern Europe. They were extraordinary, 16th and 17th, really amazing, amazing buildings. It’s a great tragedy, a small tragedy compared to the human tragedies, but you know, for an art historian, it’s a tragedy for me, that these were all so systematically destroyed by the Nazis in the Second World War. You can get a sense of how amazing and marvellous they were if you go to the Jewish Museum in Paris. They have a whole floor devoted to models of these wonderful 16th and 17th century wooden synagogues.

So, here is a portrait of a rabbi in the same synagogue that I’ve just shown you, but I can’t find the name. Oh yes, Yablonov, it’s in Yablonov. He becomes very interested in the ceremonies, religious ceremonies and worship. But I want to stress again, that he was not religious himself and he was, didn’t come from this background. So, he is almost a say, as much as an outsider observing all of this, as I would be if I, if I were painting piece things. And, he’s not alone. There are many other artists, at the end of the 19th century, who are interested in, as I would say, as outside observers in traditional ceremonies, religious ceremonies. Whether they’re Jewish or Christian or indeed Islamic, in case of Orientalist painters. Here are two paintings of Christian worship that date from around the same time.

This is a French artist, Jean-Daniel Bougele, who was very interested in the traditions, religious traditions of Brittany. And, this is the, German artist, ooh dear. Sorry, my brain is going to mush. But this shows traditional religious worship in, Wilhelm Leibl. Wilhelm Leibl on the right hand side, and of course Gauguin in 1880 and 1889. He also went to, to Brittany. He was in no sense a believing, or traditional Christian, but he’s very interested in all the trappings and the ceremonies of Christian worship. So, this is a painting which seems, the title of this is In The Beth Hamedrash. So, this is a section, a separate section of the synagogue, or outside the main section. And it, this looks, again, very meticulously observed, but it’s assumed that actually this is a composite of different synagogue buildings, cause there are different elements that you can see, if you look at the wall light in the middle, in the background, you can see that he’s made a study of it, no doubt, from a real one, but not necessarily in that building.

So, he’s combined elements of different buildings together. This is, I find this painting very beautiful, very moving, and it shows the wife, blessing the candles on the evening of the Sabbath. And it has a very domestic quality to it. Notice the Biedemeier furniture. Wonderful Biedemeier bed with a great plumo on top of it and the Biedemeier chairs and the simple wooden floor. So, it’s, and here for comparison, a Biedemeier picture by Moritz Von Schwind on the right hand side with many of the same interior elements as the Jewish household painted by Kaufman. And this most touching painting of a woman. Here the candles have been lit and she seems to be lost in inner thoughts, or maybe prayer as she waits for her husband to come home from the synagogue. So, the subject of a lone woman, lost in prayer, or religious thoughts was quite a traditional one. It was a popular one in Holland in the 17th century.

Of course in Vienna he had access to the great collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. You’ll be very, very familiar with the work of Rembrandt. This is a Rembrandt, traditionally said to be a portrait of his mother, but as has been pointed out recently, he was in his early twenties when he painted this. And she’s far too old to have been his mother. Maybe she could have been his grandmother. And this painting by Nicolaes Maes, again, of a woman lost in her religious thoughts. So, he was very keen, I think, from a cultural and historical point of view to preserve these Jewish religious traditions. And for the Jewish Museum, he created a sabbath room.

This is what it looked like, because it was later dismantled and destroyed by the Nazis. But, you can see actually several elements, the mirror, the clock and so on. The candles in the painting on the left that are painted from objects that were in this room that he created for the Jewish Museum. He mainly paints men. There are a series of paintings of women. And, but I think in the paintings of women, he’s often more interested in the details of the costume than in the subject, as they’re less involving, I think, psychologically, than his portraits of men. This one shows a young married woman. She’s wearing her, her wig, and she’s wearing sort of festive clothing. But she’s, he’s taken again, he’s taken some liberties here, because she’s actually posed in front of a Torah curtain, which would’ve been from a section of the synagogue, which was not accessible to women. It was a male part of the synagogue.

But he’s chosen it because he likes it. The whole painting to me, somebody even mentioned Whistler at the beginning, and this is a painting to me, which is a kind of whistlerian harmony. It’s like a symphony of cream, and bold. And, so it has a very, some of the elements in it are made, the choices are made for aesthetic reasons, I think, rather than just trying to document the clothing. And this, this, although you can see the Hebrew for Hannah at the top. It’s thought to be it in fact a portrait of his daughter, whose real name was Maria Paulina. And, you can see that she’s wearing a shtam tichel, also very lavish, lavish, traditional costume, kind of tiara there. But, to me it’s the male portraits that are the really great thing with him. And they’re really extraordinary. They’re so intense.

As I said, you feel drawn into a really, almost uncomfortable confrontation, when you stand in front of them and look at them. There’s no flattery here. And I think of the great portraits of young Jews that Rembrandt painted back in the 17th century with which of course he would be very familiar. And there’s, they’re not ingratiating. That’s one of the things I really like about them. They’re not trying to be beautiful or exotic or, I think he’s really interested in them, as they were. There is a kind of honesty and a kind of truthfulness about these portraits and the extraordinary, meticulous technique. This is a young, this, and this shows, again, his very careful observation.

This is a young Orthodox Jew who’s a little bit more progressive than the other ones, so he has shorter hair, and, the little curls, of course, are less conspicuous than in the other portraits. I put this in for comparison. This is, another artist who’s not religious, this is Sargent, and this is his portrait of a young Italian priest, for comparison. And so, as I said, he had access to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and he’s very interested in the old masters, particularly in Italian Renaissance. So, and you, you’d see he’s used some devices that he’s borrowed, I think, from Parmigianino on the right hand side. Again, this very powerful sense of contour of the dark clothing against a light background.

And, so this is Rosso Fiorentino, another Italian renaissance artist on the left for comparison with Kaufman on the right. And again, Parmigionino on the left. That, you know, you could say that this is ambitious to set up a comparison with these very great artists, the Renaissance. And I feel that these pictures are so powerful that they can stand the comparison. And he’s also, I’m going to finish off with his images of children. You may know by now that I’m not a great fan, usually, of paintings of cute children, but his paintings of children, They’re, they’re, he, he’s, there’s nothing cute about them. There’s nothing sentimental about them. They, they, they, they, they’re, they’re really ex, this is, this is the portrait, the title of this one is The Son Of The Miracle Working Rabbi Of Belts. There’s nothing, they’re not trying to be winsome, they’re not trying to appeal to us like these are, for instance. I mean, these are paintings by the 18th century artist, Greuze, who specialised in painting nauseatingly, cute paintings of children, or Millais, the English Victorian artist who also paints very cutesy children.

So, here, this is a little boy with real character, isn’t it? By Kaufman on the left hand side and Millais Bubbles on the right hand side. And these are, these are children that, they’re fully formed human beings. They’re extraordinarily individualised. This is his son, and who was certainly not dressed like this in reality. As I said, they were a completely assimilated family. So he is dressed up his son as a Hasidic Jewish boy. This is another son, Philip, who became, an artist, quite a successful one, until driven out by the Nazis in the 1930s. Here is the son in his studio, which you can see is very much the studio of a relatively successful assimilated artist.

Cause I mean this also, a question which I, probably somebody’s going to ask me, but I can’t answer, “How was it, that Kaufman got permission, to paint these people? How was it that these very, very traditional, Hasidic Jews, who of course are forbidden to make or own graven images? How was it that he was able to get them to pose for him?” Maybe some of those rather troubled, wary expressions on their faces had something to do with that. Anyway, this is my last image. This is a painting by his son Philip, who’s an accomplished and successful artist, as I said, but working in a totally different way. This is more or less, I would say, an impressionist painting. Nothing to do with Hasidic Jews and nothing to do with religion.

Anyway, that’s it. I see there are some questions. So, let’s, ooh.

Q&A and Comments

Thank you to Wendy. I’m back in the light. Yes, I am. I did know that Isidor Kaufman is Sue Walsh’s grand, he’s her great-grandfather, I think. Philip, I think, is her grandfather.

Q: “Was anybody able to read the Hebrew behind the porch of the Rabbi?” A: Well, I can’t I’m afraid. And I don’t know whether it made sense.

A bit of Kaufman trivia. The creator of the Israeli TV series, “Shtisel,” named the art gallery of the owner in the programme, Izzy Kaufman, after the artist. He said his parents had a copy, of one of his paintings and he wants to honour him in that way. Moritz Gottlieb. I don’t know a Moritz Gottlieb. I have a wonderful painting by Polish artist, by Gottlieb, but it’s not Moritz. Right. Thank you. “Perhaps the old Jew was teaching the boy his Bar Mitzvah portion, not business tactics.” Well, the title was given by, not by me. It was, the title was given by Kaufman.

Q: “Were his parents religious or observant?” A: They certainly weren’t orthodox, but they may have been observant. I don’t know about that.

Q: “What was the name of the artist who?” It is Ernest Meissonier. Meissonier.

“There is a painted wooden synagogue original, original, in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.” I’ve never been there. I’d love to see it. Beautiful scale model of of an old wooden synagogue erect in the Jewish museum in Warsaw.

Q: “Which Jewish museum has?” A: It’s the Paris Museum. Has a whole floor of them.

“You’re saying that Chagall faced criticism from Orthodox Jews for indulging in graven image. Of course being more secular Kaufman would not have faced that response from his own community. But did some orthodox Jews still agree to both?” As I said, I can’t, I’ve asked, I’ve wondered that, and I really don’t know what the answer is. “Photo of the lone woman sitting in her dining room with the lit candles. I couldn’t help notice the exquisite damask tablecloth.” Such a lovely painting that, isn’t it? Really is beautiful.

Q: “Who would’ve been his model?” A: Well off, I mean, they’re so individualised. We know that they’re real people. You can tell that. But, and sometimes it will say, “This is the rabbi from such and such a place.” But by and large we don’t have any names for the models of his pictures.

Q: “How was he able to paint them?” A: I don’t know. I don’t know.

His son did survive the Holocaust. “Two-dimensional portraits may not be considered a graven image.” Hm, I’m not sure about that. I think they are. “There are a number of paintings by Messonier in the Wallace collection.” I wish there were some. I’d love to, I’d love to see more paintings by Kaufman. If there, there’s an excellent catalogue. I’ve given you the details on the list that came with the PowerPoint this morning. And most of his paintings still seem to be in private collections. Some are in Jewish museums. This is, oh, Rabbi Colin,

Q: “Am I saying Jews have no problem with paintings?” A: Shares he didn’t mind portraits or photos made of them. They do mind being made objects of ridicule. Ridicule.

Thank you very much. Somebody can’t hear me. I’m not sure why. Quick. The Holãsovice synagogue. “It was given to Paul Grüninger, Grüninger, by an Austrian Jewish family fleeing Austria, Austria to Switzerland. Grüninger was a Swiss policeman, a righteous gentile, recognised by Yad Vashem, who helped 3000 Jews enter Switzerland illegally.” This is Jennifer Roe. She says she sold many prints when working for including that one. I think those poor, I’m sure they must cost an absolute bomb. Well, they should, cause I think they’re incredible pictures.

Q: “Wondering about Kaufman’s passion or motivation for painting religious Jews as an assimilated man? Did he think he was recording?” A: I think he probably did think he was recording the trying, dying tradition. I’m sure that was part of his mo motivation. Maybe he was also trying to get back to his roots and certainly want, I mean, of course he was wanting to preserve memory, but of course he couldn’t know what was going to happen. He couldn’t know that they were going to be largely exterminated.

“Raise The Roof” as a wonderful documentary about the reconstructions of stunning ceiling, and roof of a synagogue in a place I can’t pronounce. Thank you all very, very much.

And I’m moving on to another very great Jewish artist on Sunday. That is Darius Milhaud. I’ve enjoyed putting that lecture together so much. What a wonderful man and a wonderful composer. So I hope to, you’ll, some of you will tune into that on Sunday.

Goodbye everybody. Bye-bye.

• [Producer] Bye-bye Patrick. Thank you so much. Bye-bye everybody.