Lot 155: EDOUARD MOYSE B. 1827

signed and dated 1859; titled on reverse

oil on canvas

45 1/2 by 81 in.<br><br>108 by 206 cm.

Paris, Salon of 1861, no. 2330

Susan Tumarkin Goodman (editor), The Emergence of Jewish Artists in Nineteenth-Century Europe, New York, 2001, p.16 & 37

Revue du Louvre, October 1994, p.84-85

Born in Nancy in 1827, Edouard Moyse moved to Paris at a young age to train as an artist with Martin Drolling at the École des Beaux-Arts. He exhibited at the Paris salons from 1850 and received a second-class medal in 1882. Moyse was one of the most prominent Jewish artists of the Age of Emancipation in France, along with Alphonse Levy and Edouard Brandon. During his long career, he depicted important episodes in the history of the Jews in France as well as scenes of daily Jewish life. As suggested by Susan Tumarkin Goodman, "Jewish artists sought to hold on to or to reclaim their vanishing past by returning to it visually, making use of its themes through genre subjects that depicted rituals intended to evoke an authentic Jewish experience. A keen wish to retain the Jewish experience as primary source informs the paintings of Moritz Oppenheim in Germany, Edouard Moyse in France, and Isidor Kaufmann in Austria."

Synagogue During the Reading of the Law is a monumental work which includes over twenty figures. It depicts Sepharadic Jews of another, undefined era, with their long kaftans and turbans, in dignified devotion, conveying at the same time a convivial and warm atmosphere. As Paula Hyman indicated, "Some Jewish artists, like Jacques-Émile-Edouard Brandon and Edouard Moyse, both French, depicted with great dignity Jewish rituals that were still widely practiced but composed their paintings in such a way that they appeared timeless rather than contemporary".

The Great Sanhedrin, one of Moyse's important works and comparable to the present lot in its monumentality, is currently at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Nancy and a sketch related to it is in the collection of the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaisme in Paris. It commemorates the gathering of the Sanhedrin, ordered by by Napoleon I in 1807, and the founding of the Consistoire.