Lot 249: MAURITS LÉON 1836-1865

19 1/4 by 14 3/4 in. (49 by 37.5 cm)

oil on panel

A Rotterdam Estate, The Netherlands
Private Collection

Painted circa 1862, this rare, striking work belongs to a group of pictures depicting Jewish religious scenes by Mauritz Leon, the most important Dutch Jewish painters of Jewish religious subjects. It is possible that this is the painting mentioned by Christiaan Roosen (titled Interior of a Synagogue) in the article on Leon published in the Journal Jewish Art (vol. 16/17), 1990-91, p. 50, which was then untraced because in an unknown Dutch private collection.

It is one of only a very small handful of Jewish paintings by Leon to have survived, probably less than five. Roosen records two further scenes enacted in synagogue interiors. Leon's Preparation for the Priestly Blessing, was sold at Sotheby's Tel Aviv, 17 April, 2001, lot 118. Both works present the figures highlighted against a powerful architectural background based on the Amsterdam synagogue architecture that Leon studied. Another Jewish composition by Leon titled The Rolling up of the Holy Scroll of the Law, 1862, is in the Nederlands Israelietische Gemeente, the Hague, Holland. According to Roosen, the intimate focus on the act of prayer employed here is typical of Leon's highly distinctive approach in his Jewish works: "The action of Leon's Jewish themes takes place in a synagogue in Amsterdam. Like Moritz Oppenheim of an earlier generation, who was the first and foremost Jewish painter from Frankfurt in Germany, so Leon concerned himself in most of his Jewish paintings with either the preparations for or the conclusion of religious ceremony. "(Roosen, p. 50).

Leon died very young (at the age of 27) and left behind a small but distinguished group of Jewish paintings. He, like Maurycy Gottlieb, was one of the first Jewish artists to celebrate his own culture. "Leon went to synagogue not as a painter or an outsider, but as a Jew." Christiaan Roosen, Maurits Leon: The Making of a Jewish Artist, in Jewish Art, Journal of the Center for Jewish Art, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1990-91, pp. 46-52).