One of the more than 200 works that appeared in the first Impressionist exhibit, held at the Paris studio of the photographer Nadar 150 years ago, was a painting of a synagogue by the Jewish artist Jacques Émile Édouard Brandon.
“We tried to reassemble the entire contents of that exhibition on the Boulevard des Capucines,” Mary Morton, curator and head of the department of French paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, told JNS. “We had trouble finding pictures by Brandon, but did find this one, which may or may not have been the picture named in the catalog ‘Synagogue.’”
The picture that appears in the National Gallery’s exhibit “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment,” on view through Jan. 19, shows dozens of figures—many of them clad in prayer shawls and top hats—in a vast synagogue adorned with a menorah and candles. It isn’t entirely clear what is happening in the service, as young men, clad in white hats and robes with blue sashes, appear to congregate on the dais.
Brandon painted many Jewish scenes, including a more detailed synagogue painting (1868-70) that is part of the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“We found it quite striking that the only painting in the exhibition related to religion was Brandon’s pictures and were determined to represent that,” Morton told JNS. “Unfortunately there is very little work on his career and his oeuvre.”
The first exhibit of the Impressionists, Catherine Méneux, a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Paris, writes in the exhibition catalog that it “was not a major happening in 1874 and was seen as something exceptional only with the benefit of hindsight.”
Only 30 or so critics covered the 1874 show—compared to about 100 that would cover the Salon—and most of them were “somewhat close” to the artists.
Many of the pictures in the National Gallery exhibit, which was previously on view at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, feature the calming pastel tones and bright and energetic light for which the movement is known. But the exhibit also addresses the tumult during the Franco-Prussian War, and several pictures feature corpses and violence.
Three years before the first Impressionism show, “war and political turmoil destabilized life in Paris,” per an exhibit wall text. “Mounting tensions and power struggles between France and Prussia led the French parliament to declare war in July 1870.”
France’s “unprepared” army was “quickly overwhelmed,” and Napoleon III was captured and Prussian soldiers besieged Paris. “France surrendered six months later in January 1871,” per the wall text, which added that the crisis wasn’t yet over.
“When the French army tried to regain control two months later, a brutal civil war erupted,” it adds. “In one week, as many as 15,000 members of the commune were killed, and public buildings across Paris were set ablaze.” In 1874, as the Impressionist show was mounted, “ruins of structures throughout the city still showed scars of this conflict.”
The first exhibit of Impressionism—a term intended to be derogatory—also came some 20 years before the Dreyfus Affair, in which the French Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested in 1894 and sentenced on false grounds of treason. (He was exonerated in 1906 and reinstated into the French army).
“Antisemitism was swirling in France at this moment, and would explode into public with the Dreyfus Affair,” Morton told JNS.
Although a label accompanying Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro’s 1873 Hoarfrost (at the Musée d’Orsay) in the exhibit notes that the artist was a “Jewish immigrant from the Caribbean” who “struggled most of his life to make a living and advance his career,” Morton told JNS that there was “little trace” of the artist Edgar Degas being an antisemite until the Dreyfus affair.
“Pissarro always felt socially marginal in France due to his Caribbean origin and no doubt in part due to his Jewish family origins,” Morton said. “I have not found much to say about antisemitism and the first Impressionist show in 1874.”
One of the earliest antisemitic references in Degas’s letters came some four or five years after the first Impressionist show, when—per the three-volume The Letters of Edgar Degas (2020), edited and translated by Theodore Reff, professor emeritus of art history at Columbia University—he wrote to artist Félix Bracquemond that Ernest May, a banker and collector, was getting married. “He’s a Jew,” Degas wrote in the letter.
‘Christian Bible’
One of the things that the so-called Impressionists were reacting to was the official French Salon, which valued “history” paintings.
A wall label in the exhibit noted that among the “history painting” subjects upon which Salon exhibits drew were “tales from mythology, the Christian Bible and the history of France.”
The only two biblical works in the room are Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1872 painting The Death of the Pharaoh’s Firstborn Son, in the collection of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and Jules-Élie Delaunay’s 1874 David Triumphant, having just killed Goliath, from the Fine Arts Museum of Nantes, France.
JNS asked the National Gallery why the label referred to two paintings from Jewish scripture as coming from the “Christian Bible.”
“Thank you for pointing this out. The wall texts were written by a team of people, and I think all of us were considering Old Testament stories to be part of the ‘Christian Bible,’” Morton told JNS. “We will look into being more precise here, the Old Testament being based on the Hebrew Bible. We can let you know if and when we are able to amend the wall text.”
The Amsterdam museum notes that its picture’s subject is “from the biblical book of Exodus,” and “Moses and Aaron (upper right) visit the pharaoh, who is mourning his son.”
“The Egyptian ruler’s son had died from one of the plagues sent by God to secure the Israelites’ release from Egypt,” the Rijksmuseum adds. “The gloom of the painting reflects the father’s intense grief. One has to look long and hard to discern all the figures and details.” The museum’s website notes that the painting is part of its online collection of “Old Testament” scenes.
Morton told JNS that the question of how artists in this time period looked at biblical, mythological and French historical scenes is “a huge question” that “opens some big art historical issues around the state of history painting at this time.”
“My view is that artists were choosing subjects that spoke to the anxieties and emotions of the day, politically, socially, culturally, rather than trying to represent an accurate account of history,” she said.
‘The Railway’
One of the central pictures in the exhibit, which comes from the National Gallery’s collection, is Edouard Manet’s 1973 canvas The Railway, which depicts a seated woman and a standing girl in front of a fence framing a train station in the distance. The girl, who has a large blue bow on her dress, turns her back on the viewer, amplifying the mystery of the scene.
“We believe the little girl is the daughter of Manet’s friend and fellow artist Alphonse Hirsch, who was Jewish,” Morton told JNS. “I am not sure whether or not her Jewish identity is part of Manet’s message.”
The woman in the picture, per the National Gallery site, is Victorine Meurent, “Manet’s favorite model in the 1860s,” while the girl “was the daughter of a fellow painter who allowed Manet to use his garden to create The Railway.”
“Reviewers were critical of the unfinished appearance of The Railway and that the rail station itself was not well-defined in the picture,” according to the museum website. “Although Manet never chose to associate himself officially with the Impressionist group, this painting’s scene of modern life, as well as its loose, abstract effects, show the influence of the younger artists on his work.”
“It is always unclear what Manet ‘means’ in his pictures,” Morton said. “This is why he remains at the center of the discourse.”
