The painter Raphael Soyer emigrated from the Russian Empire to the United States with his parents and siblings in 1912. He studied painting in New York and lived there for the rest of his life. He was a staunch social realist, painting scenes of immigrant and city life, as well as portraits of family, friends, and fellow artists. In addition to working in a representational style, he defended it in print against the rising fashion of abstractionism. His brothers Moses and Isaac were also painters.
Soyer’s informal family portrait, Dancing Lesson, has become an iconic image of the American Jewish experience, appearing on many book covers and exhibition catalogs. It was painted about thirteen…
The Arrest of the Deserter depicts a scene from an 1844 comedy, Dominique the Deserter, set in the seventeenth century. Rebecca Solomon painted domestic scenes and scenes of modern Victorian life, but…
Paper cuts have been a tradition of Jewish folk art, with the earliest record of one dating to the fourteenth century. Given the widespread availability of paper in Europe by the mid-nineteenth…