Samuel Hirszenberg

Samuel (Szmul) Hirszenberg
Self-Portrait, 1907
Born	(1865-02-22)February 22, 1865 Łódź, Russian Empire
Died	September 15, 1908(1908-09-15) (aged 43) Jerusalem
Education	Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts Academy of Fine Arts, Munich Académie Colarossi
Known for	Painting
Notable work	The Wandering Jew, Exile, The Sabbath Rest, The Eternal Jew
Movement	Realism

Samuel Hirszenberg (also Schmul Hirschenberg) (Łódź, February 22, 1865 – September 15, 1908, Jerusalem) was a Polish-Jewish realist and later symbolist painter active in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Biography

Szmul (Samuel) Hirszenberg was born in 1865, the eldest son of a weaving mill worker in Polish Łódź. Against the will of his father, but thanks to the financial assistance of a doctor, he chose to be an artist. At the age of 15 he began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, where he was heavily influenced by the realistic painting of Jan Matejko.

After two years of training in Kraków, he continued his studies from 1885–1889 at the Royal Academy of Arts in Munich.

Art career

"The Last Prayer," Hirszenberg, Ein Harod

His first major work to attract attention was Yeshiva (1887). After an exhibition at the Kunstverein Munich (1889), he showed at the art exhibition in Paris and was awarded a silver medal. In Paris, he completed his artistic training at the Académie Colarossi.

The Wandering Jew (1899), Israel Museum

In 1891, Hirszenberg returned to Poland. In 1893 he resettled in his hometown of Łódź. While the images of the early years, like the paintings Talmudic Studies, Sabbathnachmittag, Uriel Acosta, and The Jewish cemetery show a certain kinship with the Jewish genre painting by Leopold Horowitz, Isidor Kaufmann, and Maurycy Gottlieb, his later works can be rather assigned to the symbolism. Themes of the "tearful" Jewish history came to the fore. Noteworthy are the three most famous pictures of this period: The Wandering Jew (1899), Exile (1904), and Czarny Sztandar / Black Banner (1905).

In 1900, after working on a large painting, "The Eternal Jew," for over four years, it was exhibited in the Paris Salon. Disappointed by the poor response in Paris Munich and Berlin, he retired for health reasons.

In 1901, he went for a year on a trip to Italy. In 1904, Hirszenberg moved to Kraków. In 1907, he immigrated to Palestine and began to work as a lecturer at the newly founded Bezalel School in Jerusalem, headed by Boris Schatz. After a short and intense creative period, he died in 1908 in Jerusalem.

Selected paintings

• 
  Uriel da Costa teaching the young Spinoza (1901)
• 
  The Sabbath Rest (1894)
• 
  Capri (1901)
• 
  Jewish Cemetery (1892), Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme
• 
  Spinoza, Excommunicated
• 
  Dome of the rock, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1908

See also

• Israeli art
• Maurycy Trębacz (1861–1941), Polish-Jewish painter.

Further reading

• Cohen, Richard & Rajner, Mirjam, Samuel Hirszenberg (1865- 1908): A Polish Jewish Artist in Turmoil, London, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2022
• Cohen, Richard I. (1998). Jewish icons: art and society in modern Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-20545-6. P. 223-235.
• Goodman, Susan Tumarkin (2001). The Emergence of Jewish Artists in Nineteenth-Century Europe. London; New York: Merrell. ISBN 978-1-85894-153-0.
• Ruth (1902). "Samuel Hirszenberg: eine biographische Skizze" [biographical sketch, in German]. In: East and West, vol. 2, issue 10. Columns 673-688.
• "Samuel Hirszenberg" in Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906.
• Schwarz, Karl (1949). Jewish Artists of the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949. P. 43-49.

External links

• Hirszenberg's works in Central Jewish Library
• An artwork by Samuel Hirszenberg at the Ben Uri site