Isidor Kaufmann 1853-1921

Sale: Sotheby's, Tel Aviv, 19th and 20th Century European and Israeli Art, October 23, 1997, lot 33

The Rabbi in this portrait is rendered with great dignity enhanced by the beautiful atara decoration on his prayer shawl and  kittel. The sitter’s red beard and his gold embroidered attire blend with the red velvet and gold thread of the Torah curtain on the background, creating a great harmony of colour.  As G.T. Natter suggests “to this day there has been no Jewish genre painter more naturalistic and at the same time more idealistic than Isidor Kaufmann, who divested his meticulously observed models of all everyday worries and robed them in beautifully rendered garments”. (Natter, G.T., Isidor Kaufmann, Vienna, 1995, p. 33).