Inventory

Provenance

Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 18 March 1998, lot 1.

Private Collection, Los Angeles (acquired at the above sale).

Private Collection, Texas (acquired from the above).

Exhibited

Literature

Cordula Grewe. Wilhelm Schadow (1788-1862): Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde, Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2017, 285-287, ill. 287

Catalogue note

Nothing he had recently seen could compare to the monumental canvas of the Jews at the Rivers of Babylonian, this, Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) was sure. The German physiologist would have known; after all, he himself was among the foremost landscape painters of the German Romantic cohort. The fact that the artist who had delivered this feast of modern history painting was extremely young made it even more noteworthy. Overnight, Eduard Bendemann (1811-1889) had become a household name. The work, Carus confided in his diary in 1835, has “a very special effect on the viewer. In no other new historical picture of the Luxembourg or the Louvre have I found a spirit even remotely comparable to that of this picture.”[1] The admiration of this hitherto unknown “emphatic effect” went had in hand with a powerful reaction to the innovative motif that spoke—Bendemann’s audiences were convinced—directly to one of the most critical issues in contemporary politics. “Although the depiction of this misfortune appears in the guise of the past,” the well-known Düsseldorf art critic Hermann Püttmann (1811-1874) exclaimed a few years later, “Bendemann’s pictures of Jews speak a profound word into the day’s debates about the emancipation of the unfortunate people, and if it is true that art can have an influence on cultural progress, ... these pictures can serve instead of the best plaidoyers.”[2]

Until the young Bendemann had turned to the 137^th Psalm on a monumental scale, history painting had not paid much attention to the end of the old Jewish empire and the fate of those exiled by King Nebuchadnezzar II (c. 630-c. 561 BC) after the siege of Jerusalem in 597 BC. The psalm opens with a powerful lament, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion,” which Bendemann cites in the spandrels of the decorative frame. Beneath, the mourning Jews have settled under a large willow at the banks of the Euphrates. The massive tree provides shade and shelter for an old harper in chains whose heroic figure forms the rock for a group of young women in need of comfort. The youngest has slumped into his lap hiding her face, overwhelmed by grief and longing. On the left, a dark-haired beauty has let her zither slide to the ground as she pauses in deep thought, her eyes cast down, like a powerful allegory of melancholy. Only the last of the four, a mother with an infant on her arm, seems hopeful. Letting her gaze wander into the far distance, she heralds an unwavering trust in God, a belief in the divine promise of a bright future for herself and her offspring. Among the Jews at the river of Babylon, she is the figure seeing salvation.

Premiered at the biannual exhibition of the Berlin Academy in 1832 and an immediate sensation, the canvas subsequently toured Germany with continuing triumph. Indeed, the picture had already made such an impression while still in the studio that the local art union had commissioned a large-scale print after the yet unfinished canvas (Cat. 1a). Soon the dolorous Jews found themselves on embroidery designs, tobacco boxes and coloring pages or glowed in the translucent beauty of porcelain copies.[3] However, the over-the-top popularity also caused an unexpected crisis, and Düsseldorf found itself competing with Berlin over the painting’s purchase. Concerned, Bendemann appeased both parties by offering the Prussian crown prince another subject from Jewish history, Jeremiah on the Ruins of Jerusalem (Cat. 1b). Completed in 1836, Bendemann’s second Jewish history was equally well received, winning a gold medal in Paris at the Salon of 1837. The French fascination with the German wunderkind was awoken; and in a blink of the eye The Captive Jews had become a veritable prototype for French depictions of exile in extremis.[4] This success stemmed above all from the composition’s emotive allure that, in the typical manner of Düsseldorf soul-painting, invited the viewer to project their own desires onto the motif. When Eugène Delacroix, for example, seized the theme in 1838, he did so as a symbol of the love of nation required of those legislators who roamed the Palais-Bourbon library in search of books and guidance. Two years after the completion of the Palais’ theology cupola, Charles-Adolphe Richard-Cavaro delivered a Hellenized version of the captive Jews, now simply called The Exiles (Salon of 1849, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon). The list could go on. Despite the remarkable subject’s specificity, it emancipated itself in the end from its biblical origins and turned into a universal commentary on exile and the diasporic experience.

One secret of this success was certainly Bendemann’s decision to present his sublime depiction of Jewish history in the grand manner of Renaissance and Nazarene fresco, while avoiding all orientalism.[5] This might also be a reason why his Captive Jews have lost little of their appeal. Multiplying in all kinds of reproductions, not least digitally online, they still occupy a place of pride at their original destination, the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne. Jeremiah on the Ruins of Jerusalem was not so lucky. Its fate was sealed by the air raids of 1943, when its homestead, a palace in the North German city of Hanover, went up in flames. Jeremiah’s memory survives only in print. The two paintings quickly occupied a special place in the Jewish imagination as well. Already in 1901 Bendemann was, one might note, among the eleven artists chosen for a small exhibition at the 5^th Zionist congress, and the Captive Jews soon was celebrated as a Jewish picture by a Jewish artist. This, however, is misleading. insofar as Bendemann himself came from a Jewish family, but his parents already had converted to Protestantism and he had been baptized as a baby. Moreover, the symbolism of his pictures leaves no doubt about the deeply Christian nature of his art.[6] Hence, the young mother and her infant are modelled after a “Madonna and Child,” the vine wrapping itself around the willow tree cites a common attribute of Christ (representing the blood shed for humanity’s salvation), and the group’s repose paraphrases the popular motif of “Rest on the Flight from Egypt.” Thus, if Bendemann’s image clearly celebrated the inner strength of the Old covenant and drew attention to the plight of Germany’s contemporary Jewry, it was no less an ardent call for conversion. The future of the Jewish people, the picture tells us in no uncertain terms, is Christian. Under the Nazarene’s brush, the Old Testament story of exile becomes integral to the salvational history of the New.[7] What distinguishes Bendemann’s vision, however, from the era’s aggressive anti-Judaic imagery is an emphatic denial of violence. His is a utopian vision of a divine will, of a kingdom of peace, not a world of persecution or genocide. Franz Liszt (1811-1886) clearly picked up on that. “I will compose for you two artworks,” he told a certain Miss Genast, “Jeremiah and The Grieving Jews. … I was inspired by them; they are by Bendemann, a painter from Düsseldorf … . I would not compose the full text, the end of which is gruesome and full of hate and vengeance; I would give only the impression of a longing for home.”[8] It is this longing that still, beyond religious alliances or national borders, speaks to the modern viewer.

Cat. 1 Figures:

Cat. 1a Ferdinand Ruscheweyh, after Eduard Bendemann, Captive Jews Weeping by the Waters of Babylon, 1832, copper engraving on paper, 29.2 x 38.8 cm (plate), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

Cat. 1b Georg Jacob Felsing, after Eduard Bendemann, Jeremiah on the Ruins of Jerusalem, 1838. Plate from Athanasius Graf Raczyński, Histoire de l'art moderne (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1836-1841). Etching and engraving, 23 x 37.6 cm (plate), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.