The Rabbi of Ternowa

Isidor Kaufmann, perhaps the most important Jewish genre painter of the 19th century, was born in 1853 in Arad, in what is now Romania. His artistic career began at the age of twenty-one when he made a copy of a head of Moses and displayed it in his family’s tobacco shop. The drawing drew the attention of Baron Acxèl, the Arad chief of police, who convinced Kaufmann’s mother of her son’s artistic talent and offered to support the artist financially at the Budapest State School of Drawing. Kaufmann later attended the Imperial Academy of Visual Arts in Vienna, where he studied with Josef Trenkwald, a historical and religious painter who was associated with the Nazarene movement.

Kaufmann’s depictions of Hasidic sitters and everyday scenes of Jewish life were highly sought-after by collectors during the artist's lifetime; they reflected a way of life that had a strong emotional resonance for their owners who had largely left these traditions behind. 'Kaufmann glorified in the unshakable piety and the warm intimacy of the religious traditions of the shtetl. For him, this was something 'exotic' that he did not belong to... Kaufmann's painting fulfilled the function of reminding their owners of the world of their parents, and in particular of their grandparents, of a home they had left as children... Kaufmann's paintings became 'windows' through which the assimilated bourgeoisie in the capitals of central Europe could peer into their past' (G. T. Natter, 'Scribblings and Sugared Water', in Bilder des Weiner Makers, Isidor Kaufmann 1853-1921, Vienna, 1995, p. 37). Later in his career Kaufmann would travel each summer to small villages throughout Eastern Europe and Russia to observe these traditions firsthand. The title of the present work likely refers to either the village of Ternova in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine near the Russian border or possibly the Polish village of Tarnów in the southeastern part of that country.