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WILLIAM RAPHAEL, R.C.A. (1833-1914)
by Sharon Goelman, M.F.A.
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William Raphael was the first Jewish professional artist to establish himself in Canada. He was a sensitive and modest individual with three loves: his family, including his dogs, nature and art. Raphael was best known for his exemplary portraits and lively Canadian genre scenes. Like his older Canadian contemporaries, Paul Kane (1801-1871) and Cornelius Krieghoff (1815-1872), Raphael gained recognition for capturing the habitant and Indian way of life in his new land. His exhibited works were favourably reviewed, and he was credited as being "one of the cleverest artists"; an old favourite to Montreal;" and "perhaps one of the most thoroughly educated historical painters in Canada." Although less known for his quiet landscapes, religious paintings, still lifes and anatomical drawings for medical lectures and publications, or for his restoration of church canvases, he was also regularly acknowledged in the newspapers for his contributions to the field of art education, both in public institutions and in his own private school.
Raphael was a product of his background and training, for which he was highly respected early in his career and well into his middle years. However, tragically, at the climax of his artistic output there was a shift in aesthetic tastes that affected his career and his previous momentum. He suffered greatly as a result.
FORMATIVE YEARS IN BERLIN
Raphael was born in 1833 in the tiny town of Nakel in Prussia, sixty kilometers from Berlin, where his parents, the Rafalskys, Orthodox Jews of Polish decent, had settled.
In larger cities such as Berlin, where culture abounded, a gradual emancipation of Jews and a growing movement of Reform Judaism evolved during the 1840s and 1850s. Raphael’s ambition to become an artist corresponded to this new liberalization of German Jewish life.
In 1850, when he was seventeen, Raphael arrived in Berlin to study. He wrote: "Different is the world with each new step away from my parents’ home . . . how the sun is cold . . . everything seems so foreign to me." His personal writings from that time reveal a sensitive young man with strong emotions, intensely interested in music, literature and classical history. He first noted his dues to the Royal Academy of Berlin in 1851, when he wrote in his diary, "I had lessons with professor Wolff on November 4, 1851." But on October 8, 1955, he states, "I left the Atelier in order to go to the painting class of the Academy", which indicates that at this point he was possibly studying with a private teacher or professor at an atelier, yet also with others at the Academy. His sketchbooks contain drawings from plaster casts in attempts to grasp form, light and shadow; copies of works by proven masters; sketches from everyday life, as well as anatomical studies. Such exercises reflect the rigid academic training for which the Royal Academy of Berlin was known, to which Raphael would unflinchingly adhere throughout his career and use as an approach when he, in turn, taught art.
Raphael was born only six years before Louis Daguerre (1789-1851) publicized his photographic process, yet by 1850-1851, when Raphael was studying in Berlin, this invention had probably already influenced the style and philosophy of the teachers who taught him. His teacher "Wolff was likely the portraitist Johann Eduard Wolff at the Royal Academy of Berlin. We cannot trace with certainty the style of Wolff during the period when the lives of student and teacher overlapped. However, the oeuvre of the portraitist, genre and painter of historical scenes, Karl Begas (whom Raphael would refer to as his professor repeatedly once in Canada) left a lasting impression on Raphael’s aesthetic values and approach to interpreting nature.
Begas veered away from earlier overtones of the Nazarene branch of Romanticism and turned towards Realism, becoming more objective in his interpretations. This objectivity was probably tempered by his study of current experiments with photography and the new freedoms inherent in the industrial age. Both Raphael’s teachers, Begas and Wolff, earned recognition as minor masters at the forefront of the Realist Biedermeier or Early Naturalist movement in Germany, which was often opposed to the philosophical or spiritual side of the Biedermeier Romantics or the Northern German Romantics.
A FRESH START IN THE NEW WORLD
After the deaths of his parents, Raphael decided to join the great wave of emigration that started mid-century in Germany during what was a difficult economic period of unemployment, poverty and displacement, especially for artisans. His decision to come to Canada was bolstered by a support system of friends and family, including a brother in Montreal. On December 22, 1856, Raphael disembarked from the steamship "Bourussia" in New York City, where he stayed for four months before leaving for Montreal. He arrived in Montreal, his new home, on April 23, 1857.
Raphael loved the countryside and the serenity of nature and enjoyed painting landscapes; however, he had to make a living in the city, where he earned his income mainly through commissioned portraits. During his first year in Montreal he found sitters for portraits, as he had earlier in New York. In between slack periods of work in Montreal, he traveled to Quebec City, Trois-Rivières, and later to London and Windsor to seek further commissions and experience the many characteristics of the Canadian landscape.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHOTOGRAPHY AND PORTRAITURE
We learn from ledger payments listed in Raphael’s diary that by 1859 he had a regular income from Notman’s photographic studio. Indeed, he later referred to that experience: "When I arrived to this country, a stranger to the people and language, Mr. Notman proposed to me an engagement for a year, to paint for him the portraits taken by photography, and I gladly accepted." Raphael was probably still working at Notman’s in 1860, but may have been displaced later that year, when Notman hired John Fraser to manage a number of full-time artists. Raphael also worked with A.B. Taber, another photographic firm. A canvas in the National Gallery of Canada of the McFarlane Children, signed jointly by James Inglis, photographer, and W. Raphael, dated 1871, suggests further collaborative work in photography and portraits. Although lucrative, this practice may have narrowed his freedom of approach towards painting portraits in years to come. The fact that he shared quarters with A.G. Walford, photographer, in 1881 indicated that he continued to depend on portraiture for his livelihood.
Certainly during his earliest years in Canada East, as Quebec was known until 1867, Raphael painted many portrait commissions from a cross-section of the Montreal community. Among the many portrait references found in his sketchbooks from the years 1857 to 1859 was one of a Mr. Hermann Danziger, in whose home Raphael resided as a boarder in 1861 and whose fifteen-year-old daughter, Ernestina Danziger, Raphael would marry the next year.
Between 1863 and 1886 the Raphaels produced nine surviving children, likenesses of whom would be incorporated into their father’s sketchbooks and paintings. One son, Samuel, followed in his father’s footsteps; he became an artist in New York City.
During the 1860s and early 1870s, Raphael painted mostly genre scenes, portraits and a limited number of landscapes, acquiring favourable mentions in the press regularly. However, throughout the depression years of 1873 to 1878, it was his affiliation with photographers and his ability to capture sitters’ likenesses freehand or from photographs that provided Raphael with many opportunities not available to his contemporaries. It was during these years that his reputation as a portraitist grew amongst the elite French-Canadian clientele, including families such as Desjardins, Panneton, Paré, Souligny de Vinet and Provost.
Research has brought to light portraits by Raphael of prominent figures who contributed greatly to Canadian society. In the medical and religious communities, they include Dr. Louis Edouard Desjardins, the first French-Canadian ophthalmologist in Montreal; Dr. Aaron Hart David, the first Jewish physician in Canada and a descendent of the first Jewish family to live in the Province of Quebec; Dr. Francis W. Campbell, Hart David’s successor as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Bishop’s University; Reverend Dr. Abraham DeSola, Professor of Oriental Languages at McGill University and Reverend of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue; and Cannon Joseph Octave Paré, Secretary to Bishop Bourget.
Various examples of Raphael’s portraits of politicians, businessmen, military figures and fur traders who helped build the region now known as Quebec are found in the McCord Museum and the Château de Ramezay. Raphael’s portraits of Governors General were reputed to have hung in the original Parliament Buildings. An oversized poster-type photograph of a full-length painting of Gladstone and Laurier at Hawarden Castle, signed by Raphael and dated "July 10th, 1897", shows the two Prime Ministers arm in arm. To date, the original canvas has not been found.
Raphael painted formal bust portraits of immediate family members and a Self-Portrait as keepsakes for his home and those of his children. Several of these detailed works were inspired by photographs. They are indicative of the delicate brushstroke and subtle, non-dramatic manner in which Raphael treated his subjects and surfaces. In contrast to the formal portraits are Raphael’s more loosely painted full-length studies of his wife and children. Examples of these include Lady in Pink Knitting Outdoors, Boy with a Top, 1879, Fletcher’s Field, Montreal, 1880, and Study of Boy, Ducks and Cats, 1884. When using his own children as models, Raphael exhibited a livelier approach. The figures’ suggested movement and frolicking mood differs from the concerned-looking Irish Immigrant, 1870 in tattered clothes and the serious posthumous tribute Portrait of a Boy, 1875, dresses in a tartan kilt.
GENRE SUBJECTS AND THE GERMAN BIEDERMEIER INFLUENCE
In his genre scenes, Raphael strove to document the more romantic aspects of Canadian life, as seen through the eyes of an immigrant anxious to record details of people’s appearances and activities. He incorporated into the compositions a feeling of harmony, accomplished through formal, ordered realism. He often based his scenes on carefully prepared sketches executed on location, yet he lent to them a levity and casual air through relaxed, sometimes witty participants. This is demonstrated in his most illustrious genre painting, Behind Bonsecours Market, Montreal, 1866, formerly titled Immigrants at Montreal, where, through structured light, the artist captures detailed aspects of the environment and society at the Montreal harbour amid the freshness of spring.
Raphael placed himself right in the centre of the sunny harbour scene located in back of Bonsecours Market. He clutches his hand-luggage in his right hand and his artist’s portfolio and precious keepsake, his family’s silver candelabra, in his left. Many preliminary sketches have been found that relate to this complex painting. The luminous treatment of the boats, the distant water and the haze on the right rival superb Luminist examples. The winter counterpart of this painting, titled Bonsecours, painted in 180, documents the activity in front of the marketplace along St. Paul Street and reveals a lively sense of anecdote and humour.
Raphael painted Habitants Attacked by Wolves in 1870. He must have relished the concept. A similar undated oil sketch, Habitants Chased by Wolves, another smaller oil, Pursued by the Wolf Pack, 1869, and a chromolithograph identical in appearance and size to the painting completed in 1869, are all based on the same romantic theme – three adults in a one-horse drawn sleigh being chased by ferocious wolves in a threatening winter landscape. One senses the urgency of the habitants trying to escape these wild animals at their heels as they try to race ahead of an oncoming storm. The romantic notion of the chase was particularly appealing to the German artist’s love of adventure. In several paintings, he depicted three jovial young boys rambunctiously racing through the snow in similar threatening winter compositions, with a dog-drawn log sleigh, only this time sans wolf pack behind. One such example is Winter Fun, 1878. In another version, Avant la tempête, 1869, a mother and child lag behind the group in deep snow.
After examining Begas’ work and Canadian scenes by Raphael, it becomes apparent that Raphael’s oeuvre and subject matter reflects his teacher’s example and link to the Realist Biedermeiers. Raphael was fascinated by the pomp and ceremony of official events, groups of people in contemporary costumes, and well-known monuments or buildings. This is exemplified in his painting St-Jean-Baptiste Parade Outside the Montreal Bank, 1872. Here the artist fully documents the colourful annual event of Quebec’s Catholic community and the detailed classical features of the bank.
HABITANTS AND INDIANS – CLOSE-UPS OF INDIVIDUALS
Raphael never lost his interest in capturing the habitant in his toque, long jacket and hand-woven belt, the ceinture flechée, smoking his pipe, whittling a piece of wood, lacing a snowshoe, grinding corn, hunting in the woods or cutting tobacco. Various versions show the habitant’s wife working in the kitchen at her spinning wheel, usually in front of a wood stove, with an oval rug woven from rags on the floor below. Seated Habitant Smoking His Pipe, painted in watercolour in 1872, and Habitant Mending a Snowshoe, a watercolour executed in 1873, were made into 1,000 photo-lithographs and comprised part of the National Gallery of Canada’s set "The First Portfolio of Canadian Watercolours", lithographed by Cambridge Press of Montreal in 1950.
In addition to habitant scenes, Raphael searched for authenticity of social strata, customs and clothing of the Canadian Indians. Princess Rose Taieronhoete depicts the Kanawake Reserve Chief’s wife in ornate dress, feathered headpiece and jewellery while Two Indian Women, 1873, portrays a young girl seated next to an older woman. Large shawls cover their heads and shoulders as they wait to sell wares from their hand-woven baskets.
LANDSCAPES
Raphael’s landscapes elicit the harmonious quietude of Canadian nature. The artist traveled to a variety of regions as early as 1858 in order to experience vistas in various parts of Quebec and Ontario. Throughout his remaining years in Canada he continued to record scenes at varying locales, including Lachine, the Laurentians, Sherbrooke, St-Grégoire, the Eastern Townships and New Brunswick. Outside of Canada, he sketched in the Adirondacks, New York, Lake Champlain, Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia, and even Scotland, where he was lured by the beauty of Scottish castles and mountainous regions as early as 1865.
In all, Raphael sought peaceful environments where he could connect with the mood of forests, woods, waterfalls, mountains, cliffs, swamps, rivers and lakes. He relished evidence of humankind’s existence in nature, and recorded their site-specific creations…churches, castles, old mansions, bridges, steamships, boats and canoes. Stark daylight is magnificently rendered in scenes such as With the Current, 1892, where a leisurely couple relaxes in a boat amid nature’s greenery, and in The Lily Pond, Laurentians, 1911, where the lily pads, water and surrounding foliage, all drenched in sunlight, seem palpable. The silence of a beautiful summer evening is captured in both Church at Tadoussac, Sunset, 1879, and Près de Sherbrooke, 1898. The varied brushstroke, colour, texture and treatment of light are all convincingly executed in these truly Canadian environments.
Certain paintings of Quebec scenery by Raphael provide invaluable documentation. Pointe-au-Pic, Murray Bay encampment scenes, where Raphael sketched the specific style of the Montaignais Indians; birch bark wigwams and Maliseet canoes before they became extinct, delight the historian. Two such canvases, one in the collection of the McCord Museum, Three Montaignais Wigwams on the Shore Beneath the Cliffs at Pointe-au-Pic, Murray Bay, and a second, The Last of the Wigwams, are referred to in the foreground of the dramatic nocturnal moonlit scene that won Raphael his acceptance into the Royal Canadian Academy in 1880. Titled Indian Encampment on the Lower St. Lawrence, it was painted in 1879. Unequaled in its intensity of mood, it is much larger, darker and more mysterious than the smaller studies. This diploma piece and the many related Murray Bay pencil sketches dating to the late 1870s are found in the National Gallery of Canada.
PRINTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
Some of Raphael’s original works were made into various types of lithographs to make the imagery of Canadian life available to the broader public. Others were made into illustrations for the readers of travel books. Raphael’s anecdotal oil, The Early Bird Catches the Worm, 1868, a work demonstrating poetic justice and humour, was made into a chromolithograph (coloured lithograph), published by Roberts and Reinhold in 1869. It was touted to be the "first attempt in Canada of the chromo process". His dramatic subject Habitants Attacked by Wolves was also made into a chromolithograph, this time by Burland L’Africain and Company for distribution to the Art Association of Montreal’s subscription members in 1870. In 1881, the same institution made photoprints from Raphael’s Head of an Iroquois Chief, Caughnawaga and Scene at Murray Bay and presented them to their members as a bonus. That same year, Lucius O’Brien invited Raphael to submit four illustrations of individual habitants for the two-volume travel book Picturesque Canada, to be published in 1882. Correspondence from O’Brien’s arch-rival John Fraser indicates that Fraser also asked Raphael for figure studies for a book that he intended to produce, but which never materialized.
STILL LIFES AND FLORAL STUDIES
Raphael painted still lifes of hanging fowl and fish and symbolic floral studies, which were fashionable in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. He excelled at flowers. The Art Gallery of Vancouver has in its collection a close-up view of a densely grown patch of Hollyhocks, 1908, inspired by the artist’s personal garden. A black cat, hardly noticeable from behind, peers at the viewer through the tall, sun-lit red, white, pink, yellow and purple flowers. This painting is executed in a lighter palette with boldly-applied impasto paint and a livelier brushstroke than the more traditionally painted interior still life, Peonies in a Vase, where the pink flowers fill up the foreground of the composition, and fallen petals and leaves remind the viewer of the effects of time passing.
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