The Jewish Museum in NYC has a new acquisition: Portrait of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, 1842, by 19th
century German artist Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, has been added to the
“Modernity” section of Culture and Continuity. The subject of this
portrait was the sister of famous composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy,
a talented composer and musician in her own right. Fanny Hensel was
the wife of a fellow painter, Wilhelm Hensel, whom Oppenheim met in Rome
with the Nazarenes. Oppenheim, widely recognized as a portraitist, is
known as the first Jewish artist to have benefited from the
Emancipation, when new civil rights permitted Jews entry into academies
of art for the first time in Europe. Extensively patronized by the
Frankfurt branch of the Rothschild family, Oppenheim characterized
himself (immodestly) as “a painter to the Rothschilds and the Rothschild
of painters.”
http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/CultureAndContinuity
The Jewish Museum
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New York NY 10128