Édouard Moyse

Origins and early life

Édouard Moyse was born at Nancy in 1827, into a family of Jewish merchants; he was registered Édouard Abraham and took as a surname an inversion of his father's given name. He went to Paris as a young man and studied at the École des beaux-arts under Martin Drolling.

Work and career

He was the first artist in France to make the scenes of Jewish life his subject — the service in the synagogue, a circumcision, the blessing of children, the reading of the Law — at a time when French painting depicted Jews only as figures in a Christian story, and he thereby formed, with Édouard Brandon and Alphonse Lévy, the trio of nineteenth-century French painters of Judaism. His best-known canvas is Le Grand Sanhédrin of 1867, which records the assembly of Jewish notables convened by Napoleon in 1807 to settle the terms on which French Jews would be citizens; Une synagogue pendant la lecture de la Loi dates from 1861.

He also painted the persecutions, including scenes of the Inquisition, and used the orientalist and medieval costume conventions of his day, having travelled in Algeria in his youth. Recognition came late: a medal at the Paris Salon of 1882. He died in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris in 1908.