Gentleman from Cracow

Raphael Soyer (1899-1987)
Lithograph, 1970
Cincinnati Skirball Museum; gift of Herbert and Nancy Bernhard

A prolific painter who is often described as an American scene painter and Social Realist, Raphael Soyer was also a reluctant Jewish artist. Raphael and his twin brother Moses were born in Borisoglebsk, South Russia, and emigrated to the Bronx in 1912 with their parents and four other siblings. Art historians, critics, and writers discussed many of Soyer’s paintings in the context of Jewish art, something he struggled with and basically denied throughout his career. Soyer was also a prolific watercolorist, lithographer, and book illustrator. A close friend of Nobel prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991), Soyer brought Singer’s characters to life with his illustrations for several of his stories, including The Gentleman from Cracow. The story involves a dashing outsider coming to the town of Frampol. He lends people money, encourages orgies, and before long the formerly pious villagers are having wild parties where every kind of vice prevails. The gentleman from Cracow turns out to be the devil, who vanishes as suddenly as he arrived, leaving the villagers embarrassed and ashamed. Only the pious rabbi was not taken in by the devil masquerading as a gentleman from the big city. Eventually the community is restored, having learned a lesson about the choices people must make between good and evil behavior, and the internal and external influences that drive those choices. Soyer chose to illustrate the moment when the gentleman first arrives, accompanying the following text: “a carriage drawn by eight spirited horses came to Frampol. The villagers expected its occupant to be a Christian gentleman, but it was a Jew, a young man between the ages of twenty and thirty, who alighted. Tall and pale, with a round black beard and fiery dark eyes, he wore a sable hat, silver buckled shoes, and a beaver trimmed caftan. Around his waist was a green silk sash.” When an interviewer described Raphael Soyer as “the Isaac Bashevis Singer of the painting world,” and commented that several critics had referred to him this way, Soyer replied, “Did they? Well, I don’t think too much of critics.”