Therese Dreyfoos and Samuel Dreyfoos
Raphael Strauss (Bavaria, Germany 1830–1901 Cincinnati)
Oil on board, ca. 1862
Cincinnati Skirball Museum, gift of the W. Gunther Plaut Family
Therese Pappenheimer (1819–1908) came to the United States a few years after Samuel Dreyfoos (1815–1895) who emigrated in 1839–40 to avoid military service. Both were born in Aldingen, Württemberg, Germany, where they were sweethearts. The couple was married in 1843 in Philadelphia. They first settled in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and moved to Cincinnati with their three children in 1848. A fourth child was born in 1849. In 1850, Samuel joined K.K. Bene Yeshurun, today’s Wise Temple. Interestingly, he sent his three oldest daughters to a Catholic convent school in Reading, Ohio, where they took regular academic courses and French, sewing, and music.
Samuel was a partner in a hardware and cutlery store in Cincinnati with Therese’s brother Leopold, who had left Pennsylvania in 1847. Pappenheimer and Dreyfoos & Co. was founded in July 1850. Other family members were taken into the firm over the years, and in 1860 the business expanded, adding the sale of guns and pistols. The partnership of Pappenheimer and Dreyfoos was dissolved in 1864 for unknown reasons. Samuel started a new business in wholesale shoes and boots with his son-in-law Lee Cahn known as Dreyfoos and Cahn. The business only lasted a couple of years. In 1870 Samuel and Therese and their unmarried children moved to New York, where they lived for six years. The couple returned to Cincinnati in 1876 where they remained for the rest of their lives.
Therese Dreyfoos played an important role in founding the Widows and Orphans’ Asylum Association in Cincinnati in 1863. She became the association’s first president, an office she held from May 1863 through 1866–67. According to a book written by Elizabeth S. Plaut, The Guggenheim/Wormser Family: A Genealogical 300-Year Memoir, Therese had the first sewing machine and the first Steinway piano in Cincinnati.
About this portrait, Plaut writes the following:
“It was probably in 1862 that Therese and Samuel sat for
Raphael Strauss, who competently painted their portraits.
The detail of the jewelry and dress indicate that the couple
was in very comfortable financial circumstances. Samuel’s
portrait shows him as a man in the fullness of his strength,
black-haired and handsome, with a thoughtful, kind face
and winning manner. Therese sits straight, though relaxed,
in a chair, looking at the viewer with clear eyes in an attentive
manner, a gracious smile playing around her lips. The artist
captured them on canvas during the time when their lives
were full and their days pleasant.”
In a footnote, Plaut writes that Strauss was thirty-two at the time and painted the portraits of many Cincinnatians that year, Christians as well as Jews. She also comments that Isaac M. Wise, writing in his German newspaper, Die Deborah, recommended Strauss as an artist who should be patronized.
