Joseph Raphael (1869–1950) was an American Impressionist painter who spent most of his career as an expatriate but maintained close ties with the artistic community of

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

Biography

Born in the town of

Jackson, California Jackson (formerly, Botilleas, Botilleas Spring, Bottileas, Bottle Spring, and Botellas) is a city in and the county seat of Amador County, California. Its population was 4,651 at the 2010 census, up from 3,989 at the 2000 census. The city is acc ...

on June 2, 1869, Raphael studied with Arthur F. Mathews at the California School of Design. In 1902 he entered the

École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts The Beaux-Arts de Paris is a French ''grande école'' whose primary mission is to provide high-level arts education and training. This is classical and historical School of Fine Arts in France. The art school, which is part of the Paris Science ...

in Paris, but then moved to the

Académie Julian The Académie Julian () was a private art school for painting and sculpture founded in Paris, France, in 1867 by French painter and teacher Rodolphe Julian (1839–1907) that was active from 1868 through 1968. It remained famous for the number a ...

and studied under

Jean-Paul Laurens Jean-Paul Laurens (; 28 March 1838 – 23 March 1921) was a French painter and sculptor, and one of the last major exponents of the French Academic style. Biography Laurens was born in Fourquevaux and was a pupil of Léon Cogniet and Alexand ...

. He spent parts of the next several years in the Netherlands, producing paintings in a dark style derived from the Dutch Masters. In 1906 his large oil ''La Fete du Bourgmestre'' received an honorable mention at the Paris Salon; it was subsequently purchased by a group of friends in San Francisco and given to the San Francisco Art Association. In 1910 he had a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Institute of Art; beginning in 1913 he had annual exhibitions at Helgesen Galleries, San Francisco. He would ship artworks to his San Francisco friend and patron

Albert M. Bender Albert Maurice Bender (June 18, 1866 – March, 4 1941) was an German-American art collector who was one of the leading patrons of the arts in San Francisco in the 1920s and 1930s. He played a key role in the early career of Ansel Adams and w ...

, who bought some and encouraged friends to buy others. Raphael also participated in the annual group shows of the San Francisco Art Association. Before long he adopted a style borrowed from French Impressionism, eventually using broader, freer, more Post-Impressionist brushstrokes. By 1912 he was married and living in

Uccle Uccle () or Ukkel () is one of the 19 municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium. In common with all of Brussels' municipalities, it is legally bilingual (French–Dutch). It is generally considered an affluent area of the city a ...

, Belgium, a suburb of Brussels. He produced many paintings of the countryside near his home. As Raphael's international reputation grew, his family grew as well, to include four daughters and a son. His family frequently appeared in his figurative works. By the early 1930s Raphael and his family were living in a suburb of Leiden, Holland, and he painted often in nearby Bruges. In 1939, with World War II approaching, he returned to San Francisco, where he lived and maintained a studio on Sutter Street until his death on December 11, 1950. Known primarily as a painter, Raphael was also a skilled printmaker, creating numerous etchings and color woodcuts of European and San Francisco Bay Area scenes.

Museum collections

Fine Arts Museums of San FranciscoOakland Museum of CaliforniaSan Francisco Museum of Modern ArtMonterey Museum of ArtKrannert Art Museum, University of Illinois

Awards

*Honorable Mention, Paris Salon, 1906 *Silver Medal, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915 *Gold Medal, Panama-California Exposition, San Diego, 1915

References

Sources

*''Plein Air Painters of the North'', by Ruth Lily Westphal, 1996 *''Artists in California, 1786-1940'', by Edan Milton Hughes, 2002
Montgomery Gallery, San Francisco

Additional references

*''Joseph Raphael (1869-1950): An Artistic Journey'' (Spanierman Gallery, 2003)
''California Art Research''
(1937), vol. 5, pp. 32–42 {{DEFAULTSORT:Raphael, Joseph 19th-century American painters 19th-century American male artists American male painters 20th-century American painters 20th-century American male artists American Impressionist painters Painters from California 1869 births 1950 deaths Modern painters People from Uccle People from Jackson, California