Index · Lot P-107
Klagemauer Der Juden
Wailing Wall of the Jews
Curator's note
Painted in the early 1890s during Perlberg's Holy Land travels, Klagemauer Der Juden depicts worshippers gathered at the Western Wall in Jerusalem under a clear Levantine light. The composition gives the wall full architectural weight while individuating the figures at prayer; the palette is dry, ochre and limestone, with cooler shadows in the recessed courses of stone. The work belongs to a small body of late nineteenth-century European treatments of the site executed by artists who travelled to Jerusalem rather than working from photographs, and it is one of the larger surviving canvases of the subject from the period.
Subject
The Western Wall — Hebrew Ha-Kotel ha-Ma'aravi, German Klagemauer — is the surviving western retaining wall of the Temple Mount platform built under Herod the Great in the late first century BCE. By the late nineteenth century, when Perlberg was painting, the narrow alley before the wall was the principal site of Jewish prayer in Jerusalem and a recurring subject for European travelling artists, photographers, and writers of the period.