Jacques Bunimowitsch
lithuanian-German Jewish artist
Jacques Bunimowitsch (1859-ca. 1915?; Yiddish: יעקב בונעמאוויטש; romanized: Yakov Bunimovitsh; Lithuanian: Jokūbas Bunimovičius) was a Lithuanian Jewish portrait artist who flourished in Frankfurt during the final two decades of the 19th century.
Early life
Bunimowitsch's surname was Bunimovitz, which was the Yiddish pronunciation of the name; his name was later Germanized to Bunimowitsch. He was likely the younger brother of the industrialist and financeer Israel Bunimovitz (b. 1848; otherwise, a cousin); the Bunimovitz family descended from a lineage in Valozhyn (an ancestor, Aharon Bunimovitz, was the Rosh ha-kahal of Valozhyn (Volozhin) and sofer to Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner, and Jacques was a member of the Vilnius branch of that family, which arrived with Binyamin Bunimovitz of Valozhyn before 1848. Other members of this family include Irving Bunim.
Artistic education
Bunimowitsch began his schooling at the Vilnius Academy of Arts during the period of 1873–74; two paintings completed during this time, Arkliai Arime and Kaimelio Gatve are examples of the Eastern European dynamic landscapes which were popular at the school at this time. His style of austere aristocratic portraiture was to come after, influenced by his subsequent teachers.
He then moved to Berlin to study under Anton von Werner at the Prussian Academy of Arts (he studied there from 1876 to 1879); Bunimowitsch apparently absorbed the genre of historical painting from von Werner, as well as the German historical painting that Von Werner practised; Bunimowitsch's portrait style can be seen as similar to von Werner's Portrait of the poet Joseph Victor von Scheffel (placement of the portrait, lighting, dressing in dark, facial staging, and so on). Likely, it was at this time when he painted a portrait of Frederick II, Grand Duke of Baden as a young teenager.
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