Ezekiel, Moses Jacob

views updated

EZEKIEL, MOSES JACOB

EZEKIEL, MOSES JACOB (1844–1917), U.S. sculptor. Ezekiel was born in Richmond, Virginia, and his sculpture is imbued with elements of his Southern and Jewish roots. As a youth he modeled Cain Receiving the Curse of the Almighty and Moses Receiving the Law on Mount Sinai, both of which are now lost. He attended the Virginia Military Institute, and served in the Confederate army during the American Civil War. After the war, he studied art in Cincinnati and Berlin in the late 1860s.

His bas-relief Israel (1873), in which Israel is represented allegorically, won the Michael Beer Prix de Rome. A 1904 replica of the lost original resides at the Skirball Museum Cincinnati at Hebrew Union College. The first foreigner to receive the prize, Ezekiel embarked on two years of study in Rome beginning in 1874, where he then settled permanently. His studio in the Baths of Diocletian became a fashionable gathering place for artisans of all persuasions as well as royalty and politicians. The B'nai B'rith commissioned his enormous marble group Religious Liberty for the Centennial Exposition of 1876 (National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia). This was one of the earliest of several monuments he made for the United States as well as for European countries. In 1888 he designed the seal for the recently established Jewish Publication Society of America. Inscribed in the seal, which shows Jerusalem with a Shield of David, is the motto "Israel's mission is peace." He also executed portrait busts, including bronze heads of Robert E. Lee (c. 1886, Virginia Military Institute Museum, Lexington) and Rabbi Isaac Mayer *Wise (1899, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati). The king of Italy knighted Ezekiel in 1907. Although he lived most of his adult life in Rome, his will specified that his body return to America after his death. He was buried at the foot of a Confederate memorial he designed for Arlington National Cemetery (1914). His autobiography, Memoirs from the Baths of Diocletian, was published posthumously in 1975.