Rachel Weeping

Jacob Steinhardt was an Israeli painter and woodcut artist. Born in Żerków in 1887, Steinhardt travelled throughout Europe as a student, artist, and German soldier in the First World War. He then returned to Berlin but emigrated to Palestine in 1933 with his wife and daughter when he perceived danger from the Nazi-controlled police. Once settled, he taught at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.

Along with Ludwig Meidner, Steinhardt co-founded a German expressionist group, Die Pathetiker, which emphasized moody and dramatic gestures and expressions. He employed this approach in visualizing well-known biblical characters and scenes such as the meeting of Jacob and Esau, Jonah and the Fish, and Ruth and Naomi. Most evocative are his more poignant scenes of suffering and pain, which even include a personal take on one of Michelangelo’s Pietà sculptures.

Steinhardt, however, was not merely revisiting his religious upbringing through art. By means of his works, he bemoaned the lot of his fellow Jews in Europe and Jerusalem and expressed his frustrations at their plight.

Rachel weeping for her children is among the tragic biblical figures who carried his message. In this work, the focus is on the matriarch: her tilted head angled downward, cupped by her hands; her gaping mouth, raised eyebrows, closed eyes, and wrinkled forehead. There is no distinct background as found in other tragic scenes of Steinhardt. The mother’s pained look channels Steinhardt’s horrified reaction to the Holocaust.

Like Jeremiah during the Babylonian exile, Steinhardt faces the widespread peril endangering his people. The artist looks inward and visualizes his angst through an ancient biblical figure: Rachel weeping for her children. Her symbolic significance continues long after her first appearance in Genesis and Jeremiah.

References

Behrens, Stefan. 1987. Jacob Steinhardt. Das graphische Werk (Berlin: Berlin Kunstamtes Wedding)

Kolb, Leon ed. 1959. The Woodcuts of Jakob Steinhardt: Chronologically Arranged and Fully Reproduced (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America)

The influential image of ‘Rachel weeping ... for her children’ in Jeremiah 31:15 continues beyond ancient prophetic contexts to the early infancy narratives of Matthew’s Gospel, specifically in 2:16–18, the so-called Massacre of the Innocents.

The famed Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens produced two versions of the Massacre (in c.1610 and 1638). The features of both are in accordance with numerous other visual interpretations of the passage from the days of Raphael to the mid-seventeenth century, including classical architectural backgrounds, nude athletic men, and depictions of violence. The soldiers attack, children suffer, and the mothers defend them in vain.

The most salient feature of the later Rubens painting is the figure representing Rachel. She stands in a central but isolated position at the centre of the composition, lifting her tear-filled eyes to the skies, donning a black over-garment of ritual mourning, and interposing between earth and heaven a bloodstained swaddling cloth. One may follow her eyes to the angels ready to receive the children as martyrs.  

Interestingly, this mother reappears in another work by Rubens, entitled The Horrors of War, completed around the same time (c.1638). As explained in a letter to its commissioner Justus Sustermans, the painter intended it to decry the destruction wrought by Europe’s internal wars, and especially those of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). Thus, the same mourning figure who in this Massacre of the Innocents represents Rachel—in essentially the same pose, and with the same expression and attire—is the ‘unfortunate Europe’ (l’infelice Europa) in his contemporaneous allegorical work.

Rubens illustrates the enduring relatability of Rachel as victim of political violence and war. She continues as the representative of suffering mothers, calling to mind unseen victimhood, centralizing the marginalized, and speaking for the unheard, beyond the Babylonian captivity and Herod’s massacre, all the way to the seventeenth-century wars of another continent.

References

Belkin, Kristin L. 1998. Rubens (London: Phaidon)

Sauerländer, Willibald. 2014. The Catholic Rubens: Saints and Martyrs (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute)

The American revolutionary and polymath Charles Willson Peale is famous for his portraits of the leading figures of that era. At times, however, he also revealed his own personality: his love of natural history, museum propriety, and family.

Alongside his joys, Peale’s art also exhibited his sorrows. His fourth child, Margaret Bordley (born in 1772), inspired him to initiate his most ambitious portrait: The Peale Family. The project, however, took over three decades to complete because a tragedy interrupted its progress. His beloved young daughter died the same year from smallpox.

Soon afterwards, Charles commemorated his deceased daughter with a painting that includes his first wife, Rachel (1747–90). It is unlike Peale’s other woman–child portraits that show two individuals alive and well. Here, Rachel looks heavenward and weeps over the lifeless corpse of the infant Margaret on her deathbed. All that is below the mother is white, including the handkerchief in her hand, the pillows, the bedsheets, Margaret’s clothing, and her skin. Peale intended the portrait to be a public health warning to encourage inoculation from smallpox.

In this work we find a complex mingling of politics, disease, and art as well as a multidimensionality that allows the work to be read on several levels. Peale perpetuates Rachel weeping as a symbol of personal family bereavement far beyond the original context of Jeremiah 31.

References

Richardson, Edgar P., Brooke Hindle, and Lillian B. Miller. 1983. Charles Willson Peale and His World (New York: Harry N. Abrams)

Ward, David C. 2004. Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press)

Wehrman, Andrew M. 2022. The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press)