Moses Jacob Ezekiel

Ezekiel was born in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Jacob Ezekiel (1812–1899), an Ashkenazic Jew. His mother, Catherine de Castro Ezekiel, was Sephardic.[6][7] His grandparents had emigrated from Holland in the early 1800s, settling first in Philadelphia and later in Richmond.[8]^: 3 His father was a cotton merchant[7] and bookbinder, "a good writer and a well-read man, who possessed the complete works of Maimonides".[9]^: 76 While in the book-binding business in Baltimore (1833–34), Jacob founded the Hebrew Benevolent Society of Baltimore.[10] Jacob moved to Richmond in 1834, entering the dry-goods business with first one, then another brother-in-law.[11]^{: 16 n. 10} He was secretary of the synagogue Kahal Kadosh Beth Shalome "and spokesman of the Jews of Richmond".[11]^{: 16 n. 10} In Cincinnati, Jacob served as Secretary of the Board of Hebrew Union College. He was a charter member of B'nai B'rith.[12]

The seventh child,[8]^: 3[nb 1] Moses had three brothers and eight sisters,[13][nb 2] at least one of which was stillborn.[9]^: 88 He was brought up as an observant Jew by his grandparents, to whom his parents sent him to live due to financial difficulties.[4][8]^: 3[nb 3] They owned a dry-goods store that sold suits and women's dresses for slaves about to be sold. They also owned a few slaves.[3][5] Moses "was sent to a 'pay' school", that of "old Mr. Burton Davis",[9]^: 91 and he attended dancing school.[9]^{: 85, 101}

Ezekiel's most famous work, the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

When Fort Sumter was fired upon and Virginia seceded, Ezekiel enrolled in the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia,[7] the first Jewish cadet (student) to do so.[14] He was Corporal of the Guard that accompanied the coffin of Stonewall Jackson (a Virginia Military Institute instructor) at his burial in Lexington in 1863.[8]^: 43[11] He and other cadets from VMI marched 80 miles north and fought at the 1864 Battle of New Market. He was wounded in a fight with Union army troops under Franz Sigel. After his recovery, he served with the cadets in Richmond to train new recruits for the army. Shortly before the end of the war, he served in the trenches defending the city.[15]

Following the Civil War, Ezekiel returned to VMI to finish his education, graduating in 1866. He studied anatomy at the Medical College of Virginia in 1866–68, thinking of becoming a doctor.[9]^{: 127–128}[8]^: 17 In 1867–68 he was superintendent of the Richmond Hebrew Sunday School.[16]

He moved in with his parents in Cincinnati in 1868; his parents had moved there, where their oldest daughter Hannah lived, after losing their business in Richmond to fire.[9]^: 128[8]^: 17 While not there long, in his memoirs he calls Cincinnati his home.[17]

In Cincinnati he began the study of sculpture[3] at the Art School of J. Insco Williams and in the studio of Thomas Dow Jones.[9]^: 130[15] Moving to Berlin in 1869, he studied at the Prussian Academy of Art under Professor Albert Wolf.

Needing money, in 1873, during the Franco-Prussian War, he was a war correspondent for the New York Herald,[18]^: 4 and he was arrested and imprisoned "for a time" as a spy for France.[6] He was admitted into the Society of Artists, Berlin, and at age 29 was the first foreigner to win the Michael Beer Prix de Rome, for a bas relief entitled Israel. The prize of $1,000 provided for two years of study in Rome,[19]^: 229 but he traveled to Rome by way of the United States, where he had not been for five years,[9]^: 166 as he had "unexpectedly" received a commission from B'nai B'rith for a monument to Religious Liberty.[9]^: 164[8]^: 41

Arriving in Rome in 1874, he fell in love with the Eternal City, which he soon made his home. It was there that he completed the sculptures and paintings for which he is famous.

"Ezekiel found both personal and artistic freedom in Rome. He dressed like a dandy and spent extravagantly on entertaining friends, clients, and potential clients."[7] His studio in Rome was in the former Baths of Diocletian, where every Friday afternoon he had open house.[19]^: 233 It was called "one of the Show Places of the Eternal City, magnificent in proportions and stored with fine art works."[20] and many visitors left descriptions of it.[18]^: 24

Perhaps the most characteristic of his creations was the celebrated studio.… Here in the vaulted thermae built in the days of Diocletian he had gathered together treasures from many lands and ages. Ancient marbles and alabasters, bronzes, costly metals and relics beautified with precious stones, medieval parchments and church ornaments, oriental ivories, velvets and silks hung on all sides, in alluring contrast to the latter-day furniture and the twentieth century grand piano, proclaiming the broad sympathies and the catholic tastes of this citizen of the world.[21]^: 230

— American Jewish Yearbook, 1917

Under a leafy arbor, a paved stairway leads up to a vineclad terrace, from which you have an extensive view of the surroundings. Doves have built their nests in the masonry and flit fearlessly to and fro about you. Works of art, vases, fragments of old armor, antique heads and ornaments gleam through the dark foliage. Artists' hands have appropriately ornamented the interior of the high hall; pillars, rich with carving of vines, uphold the arches; lamps and statuettes occupy the mantels; tapestries and paintings adorn the walls. Hours might be spent in examining the works of art, great and small, in this wondrous room. Nothing is commonplace: every seat, every cloth, every cup and dish, every furnishing, bears its individual stamp.[22]

— Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 15, 1889

"His picturesque studio in the Baths of Diocletian was the rendezvous of all important American visitors and the most prominent representatives of art."[6] Among the visitors to his studio were:

• Gabriele d'Annunzio[9]^: 201
• Queen of Italy Margherita of Savoy[9]^: 414
• General and future President Ulysses Grant[9]^{: 198–199}
• Franz Liszt[9]^: 254
• U.S. ambassador to Italy John Stallo[9]^: 259
• Cardenal Gustav Adolf Hohenlohe[9]
• writer Annie Besant[9]^: 275
• railroad magnate Melville Ingalls[9]^: 275
• engineer Benjamin Hotchkiss, and
• Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany[9]^: 313

A lecture in his studio was attended by 150 people.[9]^: 275 He also hosted musicales there,[23]^: 42 where could be heard "the finest music by the greatest talent".[9]^: 233

Ezekiel occupied this studio from 1879 to 1910.[23]^: 42 After 30 years, the government "demand[ed] the possession of this part of the ruins as an adjunct to the National Roman Museum. On leaving there he was given by the municipal authorities the Tower of Belisarius on the Pincian Hill overlooking the Borghese Gardens, which furnished him a home for the rest of his years, while he took a studio and work rooms in the Via Fausta and just off the Piazza del Popolo."[19]^{: 226–234}

Fedor Encke. Drawing by Moses Jacob Ezekiel.

Although Ezekiel never married, he had a daughter, Alice Johnson (1859-1926). According to a census document of July 14, 1860, Alice Johnson was 10 months old, suggesting she was born in September 1859. She would therefore have been conceived at the beginning of 1859[24] when Moses was 14. Her mother was Isabella, a "beautiful mulatto housemaid" of his father.[24]^: 148 After graduating from Howard University, Alice became a schoolteacher and married Daniel Hale Williams in 1898, who was also mixed race. He became a prominent, pioneering heart surgeon. They lived in Chicago for much of his career.[25][26][27]

Isabella visited Moses in Rome with Alice, but returned shortly thereafter. Moses never refers to Alice in his Memoirs, and there is no record of any other contact between them.

In 1872, in Berlin, he met Fedor Encke (1851–1926), the "illegitimate grandson of King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia."[4] Encke was a portrait painter later commissioned to do portraits of Theodore Roosevelt and John Pierpont Morgan, among others; he also painted Ezekiel.[8]^: i The pair "traveled together often and socialized with Europe's elites, including Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, French actress Sarah Bernhardt and Queen Margherita of Italy."[4] Encke accompanied Ezekiel on a visit to the United States.[8]^: 49 According to writer Michael Feldberg, Ezekial and Encke had "a forty-five year homosexual relationship…that neither acknowledged publicly."[7] About this relationship, Ezekial was always circumspect in his letters and memoirs, referring to Encke only as his "traveling companion" and "my dear friend."[9]^: 209[28]

Biographer Peter Adam Nash, in The Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel, describes Ezekiel as homosexual, but Nash does not produce any direct evidence for this; Nash's assumption is made from his research of Ezekiel's papers and of their social and historical context.[29]

In his lifetime, Ezekiel received numerous honors: he was decorated by King Umberto I of Italy, the "Crosses for Merit and Art" from the German Emperor, another from Prince Frederick Johann of Saxe-Meiningen, and the awards of "Chevalier" (Cavaliere) and "Officer of the Crown of Italy" (1910) from King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy. Ezekiel received the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Palermo, Italy; the silver medal at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri; and the Raphael Medal from the Art Society of Urbino, Italy.

The honorific "Sir" by which Ezekiel is often referred is technically incorrect, as Ezekiel was never knighted by the monarch of the United Kingdom. More properly, his title was "Cavaliere" Moses Ezekiel, because of his Italian knighthood, or Moses "Ritter von" Ezekiel, because of his German honors. Ezekiel translated his Italian title into the English "Sir" on his visiting cards, resulting in the honorific by which he became known in English-speaking countries.[30]

In 1904, he was presented the New Market Cross of Honor at VMI by the Government of Virginia as one of the 294 cadets who fought at the Battle of New Market.

Ezekiel's grave on the north side of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Ezekiel died in his studio in Rome, Italy during the First World War,[31] and was temporarily entombed there. In 1921, he was reinterred at the foot of his Confederate Memorial in Section 16 of Arlington National Cemetery. The inscription on his grave reads "Moses J. Ezekiel Sergeant of Company C Battalion of Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute."

Religious Liberty (1876) in Philadelphia.

In the early 1880s, Ezekiel created eleven larger-than-life sized statues of famous artists. These were installed in niches on the façade of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's original building (later the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery). In the early 1960s, they were removed to the Norfolk Botanical Garden in Norfolk, Virginia.

Among his other works was a memorial at VMI, Virginia Mourning Her Dead (1903), for which he declined payment.[7] It was installed in the small cemetery where six of the 10 VMI cadets killed at the Battle of New Market are buried. He also created a Confederate memorial which he called New South (1914); it was installed at Arlington National Cemetery. Many of his works were of famous leaders.

One word frequently used by Ezekiel as well as others to describe his statues[9]^{: 139, 164, 409, etc.} is "colossal": his "genius often asserts itself in colossal figures and emblematic monuments".[34] His never-built statue of Johns Hopkins, founder of Johns Hopkins University, was to have been over 15 feet (4.6 m) high, with a "colossal" bust of Hopkins, in bronze, 21⁄2 times life size.[35] His most important statues are huge, and in one case he claimed that it was the largest statue ever made.

Lists of Ezekiel's works are found in the introduction to his Memoirs,[9]^: 70–73 in an obituary in Art and Archaeology,[19] and in the New York Times.[6]

Ezekiel was a postwar friend of Robert E. Lee, who recommended he become "an artist",[3][4][9]^: 124 and Ezekiel once remarked "the one work I would love to do above anything else in the world"[9]^: 171 was a public sculpture of Robert E. Lee. But, despite entering at least four contests to do so, this ambition was not realized.[3]

The American Jewish Archives, in Cincinnati, has a "Moses Jacob Ezekiel Collection." It "includes original and photocopies of Ezekiel's correspondence and writings, photographs of many of his works, biographies, genealogies, memorial tributes, correspondence of Ezekiel's biographers, articles and newsclippings concerning Ezekiel and miscellaneous items." http://collections.americanjewisharchives.org/ms/ms0044/ms0044.html

Virginia Military Institute has two boxes of Ezekiel papers. "Included is correspondence to Virginia Military Institute Superintendent Edward West Nichols and others, 1867 – 1917, some relating to the design of the Battle of New Market memorial sculpture Virginia Mourning Her Dead; pen and ink sketches by Ezekiel (ca. 67 items); the typed manuscript of Ezekiel's autobiography, Memoirs from the Baths of Diocletian, and miscellaneous printed material."[15] Ezekiel's Memoirs, a fundamental source, were unknown until they were rediscovered in the Hebrew Union Archives by the two rabbis, who after much editorial work, prepared them for publication in 1975. They were called "gossipy" but "readable" in a review.[1]

Some additional material is in the archives of Congregation Beth Ahabah, of Richmond,[11] which contains the archive of Jacob Ezekiel's synagogue, Kahal Kadosh Beth Shalome, the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, on whose board of directors Jacob was secretary, and the organizations such as B'nai Brith and United Daughters of the Confederacy that commissioned sculptures.

• 
  Bas relief of Sarah Workum, private collection.
• 
  Virginia Mourning Her Dead (1903), Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA.
• 
  Anthony J. Drexel (1904), Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA.
• 
  Bust of Anthony J. Drexel (1905), Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA.
• 
  Homer (1907), University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
• 
  The Lookout (1910), Confederate Cemetery, Johnson's Island, OH.
• 
  Jefferson Monument (1910), University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
• 
  Bust of Andrew Gregg Curtin (1912), Smith Memorial Arch, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• 
  Confederate Memorial (Arlington National Cemetery) (1914), Arlington, VA.
• 
  Statue of Edgar Allan Poe (1917), University of Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland.

'

Ezekiel was portrayed by Josh Zuckerman in the 2014 film Field of Lost Shoes, which depicted the Battle of New Market.

Ezekiel is the sculptor Askol in Carel Vosmaer's novel The Amazon, in which Ezekiel's studio is described in detail,[9]^: 15[54] It is also described in Mary Agnes Tincker's The Jewel in the Lotus;[9]^: 66[55] "the opening pages depict the studio of Salathiel, the sculptor, the original of which character in the novel was Moses Ezekiel."[18]^: 27

A poem about his Israel was written by Pietschmann, of Berlin.[18]^: 10–11

Gabriele d'Annunzio wrote a poem, "To Mole Ezekiel," in 1887.[9]^: 459

A description of his studio by Lilian V. de Bosis was published in the May 1891 issue of 'kTye Esquiline.[18]^: 25–26

• Herbert Barbee
• Edmonia Lewis, the other American sculptor in Rome

• Cohen, Stan and Keith Gibson. Moses Ezekiel: Civil War Soldier, Renowned Sculptor, Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, Inc., 2007. ISBN 1-57510-131-9
• "Obituary. Sir Moses Ezekiel". American Art News. March 31, 1917. p. 4.
• Ezekiel, Moses Jacob (1975). Gutmann, Joseph; Chyet, Stanley F. (eds.). Memoirs from the Baths of Diocletian : or Memoirs of a Southern veteran. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8143-1525-5. First publication.
• Leepson, Marc. "Sculpting the Cause", Civil War Times Illustrated, Vol. 46, Issue 9, November–December 2007.
• Nash, Peter Adam (2014). The Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor, Arcadian Knight. Madison–Teaneck, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 978-1611476712.
• Preston, Margaret J. (June 1883). "The American Sculptor Ezekiel". Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science: 620–623.
• "Ezekiel, Sculptor, Arrives: Here to Attend Unveiling of His Statue of Jefferson in Charlottesville". New York Times. May 25, 1910. p. 9.
• Wrenshall, Katharine H. (November 1909). "An American Sculptor In Rome: The Work of Sir Moses Ezekiel". The World's Work: A History of Our Time. XIX: 12255–12263. Retrieved 2009-07-10.

• NorfolkTV (October 10, 2013), Moses Ezekiel Statues from the 1800s, City of Norfolk

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Moses Jacob Ezekiel.

• Biography of Moses Jacob Ezekiel, at website of Arlington National Cemetery
• Photographs of Confederate Soldiers' Memorial, at website of Arlington National Cemetery
• Jewish Civil War History