Vassily Polenov’s Encounters with Jewish Culture: Historicism and Ethnicity in Russian Painting

This article explores the artistic perception of Jews, Jewish material culture, history, and archaeology from an external perspective, focusing on the case of Vassily Polenov, a leading Russian painter of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A trip to the Land of Israel in 1881–1882 expanded Polenov’s vision of Jews and Jewish material culture. He made the journey to prepare for painting Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery , but his impressions from the trip were eventually embodied in other works of the 1880s, from paintings to sketches for theatrical performance scenery. Polenov’s study of Jewish costume was expressed in works on Gospel themes, raising the question of the artist’s syncretic perception of the epochs of the New Testament and contemporary Jewish communal life in the Diaspora. Synagogue ruins appear in sketches, and eventually Polenov produced a synagogue space for the theatrical stage, as a set design for the play Uriel Acosta . Finally, the artist introduced Hebrew inscriptions as ethnographic markers of significance or prophecy. A sincere interest in Jewish culture and tradition combined with Polenov’s perception of the Jewish world from a Christian perspective, led to unexpected results.