Friday Evening

Friday Evening depicts a traditionally attired woman seated beside a table prepared for the inauguration of the Sabbath. The painting recreates the Sabbath room that Isidor Kaufmann designed for the old Jewish Museum in Vienna in 1899. Modeled on the many homes he had visited in the small towns of western Hungary, Galicia, and Russian Poland, the display evoked the pious lifestyle of the artist's forebears--a way of life he believed had been lost in the lively Vienna. Kaufmann’s meticulous depictions of traditional Jewish rituals became popular with the increasingly assimilated and cosmopolitan Jewish bourgeoisie of fin de siecle Vienna.