Joseph Raphael was an American Impressionist painter who spent most of his career as an expatriate but maintained close ties with the artistic community of San Francisco, California.
Education
Born in the town of Jackson, California on June 2, 1869, Raphael studied with Arthur F. Mathews at the California School of Design. In 1902 he entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but then moved to the Académie Julian and studied under Jean-Paul Laurens.
Career
He spent parts of the next several years in the Netherlands, producing paintings in a dark style derived from the Dutch Masters. In 1910 he had a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Institute of Artist Beginning in 1913 he had annual exhibitions at Helgesen Galleries, San Francisco.
Raphael also participated in the annual group shows of the San Francisco Art Association.
Before long he adopted a style borrowed from French Impressionism, eventually using broader, freer, more Post-Impressionist brushstrokes. He produced many paintings of the countryside near his home.
His family frequently appeared in his figurative works. By the early 1930s Raphael and his family were living in a suburb of Leiden, Holland, and he painted often in nearby Bruges.
In 1939, with World World War II approaching, he returned to San Francisco, where he lived and maintained a studio on Sutter Street until his death on December 11, 1950.
Known primarily as a painter, Raphael was also a skilled printmaker, creating numerous etchings and color woodcuts of European and San Francisco Bay Area scenes. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Oakland Museum of California San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Mills College Art Museum Monterey Museum of Art Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois.