William Raphael

William Raphael (August 22, 1833 – March 15, 1914), born Israel Rafalsky , was a Prussian-born Canadian painter of portraits, still lifes, genre scenes and landscapes, best known for his lively scenes of the Montreal harbour and market life. Raphael played a foundational role in the development of professional art practice in Canada, helping to shape the country's nineteenth-century artistic landscape through his work as a painter, teacher, and institutional founder. He was the first Jewish professional artist to establish himself in Canada, a charter member of Montreal's Society of Canadian Artists in 1868, a member of the Ontario Society of Artists in 1879 and a charter member of the Canadian Academy of Arts in 1880.

Biography Born in Nakel, West Prussia, of Orthodox Jewish background, Raphael left his family home in 1851, on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, to pursue formal artistic training in Berlin. He had a rigid academic training at the Berlin School of Fine Art with and Karl Begas. Alongside formal instruction, Raphael cultivated a lifelong habit of drawing and note-taking in sketchbooks, which supported his observational approach to art. where he remained for the rest of his life. He worked at Notman's studio and with A.B. Taber, another photographic firm, during the early years, painting photograph portraits. Raphael's portrait practice quickly brought him to the attention of photographer William Notman, and their collaboration in the late 1850s produced a series of refined painted photographic portraits, including commissions for prominent figures in Montreal society. He also exhibited his work at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, the Royal Society of British Artists in 1877–1878 and at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in 1886. In 1996, Galerie Walter Klinkhoff in Montreal organized a retrospective of his work. In the final decades of his life, Raphael gradually withdrew from the public art world, a retreat shaped in part by the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and North America, which contributed to the marginalization of his work prior to his death in 1914.

In 2023, at the Cowley Abbott Auction, Raphael's Bonsecours Market (1864, graphite, ink and watercolour) realized a price of $33,600 and Encampment by the River (1871, oil on canvas) a price of $57,600.