Until political emancipation in the late 18th and 19th centuries, Jewish artists in Europe often faced strict restrictions regarding the material they could use, the places where they could display their work, the dimensions and locations of their buildings, and their ability to train under or collaborate with non-Jews.  As social and legal restrictions relaxed, especially during the latter half of the 19th century, the first generations of major modern Jewish artists began to emerge.  Rather than forming a self-contained artistic unit, Jews participated in the wide spectrum of modern artistic movements, with Camille Pissarro emerging as a leading Impressionist, for instance, and Max Liebermann assuming the presidency of the Berlin Secession.

At the same time that Jewish artists began to increase in numbers and prominence, a countervailing prejudice emerged which denied the very possibility of Jewish art, invoking either the biblical commandment against “graven images” or tying the possibility of a national art to the precondition of a territorial homeland – like Josef Strzygowski and other art historians did when cementing the concept of German art. Accordingly, Jewish artists were frequently portrayed as mere copyists or conduits of foreign influence and, as such, a convenient foil for a pure and authentic national art (German, French, or Russian, as the case may be).

Even so, a number of Jewish artists succeeded in becoming influential members of the art world in their respective countries. The first Jewish artist to achieve widespread success in Europe was Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800–1882). After studying in Rome in his early years with the Nazarenes, who emphasized biblical imagery and Christian spirituality, Oppenheim increasingly depicted Jewish life in his later work. His 1856 painting of Lessing meeting Moses Mendelssohn promoted an image of fraternity and rational discourse across religious divisions; his widely circulated series Jewish family life (printed 1866-81) exposed many viewers to domestic Jewish customs for the first time.  Max Liebermann (1847–1935) also took on Christian subjects in his early work, including The twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple (1879), which Liebermann re-painted after accusations that his Savior appeared too Semitic.  Later, especially after Liebermann embraced French Impressionism, some critics asserted that his Jewishness diluted his commitment to German culture, while others thought the same identity made him productively open to fresh influences.  Other prominent German-Jewish artists included the painters and printmakers Lesser Ury (1861–1931) and Hermann Struck (1876–1944).  Struck was both a patriotic German who served in the army and as a committed Zionist who later helped shape artistic culture in Haifa.

Jewish artists across Western Europe enjoyed close contact in the late 19th century.  Liebermann and Struck, for example, travelled frequently to the Netherlands, often meeting with the venerable Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) and his son Isaac Israëls (1865–1934), a successful painter in his own right.  Above all, Jewish artists in this period travelled to Paris for inspiration (and in the case of Russian artists, civil liberties).  Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), born and raised in the Caribbean, was a stalwart on the French scene, contributing early and often to the Impressionist exhibitions and exerting a paternal influence on major Post-Impressionists, including Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) arrived in Paris from Italy in 1906, working as a sculptor in the vein of the Romanian Constantin Brancusi, before devoting himself entirely to painting.

London’s art scene was less international than Paris, although during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 Pissarro stayed in the city.  Sir Jacob Epstein (1880–1959), though born in New York, became a prominent if controversial part of the London art world, attracting critical reviews tinged with anti-Semitic sentiment.  One of the most intriguing Jewish artists in London in this period was Simeon Solomon (1840–1905), often associated with the pre-Raphaelites.  Solomon produced several paintings on biblical themes, as well as a broadly circulated series of engravings illustrating Jewish life in England (1862).  Widely celebrated, and collected by luminaries including Oscar Wilde, Solomon dramatically fell from grace after an arrest for suspected homosexual acts in 1873, after which he fell into poverty and ill health.  The unrelated Solomon J. Solomon (1860–1927) was a prominent Academic painter who also curated one of the first exhibitions of Jewish art in 1906 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.  The end of the century saw the birth of a bevy of notable Jewish artists in Britain, including  Mark Gertler (1891–1939); David Bomberg (1890–1957); Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918, better known as a poet); and Jacob Kramer (1892–1962).

In Russia, the preeminent Jewish artist of the century was the sculptor Mark Antokol’skij (1841–1902), the first Jewish student at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, where he began a lifelong friendship with the prominent painter Il’ja Repin. While Antokol’skij faced allegations that his realistic style betrayed a corrupting Italian or French influence (especially after he moved to Paris permanently in 1877), the influential critic Vladimir Stasov championed his work, to the point of asserting that Antokol’skij’s Jewish origins contributed to his uniquely Russian vision.  Antokol’skij mentored the Russian-born sculptor Boris Schatz (1866–1932), who went on to help found the Bulgarian Academy of Art in Sofia in 1896, which provided a valuable training ground for establishing a Jewish national art in Palestine (see below).  In the field of painting, Isaac Levitan (1860–1900), a close friend of Anton Čehov and a member of the influential Peredvizhniki (“Wanderers”), became a lasting influence in Russian art through his luminous landscapes.  Léon Bakst (1866–1924) began his career as a painter before finding fame in Paris as the scenery and costume designer for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.  The late century witnessed the birth of a host of important Jewish artists, many of whom would later work in Paris, including  Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979); Marc Chagall (1887–1985); El Lissitzky (1890–1941); Naum Gabo (1890–1977); Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973); and Chaim Soutine (1893–1943).

In Galicia, Maurycy Gottlieb (1856–1879) proved a pioneering figure during his short life, introducing Jewish themes into the established genre of history painting.  The German-speaking Gottlieb developed strong sympathies with Polish nationalism as a result of his training under Jan Matejko.  Through depictions of contemporary Jewish life, such as Jews praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur (1878), as well as images of a visibly Jewish Jesus, Gottlieb manifested his identity as both a Jew and a Pole.  In a letter from 1878, he testified to his deep-seated wish “to eradicate all the prejudices against my people” and “to uproot the hatred enveloping the oppressed and tormented nation and to bring peace between the Poles and the Jews, for the history of both peoples is a chronicle of grief and anguish”. Born a generation later, Ephraim Moshe Lilien (1874–1925) – like Gottlieb born in Drohobycz, and a Matejko protégé – had little of Gottlieb’s faith in Jewish-Polish reconciliation.  Alongside Schatz, he helped develop Jewish artistic culture in Palestine, and created emblematic Zionist images, including photographs of his friend Theodor Herzl. Another generation later, the city of Drohobycz was to produce yet another major figure, the artist/novelist Bruno Schulz (1892–1942).

While in the early part of the century Jews had sought opportunities for self-expression within their European countries of origin, by the fin de siècle the prospect of a Jewish homeland offered another, increasingly concrete option.  For a number of Jewish artists, Zionism and European nationalism were related endeavours.  The imagery and sentiments current in the latter could be re-directed towards the former with relatively few symbolic alterations.  In 1901, at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel, Lilien together with the philosopher Martin Buber organized an exhibition featuring artists including Josef Israëls, Lesser Ury, Maurycy Gottlieb, and Hermann Struck. Buber was convinced that despite the international prominence of such Jewish artists, a true and enduring Jewish art depended on the formation of a Jewish state.  As he wrote that year in an article for the Zionist periodical Ost und West, “[a] national art requires a homeland out of which it develops and a heaven towards which it strives.  We Jews of today have neither of these.  We are the slaves of many lands, and our thoughts fly to various heavens.”

Answering Buber’s call, Schatz and Lilien formed the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem in 1906, named after the biblical craftsman in Exodus.  “The great idea”, Schatz wrote in 1914, “is not to copy Arab or European models, but to derive new inspiration from Hebrew ideals, from the flora and fauna of the land [...] to mould the Hebrew alphabet into artistic forms for decorative purposes, in short, to create a Palestinian renaissance”.  The irony, of course, was that even if these new Jewish artists successfully traded European for “Hebrew” scenery, they were still engaged in an act of mimesis.  They were no longer copying European “flora and fauna”; they were copying European nationalism itself.