Moses Jacob Ezekiel (b. in Richmond, Va., 1844), the sculptor, now residing at Rome, is probably the greatest Jewish artist that this country has produced. He was educated at the Virginia Military Institute, from which, after serving as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, he graduated in 1866. He then studied anatomy at the Medical College of Virginia, and in 1868 removed to Cincinnati, going from there a year later to Berlin, where he studied at the Royal Academy of Art. He was admitted to membership in the Berlin Society of Artists for his colossal bust of Washington, which is now in the Cincinnati Art Museum, and he was the first foreigner to win the Michael Beer prize. During a visit to America in 1874 he executed in marble the group representing “Religious Liberty”――the tribute of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith to the centennial celebration of American independence. The statue was unveiled in 1876 in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia (see the frontispiece). Upon his return to Rome Ezekiel leased a portion of the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian (Emperor of Rome, 284–305) and transformed them into one of the most beautiful studios in Europe. He has been elected a member of various academies and received other distinctions. Among his best known productions are: busts of Eve, Homer, David, Judith and Liszt; the Fountain of Neptune, for the town of Neptune, Italy; the Jefferson Monument, for Louisville, Ky.; Virginia Mourning Her Dead, at Lexington, Va., and a dozen heroic statues (of Phidias, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, etc.), which are placed in the niches of the Corcoran Art Gallery at Washington. Ephraim Keyser (b. in Baltimore, Md., 1850) is another prominent Jewish-American sculptor. He was educated at the public schools and the City College of Baltimore, and later studied at the Royal Academies of Fine Art in Munich and Berlin. He maintained a studio in Rome from 1880 to 1886, lived in New York from 1887 to 1893, when he settled in his native city as instructor in modelling at the Maryland Institute Art School, and also (since 1902) at the Rhinehart School for Sculpture. Among his best known works are the statue of Major-General Baron De Kalb, erected by the United States Government at Annapolis, Md., the tomb of President Chester A. Arthur at the Rural Cemetery, Albany, N. Y., and portrait busts of well known men.