Theodore Sydney Moise was the first of two children born to of Hyam and Ceclia Woolf Moise and the grandson of Abraham Moise. Born in Charleston, Theodore and his brother Edwin grew up among a vast extended family active in Congregation Beth Elohim. One relative who was of particular importance in Theodore’s life was his aunt Penina. She was known as a prolific poet but she was also an amateur painter, and gave Theodore lessons, cultivating his passion for what would become his calling.
In 1835, Moïse opened a studio in Charleston, advertising his services as a portraitist, animal painter, picture restorer, and ornamental draftsman. The following year he married Cecilia Frances Moses, daughter of Isaac Clifton Moses, and soon after they moved to Woodville, Mississippi, an affluent town flush with cash from the local cotton industry, where Edwin had recently settled. There, in 1837, their only child, Theodora, was born. Again following in Edwin’s footsteps, in 1842, they moved to New Orleans. Cecilia died in 1844 and the following year, in Natchitoches, Louisiana, Moïse married Matilda Jane Vaughn, with whom he would have nine children.
In New Orleans his reputation as a painter grew, and even as Moïse led an often-itinerant life, traveling throughout the south, painting portraits of landowners, their families, and their animals, he maintained a studio in New Orleans. He shared the studio with artists such as Paul Poincy, Benjamin Franklin Reinhart, and Trevor Thomas Fowler, often traveling together—and even collaborating—with Fowler, whose style was strikingly similar to his own. That style was heavily influenced by the neoclassicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique and Jacques-Louis-David and the American portraitist Rembrandt Peale. His best-known paintings include portraits of Senator Henry Clay and General Andrew Jackson as well as the 1867 Life on the Metairie, depicting forty-four distinguished New Orleanians at the last meet of the Metairie Race Track, which he made in collaboration with painter Victor Pierson. The painting won first prize at the Louisiana Grand State Fair for best historical painting, and around the same time Pierson painted this canvas of the two colleagues riding together in a carriage.
Moïse’s paintings in this collection include those of Edwin and Penina, as well as Mordecai Cohen, Isaac Loewengardt, Amelia Loewengardt, Caroline Lopez, Isabel Mordecai, and Isaiah Moses.
