John Kingerlee is an Irish painter living on the Beara peninsula, in West Cork. He has a second family in Fez, Morocco. John Kingerlee was born in Birmingham, England in 1936, his Mother was related to Hogan's from County Cork and he was educated in a school run by the Marist Fathers. After living for twenty years in Cornwall in the far southwest of Britain, he moved in 1982 to an isolated farmhouse on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, Ireland. On the isolated Beara peninsula, looking directly out from his home across Kenmare Bay to the ring of Kerry and his wife Mo lead a life which some might describe as lonely. However, what they lack in human contact they make up for through an existence which extends to growing their own vegetables in their organic garden; the Kingerlees' alternative outlook on life somehow seems to be in complete harmony both with the space they inhabit and with the art that flows from John's palette knife and brush. A non-conformist at heart, John has turned his back on the traditional way of seeing and depicting landscape - as a series of parallel planes that are made to appear to recede from foreground to background by the artist's manipulation of linear and aerial perspective.
Recognising that perspective itself is a mathematical construct, John takes a different approach, as radical as it is original. He states that he wants his art to recreate the experience of being in and moving through the landscape. In the studio, using his own made-up pigments, he mimics the cycle of growth and decay by working with matter in a direct and hands-on way, he applies colours, deep pools of it, red brick, molten silver and zinc and titanium, sulphuric yellows and so much more to dozens of paintings in various states of becoming. He paints applying a new layer of paint, his preferred tools are palette knives, a decorator's brush which he holds vertically using a stippling technique. Kingerlee has exhibited works in Ireland and The United States of America. Art critic William Zimmer gave a speech about the artist and his works at the Los Angeles exhibition in October 2006, curated by Masoud Pourhabib. At the time Zimmer was an associate of Katherine T Carter & Associates, an agency hired by Kingerlee's manager to promote the artist in America.
"With some disingenuousness Kingerlee has described himself as an outsider artist. No one this well-traveled could qualify as one and yet there is some truth in his statement, he is operating outside the art world. John Kingerlee's art is triumphant, it is based in an imagination sustained by enchantment, observed reality, superlative talent."William Zimmer - a New York Times art critic for 25 Years Kingerlee's "Grid Composition" was sold in Sotheby's Auctioneer's on 15 November 2006 in New York for $156,000 a new record for the artist. Official John Kingerlee Website
Veitel Heine Ephraim, 1703 – 16 May 1775 in Berlin) was jeweller to the Prussian Court, a silk entrepreneur in Potsdam, the chairman of the Jewish congregation in Berlin/Prussia, since 1756 Mintmaster in Saxony and from 1758 in Prussia. During the Seven Years' War Frederick the Great devalued the Prussian coin five times in order to finance the war. Ephraim and his companion Itzig became infamous for adding copper, up to 70%, into the fake coins, known as Ephraimiten; the coin fraud of the entrepreneurs became an existential element of war financing. Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann, Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky and Leendert Pieter de Neufville rivalled Ephraim's exchange business. Veitel Ephraim was the fifth child of Altona-born jeweller, elder of the Jewish Community Nathan Veitel Ephraim, who moved from Hamburg to Berlin, his mother came from Vienna. The Ephraim family lived in Spandauer Straße 30. Around 1744/1745 Ephraim became court jeweller of Friedrich II, they had known each other since 1738.
As Crown Prince Friedrich was in debt to Ephraim. In 1748 Ephraim had orphans taught in the production of it. In 1750 he was appointed by the King as the senior elder of the Berlin Jewry. In 1752/1754 Ephraim delivered silver to Johann Philipp Graumann director of the Prussian mints. After Graumann's fall in early 1755, Veitel Ephraim and his brother-in-law Moses Fränkel leased the Königsberger mint, their success was so great that under similar conditions they were given the lease of the mint of Cleves, where one of Ephraim's sons became in charge on 16 August. In October 1755 he leased the mint facility in Aurich. On 21 November 1756 Ephraim offered the king a seignorage of 20% for leasing the Leipzig mint facility. In Poland and Hungary the so-called buyers of entrepreneurs traded the debased coins for the better coins circulating there and delivered them to their clients and Itzig, they used their extensive business and relational foreign relations to acquire the necessary gold and silver in Holland on the Amsterdam market, in England and in Hamburg by means of Hamburg and Dutch exchange.
Another way to raise money was to remelt gold subsidies received from England and to double and triple them by mixing them with other metals. The revenue from the impact of the coin transactions from 1759 to 1762 exceeded 29 million Thaler and thus, for example, the amount of British subsidies. On 28 January 1764, Frederick the Great Itzig and Ephraim ordered that they invest the great assets they had earned in the Prussian economy. Ephraim left a fortune. In 1727 Ephraim married to Elke Fraenkel, they had four sons: Ephraim, Joseph and Benjamin and two daughters: Edel and Rosel, who married Heimann Fraenkel. Ephraim's great-granddaughter was Sara Grotthuis, a noted literary salon hostess in Berlin around 1800. Studies in the Economic Policy of Frederick the Great by W. O. Henderson, p. 40 Forgotten Fragments of the History of an Old Jewish Family by Louis and Henry Fraenkel. Kopenhagen 1975. Stern, S; the Court Jew. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1950. Full text online at archive.org The Making of Western Jewry, 1600-1819 by L. Kochan Tourismus Berlin