Hyman Bloom admired works by artists such as Soutine ("Carcass of Beef", 1924) and Rembrandt ("Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp", 1632; "The Slaughtered Ox", 1655) that explored similar themes. He called the colors of a decaying corpse he had seen in a morgue "harrowing" and yet "beautiful...iridescent and pearly." Many of Bloom's paintings feature rabbis, usually holding the Torah. According to Bloom, his intentions were more artistic than religious. He began questioning his Jewish faith early in life, and painted rabbis, he claimed, because that was what he knew. Over the course of his career he produced dozens of paintings of
Isabella Henriette van Eeghen to follow in the footsteps of her grandfather, also called Christiaan Pieter van Eeghen, who in his free time set up the Vondelpark and was responsible for various improvements to the Van der Hoop museum in 1854, the forerunner of the Rijksmuseum. It was the elder Van Eeghen who paid to have the paintings in the Amsterdam surgeons' guild restored in 1865, among them of course the "Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp". Isa attended the local girls' school MMS and then continued at the Gymnasium, eventually earning her degree in history from the University of Amsterdam. She earned her