Maurycy Gottlieb

Maurycy Gottlieb ; 21 February 1856 – 17 July 1879) was a Polish-Jewish realist painter of the Romantic period. He was one of eleven children born to Fanya (née Tigerman) and Isaac Gottlieb. He was introduced to painting in Lemberg by Michał Godlewski. At fifteen, he enrolled at the Vienna Fine Arts Academy for three years. In 1873, he went to Kraków to study under Jan Matejko and became close friends with Jacek Malczewski. However, an anti-Semitic incident at the School of Fine Arts prompted him to leave Kraków after less than a year in spite of Malczewski's protests. to work on a series of monumental paintings including scenes from the history of the Jews in Poland.

In 1879, Gottlieb settled in Kraków and began working on his new major project. He died in the same year from health complications. Matejko attended his funeral and promised his father to look after his younger brother Marcin.

Gottlieb won a gold medal at the Munich art competition for his painting, Shylock and Jessica (1876), portraying a scene from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. The painting was exhibited in Lviv in 1877, and in 1878 at Zachęta in Warsaw and widely acclaimed. Gottlieb based Jessica's face on that of Laura Rosenfeld, to whom he had proposed marriage. However, Laura rejected his proposal and wed a Berlin banker. According to one biographer, when he heard about Rosenfeld's marriage, he purposely exposed himself to the elements and died of complications from a respiratory illness. Others cite different reasons for his death, including suicide.

Despite his premature death, more than three hundred works survive (mostly sketches, but also oil paintings), though not all are finished. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, many Polish collections unknown in the Western Bloc were popularized, and his reputation grew greatly. His brother, Leopold Gottlieb, was born five years after his death and became known as a painter as an adult.

Selected works