Kārlis Padegs

In 1932 a Riga art student of about 20 painted a pale, innocent-faced Madonna sitting among soldiers' boots and helmets, holding a machine gun with a long ammunition belt. Madonna with Machine Gun, now in the Latvian National Museum of Art, is the picture Kārlis Padegs is remembered by, and it set the tone for the rest of his short career.

He grew up in Torņakalns, a workers' district of Riga, and studied at the Latvian Academy of Art under Vilhelms Purvītis, the country's great landscape painter. His own subjects went in the opposite direction from his teacher's. He painted city nightlife, cabarets, war, the morgue and sarcastic self-portraits, and said he wanted to show "the seamy side of life which we do not like to see." Riga knew him as a dandy in a Spanish hat, red scarf, long black coat and pigskin gloves, with a bamboo cane.

Padegs died of tuberculosis in April 1940, at 28. A bronze statue by the sculptor Andris Vārpa, showing him in suit and hat with a flower in his hand, has stood on Merkela Street in Riga since 1998.