Maurycy Gottlieb

Maurycy Gottlieb died at 23, and still left behind one of the most searching pictures in Polish art. In his 'Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur', painted in 1878, the crowd of worshippers on the Day of Atonement includes the young painter himself, looking out at us, a Jew from Galicia trying to hold together two worlds that kept pulling apart.

He was born in 1856 in Drohobycz, in the Austrian province of Galicia, and went to Kraków to study under Jan Matejko, the leading painter of Polish history, becoming close to Jacek Malczewski, later a famous Symbolist. An antisemitic incident at the school drove him away within a year. The wound went into his art: he painted himself as Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew of legend, condemned to be shunned everywhere he goes.

Gottlieb wanted to be both fully Polish and fully Jewish, and he drew his subjects from the Hebrew Bible, from Polish history, and from the life of Christ alike. He died in Kraków in 1879 from complications of an illness, leaving more than three hundred works, many of them unfinished.