Christ preaching at Capernaum

Here Jesus stands in a synagogue, arms raised, wrapped in a striped tallit, the prayer shawl Jewish men wear at worship. A Torah scroll lies on the reading desk beside him, and women look down from their own gallery above. Only the halo around his head comes from Christian painting. The Gospels of Mark and Luke both describe him teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum, a town on the Sea of Galilee, and Gottlieb took the setting at its word, showing a Jewish teacher among Jews. Gottlieb was himself a Jew from Galicia, the Austrian-ruled part of Poland, where equal civil rights for Jews had been written into the Austrian constitution only in 1867. He began this canvas around 1878, one of several scenes from the life of Christ he planned, and was still at work on it when he died in Kraków in July 1879. You can see where he stopped. The listeners in the lower right are fully worked, while the columns, the ceiling beams and the hanging lamp above are still thin, sketchy paint.