Asuero

Maurycy Gottlieb was barely 20 when he painted this, a Jewish student in the mainly Catholic art schools of Krakow and Vienna, where he was taunted for his background. In answer he painted himself as Ahasuerus, the figure of legend condemned to wander the earth without rest, the Wandering Jew, an outsider shunned wherever he goes. The golden robes, the warm shadow swallowing the edges of the figure, the grave inward look, all of it is borrowed from Rembrandt, the painter Gottlieb studied most closely. He poured into one young man's face a whole people's sense of not belonging. Gottlieb would be dead three years later, at 23, of an illness caught while working.