Maurycy Gottlieb

Maurycy Gottlieb painted Jewish subjects with rare depth and feeling: biblical scenes, figures from Shakespeare and his best known picture, Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur (1878), which includes his own face among the congregation.

He was born in Drohobych, in Austrian Poland, in 1856, studied at the Vienna Academy, then in Kraków under Jan Matejko and in Munich under Karl von Piloty. His Shylock and Jessica (1876) won a gold medal in Munich. He died in Kraków in 1879 at only 23, leaving more than 300 works, many of them sketches. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the National Museum in Warsaw hold his paintings.

Christ Preaching at Capernaum, one of his last large works, shows his warm colour and sensitive faces.