
Peter Rees
Director
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Director
Provenance
Emil Beres, Cracow.
Dr. Rudolf Beres, Cracow.
Emil Beres, Cracow.
J. Beres, Montreal, Canada.
Private collection, New York.
Private collection, UK.
Exhibited
Tel Aviv, Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, In the Flower of Youth, Maurycy Gottlieb 1856-1879, 16 May - 20 July 1991, and Warsaw, National Musuem of Warsaw, 19 August - 20 October, 1991, no. 17.
Literature
Kolb, 1958, p. 9, illustrated.
Soltysowa, 1977, pp. 161, 164, 178, pl. 22, illustrated.
Nehama Guralnik, Eugen Kolb, Jerzy Malinowski, In the Flower of Youth, Maurycy Gottlieb 1856-1879, exh. cat., Tel Aviv, 1991, p. 131, illustrated, p. 76, illustrated (detail).
Born in 1856, Moritz Gottlieb showed an early talent for paintng, and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna aged just fifteen. Working between Vienna, Munich, Rome and Norway, Gottlieb produced an extraordinary body of work, much of which narrates the history of the Jewish people in Poland. His iconic work Jews praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur hangs in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and he was awarded a gold medal at the Munich exhibition of 1876 for Shylock and Jessica.
The present work depicts Laura Rosenfeld, whose likeness appears in a number of Gottlieb's paintings. The two most likely met in Vienna in the mid-1870s. Tragically, following Rosenfeld calling off the engagement and marrying a wealthy banker, Gottlieb intentionally exposed himself to the elements, contracting a cold, which led to his untimely death at just 23.