Christ Preaching at Capernaum

Born to an Orthodox family in Drohobych, Galicia (now in Ukraine), Maurycy Gottlieb studied art in Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine), Vienna, Kraków, and Munich. Important early works on Jewish themes included A Jewish Wedding (1876), Self-Portrait as Ahasuerus (1876), and Shylock and Jessica (1876), inspired by Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Gottlieb is best known for the large Rembrandtesque paintings that he made in the last three years of his short life, most notably Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur (1878) and the unfinished works Christ before His Judges (1877–1879) and Christ Preaching at Capernaum (1878–1879). His premature death at age twenty-three cut off a brilliant talent, but he had already earned a place in the history of representing Jews in art for his warm, direct, and unapologetic images.