‘Portrait of a Bride’ at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Young, talented, Polish and Jewish, Maurycy Gottlieb – the last Romantic, a highly promising artist, a pupil and admirer of Jan Matejko – was rejected by his beloved. And the girl, Laura Rosenfeld, young and beautiful, known today as ‘the painter’s fiancée’ from the portrait at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Both bound together by a story without a happy ending.

The family of Maurycy Gottlieb

Maurycy Gottlieb has gone down in art history as an outstanding Jewish painter , deeply connected to Polish culture. A remarkably gifted and sensitive colourist , an artist who drew with equal enthusiasm from Polish history and literature as well as Jewish tradition and biblical themes . A first-rate portraitist and humanist and the creator of symbolic, expressive self-portraits. The short but intense life of this young painter is shrouded in the legend of a brilliant artist whose star shone only briefly, yet whose radiance continues to captivate to this day.

Maurycy was born on 21 February 1856 in Drohobych, several dozen kilometres south-west of Lviv, in a town that, over 70 years later, would be made famous by another artist—this time a writer—Bruno Schulz.

The Gottliebs were a wealthy, respected Jewish family, progressive and open-minded. They raised their numerous children in the spirit of the modern ideals of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. Maurycy was the eldest; he was educated in state schools, but his true passion was drawing. He paved the way for his three brothers – Marcin, Filip and Leopold also became painters.

Maurycy Gottlieb’s first steps in painting

Maurycy’s talents led to his expulsion from the Lviv grammar school after he drew a caricature of a teacher. We can only imagine that it was very well done. He had to complete his schooling as an external student.

Fortunately, his father appreciated and supported his artistic talents, and although the Torah forbids the depiction of living beings, he allowed him to train in the studio of a Lviv painter, and subsequently at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1872, at the age of 16, Maurycy Gottlieb was admitted to the historical painting class .

It was in Vienna that he discovered the work of Jan Matejko, and at the Universal Exhibition in Paris he saw his painting ‘Rejtan’. The painting made such a deep impression on the young man that he pleaded with his father to allow him to continue his studies in Kraków under the guidance of the artist himself. In 1873, Maurycy Gottlieb became a second-year student at the Kraków School of Fine Arts.

Maurycy Gottlieb, a pupil of Jan Matejko

In Matejko’s work, the young Jew was fascinated not only by the theatrical grandeur and exuberance of the canvases, but also by the themes of the works, which were close to Gottlieb’s heart. Master Jan used art to revive the country’s former greatness, to recount Polish history and to remind people of their national identity. ‘Self-Portrait in the Costume of a Polish Nobleman’ became a manifestation of Gottlieb’s outlook. ‘I am a Pole and a Jew, and I wish to work for both, God willing,’ he wrote in a letter with youthful idealism and the belief that art could bridge the religious and social differences between the two nations.

After a year of study in Kraków, he returned to Vienna, hurt by anti-Semitic outbursts and , it is said, the jealousy of his fellow students. He soon moved to the academy in Munich with a letter of recommendation from Matejko, only to return to Vienna shortly afterwards. His beloved, Laura Rosenfeld ( 1875–1944), lived there.

A portrait of his fiancée and her face in the paintings of Maurycy Gottlieb

The young woman, like her future portraitist, came from an assimilated Jewish family. She was born in Brno in Moravia, received a thorough education and upbringing, and after her father’s death moved to Vienna with her mother. Towards the end of 1875 or at the beginning of 1876, she met Maurycy. They were both 18 or 19 years old. Enchanted by Laura, the painter quickly proposed to her.

His fiancée’s beautiful face appeared in a scene from William Shakespeare’s *The Merchant of Venice* in the composition *Shylock and Jessica*, which he had painted whilst still in Munich. Gottlieb was awarded a gold medal by the local academy for the painting, and critics praised the depth of emotion in the depicted characters and the artist’s craftsmanship.

The painting, known today from a black-and-white photograph and a copy made by Marcin Gottlieb – Maurycy’s brother – was published in the Munich press and also presented to the public in Vienna and Lviv.

In 1877, Gottlieb painted a portrait of Laura Rosenfeld, also known as the ‘Portrait of the Bride-to-be’ . The model is depicted head-on, in a half-length pose against a dark background that contrasts with her well-lit, fair-skinned face. A young, pretty girl with black hair gazes directly at the viewer from the painting, yet the intensity of her dark eyes and pronounced eyebrows is somewhat intimidating. The entire figure exudes both subtlety and nobility , bringing to mind old portraits of ladies or queens .

The artist has depicted his fiancée in an outfit reminiscent of a Renaissance gown, with a light-coloured blouse featuring a high collar that covers her neck like a ruff. On her chest she wears a gold ornament with a medallion.

The year 1877 was a year of intense creative work, crowned with further success in the form of Laura’s portrait. The painting “Uriel Acosta and Judith von Straaten” , depicting the lovers from Karl Gutzkow’s play, gained recognition and fame. Judith bears the features of the artist’s fiancée.

In the painter’s works, lovers remain together forever, as in “Zygmunt August and Barbara Giżanka” ; in reality, Gottlieb’s engagement did not last long – by late summer 1877, Laura had broken off contact with Maurycy, placing her affections and future in the hands of a safer prospect, the Berlin banker Leo Henschel. Heartbroken, the sensitive artist threw himself into his work.

Maurycy Gottlieb as a portrait painter

Many excellent portraits by Gottlieb have survived, but he himself, trained in the spirit of nineteenth-century academic art and, moreover, deeply inspired by Matejko, dreamt of creating and immortalising great historical themes on canvas. He treated portraits more as a means of earning a living, not holding them in high regard, yet it was precisely in this genre that his talent was most fully revealed.

He was interested in people. He created intimate, atmospheric portraits imbued with a palpable emotional charge, which – as a sensitive observer – he was able to capture and immortalise. He did so in a manner similar to Rembrandt , whose works he had studied in Munich. The influence of the Dutch master is also evident in the way the figures are lit, the oriental-style settings and the thematic affinity – motifs drawn from Jewish tradition (‘Jewish Wedding’, ‘The Torah Scribe’).

His portraits of women are subtle, lyrical studies of beauty and mystery, somewhat concealing their emotions, as seen in the portrait of Laura or the artist’s sister, Anna. Male portraits are characterised by a deeper psychological analysis, with a greater degree of realism, achieved using a minimum of artistic means, as in the masterful portrait of Ignacy Kuranda.

Maurycy Gottlieb, painter of religious works

At the turn of 1877/1878, Gottlieb began work on monumental paintings depicting scenes from the life of Christ, a figure who served as a link between Jewish and Christian religion and tradition. The works created at that time were: ‘Christ on Trial’ and ‘Christ Teaching in Capernaum’; however, he did not manage to complete either of them.

The most significant work from the final period of his career was a depiction of Jews praying during the festival of Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement, in which he included a double portrait of his former fiancée and a self-portrait, beside a rabbi holding the Torah. On its cloth covering is the inscription: ‘A sacrifice for the salvation of the soul of Maurycy Gottlieb, of blessed memory’.

Was the painting a prophecy of the artist’s own death? He himself described in his diary that he painted this picture whilst in a particular state of mind , feeling the presence of deceased loved ones.

The death of Maurycy Gottlieb and the memory of him

The words on the painting became reality surprisingly quickly. On 17 July 1879, Maurycy Gottlieb died in the early hours of the morning at St Lazarus’s Hospital in Kraków, as a result of complications arising from acute tonsillitis, at the age of just 23. A romantic legend suggests that the cause of his death – a summer cold – was due to the despair he felt upon hearing of Laura’s marriage two weeks earlier. Laura herself, in her memoirs, linked the painter’s death to the painful break-up of their engagement. Whether this was the case will forever remain the artist’s secret.

“The sombre ceremony” was brought to an end by “a thunderstorm”, wrote Matejko – who was present at his pupil’s funeral – in a letter to his wife. “It is a pity he is gone; apart from his extraordinary talents, he was a man full of noble impulses, whose nature endeared him to all those who knew him well through his kindness and selflessness.” Maurycy Gottlieb was buried in the Jewish cemetery on Miodowa Street in Kraków.

Laura Henschel-Rosenfeld outlived the painter by 65 years. She devoted herself to raising her four daughters, to writing, to education and to social activism, and was active in feminist and human rights movements. She is believed to have perished on the way to Auschwitz in April 1944. Laura’s granddaughter, Bat Sheva Scheflan (1910–2007), together with her aunt, donated the portrait of Maurycy Gottlieb’s fiancée to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1955.