Maurycy Gottlieb Gottlieb settled in Kraków and began working on his new major project. He died in the same year from health complications. Matejko attended his funeral and promised his father to look after his younger brother Marcin. Gottlieb won a gold medal at the Munich art competition for his painting, "Shylock and Jessica" (1876), portraying a scene from Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice". The painting was exhibited in Lviv in 1877, and in 1878 at "Zachęta" in Warsaw and widely acclaimed. Gottlieb based Jessica's face on that of Laura Rosenfeld, to whom he had proposed marriage. However, Laura rejected his proposal
Adolph Gottlieb in New York after Gottlieb’s return they created a break with Gottlieb’s former circle of colleagues, several of whom condemned his new work for being “too abstract”. Gottlieb and a small circle of friends valued the work of the Surrealist group that they saw exhibited in New York in the 1930s. They also exchanged copies of the magazine "Cahiers d’art" and were quite familiar with current ideas about automatic writing and subconscious imagery. Gottlieb painted a few works in a Surrealist style in 1940 and 1941. The results of his experiments manifested themselves in his series “Pictographs” which spanned from