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 associate them. Meaning, then, is intensely personal – another innovation of Gottlieb’s paintings Surrealist biomorphism was one source for his Pictographs. For Gottlieb, biomorphism was a way to freely express his unconscious, in which he had become fascinated via [John] Graham, Freud, and Surrealism. Gottlieb also incorporated automatism – the painterly technique for Freudian free-association – was the method Gottlieb used to generate biomorphic shapes, which were forms spontaneously conceived in his unconscious . These biomorphic shapes were separated by the all over grid pattern, which served as the overall structure of the "pictograph" series. Gottlieb once said, "If I