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
Maurycy Gottlieb moved back to Vienna to attend the workshop of Heinrich von Angeli. He lived and worked in Vienna for the next two years and produced paintings with biblical themes, as well as illustrations for Friedrich Bruckmann Publishing of Munich. In the fall of 1878, Gottlieb travelled to Rome, where he befriended Henryk Siemiradzki. At a banquet in his residence at Via Gaeta, Gottlieb met with Matejko, who convinced him to come back to Kraków as one of his best students, to work on a series of monumental paintings including scenes from the history of the Jews in Poland. In 1879