Ernő Erb

The Polish-Jewish painter of Lviv — a self-taught artist who rose to exhibit at Warsaw's Zachęta and with the Lviv–Kraków TPSP society; his works represented Polish art at the Poznań General National Exhibition (1929) and in Buffalo, USA (1932). He painted markets, city corners, peasant and Jewish types and flower still lifes in a dense impasto that critics compared to Max Liebermann.

Sources differ on his birth year (1878, some say 1890); certain is the tragic end — he perished in 1943 during the liquidation of the Lviv ghetto. Today his works are kept by the National Museum in Kraków, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Lviv Art Gallery; Rabbi and Pupil in our collection belongs to his most personal theme.