Salome with the head of St. John, sketch

Maurycy Gottlieb was a Polish-Jewish painter who died at twenty-three, leaving a body of work that represents one of the most poignant lost potentials in nineteenth-century European art. This 1877 sketch of Salome with the head of John the Baptist is a study for the larger works exploring biblical subjects he was developing in Vienna and Munich. Gottlieb's paintings often address the experience of Jewish identity in Christian Europe — his famous Christ Preaching at Capernaum placed a Jewish Christ among Jewish worshippers — and Salome's role in the execution of John the Baptist, drawn from the New Testament, carries complex resonances when painted by a Jewish artist. The National Museum in Warsaw holds this sketch as a document of his tragically brief development.

The sketch format allows Gottlieb to explore the compositional and tonal challenges of the subject — the decapitated head, Salome's expression, the relationship of figure to ground — before committing to a final version. His academic training in Vienna and Munich is evident in the confident figure construction even at this preparatory stage.