ROSENBERG, LAZAR

ROSENBERG, LAZAR (1862–1936), painter. Rosenberg was born in Kaunas, Lithuania. At the age of 14, he entered the Vilna Art School, in 1879 he enrolled at the Koenigsberg Art Academy and in 1881 was admitted to the Academy in Berlin. There his painting of a copy of one of *Rembrandt's religious works won him a gold medal and brought him into prominence. In 1890 he moved to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian where he was influenced by the work of the Impressionists. An article on his work in the Zionist monthly Ost und West, February 1904, written by Julius Levin in Paris, reveals a series of studies of children and old Rembrandtesque Jewish heads. His admiration for the great Dutch painter may have inspired his move to Holland, where he lived from 1910 to 1935, paying annual visits to his family in Lithuania. He gained considerable prominence as a painter and draftsman in Holland, but working outside the main centers of modern art and being of a retiring nature, he has been unfairly neglected. Rosenberg's mature work is largely concerned with Dutch subjects – landscapes, the fishing village of Volendam, fishermen and their wives, interiors of Dutch houses, etc. The influence of Rembrandt remained constant, in the rich, expressive manner of his oil paint; but in the interiors with figures there is evidence of his admiration for older Dutch artists like Vermeer, as well as of Jozef *Israëls in his sympathetic treatment of simple people.

[Charles Samuel Spencer]