Mercy

During his Parisian period, Leopold Gottlieb produced many depictions of stories from the New Testament. By situating them in contemporary settings, he was able to universalise their message. Mercy is one of those paintings. It shows a male figure on crutches, his arm outstretched, waiting in the harsh sun for a small donation. He is accompanied by a bony shaggy dog in the foreground, ​​sitting in the lower right corner of the painting. In placing the animal there, the artist found a perfect balance for his diagonal composition and gave the depiction a sense of peace and harmony. Gottlieb skilfully applied the contrast between the warm colours on the walls and masonry and the emerald green of the sky, the blue accents around the man and in the shadowed parts of his clothes to convey the scorching temperature and spotlight the plight of the beggar and his companion.

The oil addresses what became an acute and significant problem after the First World War, yet its refined colours and the simplified, slightly geometric forms of the individual and his surroundings reveal its linkage to the then dominant trends in painting. This work is part of the global art created in Paris in the 1920s and perfectly corresponds with it. It took years before similar artistic means came to Poland, for example in the work of Tymon Niesiołowski.