Wilhelm Wachtel (1875 Lvov - 1952 New York), Portrait of a Woman, 1934

Biography
Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow in 1895-97 under Leopold Loeffler, later also in the studio of Leon Wyczółkowski (1896-99). He continued his studies with Nikolaus Gysis at the Munich Academy. He was associated with the artistic community of Lviv. For many years he lived in Vienna. From there he went to Paris for a year (1911), and traveled to Palestine three times (1922, 1929, 1932), where he settled permanently from 1936. After the outbreak of World War II, he moved to the United States. He painted fairy-tale-symbolic compositions, genre scenes with Jewish themes, portraits, nudes, city views and landscapes. In addition, he was involved in book illustration, printmaking and postcard design. He presented his works at exhibitions of the Lviv and Krakow Society of Friends of Fine Arts, as well as at Warsaw's Zachęta Gallery, where his monographic exhibition was held in 1935. Older literature reports that Wachtel died in 1942 in a car accident. Recent research, however, reveals the facts that he actually died after a long struggle with cancer in a New York hospital a decade later.