About the artist:

Elias M. Grossman, the Jewish-American artist who today holds a very important place in American art as a painter and engraver, the son of Kobrin, close to Bialystok, who has now received the Washington Art Museum prize for his painting, the “Western Wall,” belonged to those who undertook that road. In America Elias Grossman arrived as a son of an immigrant at the age of thirteen, his father immigrated to America years before but did not amass a large fortune and the young Grossman had to undertake hard work when he was still a youngster. After he finished his public school and high school, he started working as a hat maker. But it seemed it was not destined that the poor immigrant youth would lose his days in the miserable shop because from an early age he was attracted to painting and after his hours of studies in the east-side school he would roam around in the nearby avenue and paint old people and plain Jews who sat there and spoke about politics.