The painting, dated circa 1936 (oil, plywood, 75 x 64 cm), is a portrait study of a slender boy, viewed in profile, down to his hips. The portrayed boy's head is perched on a long neck emerging from a spread, wide shirt collar. His nose is prominent, his eyes gazing into the distance, his mouth slightly parted. He wears a flat light gray cap. The shirt sleeve is arranged in precisely rendered folds. The boy's hands are bent at the elbows, extended forward, the fingers of his left hand clenched, in his right hand he holds a stick-like object (a flower?). The painting is maintained in a uniform colour tone, with the figure painted in various tones of light brown, turning pink in some areas of the complexion, and light greys. Around the figure spreads a kind of glow in the colour of warm brown, other parts of the background uniform, light beige. There is no signature.
Jan Gotard (1898-1943) – a painter, illustrator, graphic artist, member of the Brotherhood of St Luke, co-author of seven paintings painted for the New York World's Fair (1939). He came from a completely assimilated Jewish family. He studied law at the University of Warsaw and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. His work is predominantly composed of portraits and genre portrait studies; he also painted landscapes, still lifes and nudes. One of his works was presented at a post-war exhibition commemorating Jewish artists murdered during the Second World War. Józef Sandel mentioned him in an article about this exhibition entitled "57 Jewish artists-designers, martyrs of the 1939-1945 occupation": "the artist is a member of the St. Luke's group of artists – he comes, as it were, from another world, and yet, this ascetic professor of the Warsaw academy fell into the clutches of the Nazi 'laws'. For, lo and behold, in the year of our Lord 1944, after the birth of Christ, this devout Christian was murdered simply because the features of a Jew were discovered within him when encountered on the street" ("Opinia. Pismo syjonistyczno-demokratyczne", 1948, no. 36). According to Marian Fuks, the artist hid on the "Aryan side" after the outbreak of the war, but, captured by the Gestapo, he died together with his mother in the Pawiak prison as a "hiding Jew" (Marian Fuks, Żydzi w Warszawie, Poznań/Daszewice 1997, p. 346).
