The Marriage Proposal / Family Gathering.

SCHUTZMAN, LEO

Russian-born American, 1878-1962

Oil on canvas. Signed by the artist lower left.

Leo Schutzman was a Russian immigrant who founded a lace and embroidery manufacturing business in the United States from which he retired, aged 74. At that point he first began painting. Mostly scenes of Jewish religious life remembered from childhood, he developed a reputation in the New York of the 1950’s as a Jewish Grandma Moses. After Schutzman’s death in 1962, his art dropped from public view only to re-emerge some 20 years later when paintings of his were acquired by the Jewish Museum, New York.