Figurative painter Jerome Witkin was born in 1939 in Brooklyn, New York and received his MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970. Witkin’s figural paintings often deal with themes of death and adversity. Witkin’s style of painting contains elements of abstract expressionism and social realism. He constructs grim narrative scenes and psychological portraits through a combination of abstraction and naturalism, sometimes employing continuous narration (depicting multiple moments in time in one image). His paintings appear like memories: some parts are painfully clear, while others remain eerily indiscernible.

After Witkin’s father died at age fifty, Witkin was inspired to better understand his father through research into Jewish history. This led to a series of largescale narrative paintings about the Holocaust completed over a 23-year period. This study—Witkin always works from studies from life—was likely made for one of his Holocaust paintings and closely resembles a figure in the foreground of his 1997 painting "The German Girl."