You are bidding on a set of three beautiful wooden paintings depicting the Jewish Holidays of Yom Kippur, Passover and Purim. Each piece is signed by Arthur Szys with the inscription: “New Canaan, 48”.

If you grew up Jewish in the United States, your grandparents—or your best friend’s grandparents—probably owned either a copy of Arthur Szyk’s Passover Haggadah, his “Visual History of Israel,” or a framed “Proclamation of the Establishment of the State of Israel”.  What your grandparents probably didn’t know is those popular works barely scratch the surface of Szyk’s Jewish art.

Arthur Szyk (June 16, 1894 – September 13, 1951) was a graphic artist, book illustrator, stage designer and caricaturist. Arthur Szyk was born into a Jewish family in Lodz, in the part of Poland which was under Russian rule in the 19th century. He always regarded himself both as a Pole and a Jew. From 1921, he lived and created his works mainly in France and Poland, and in 1937 he moved to the United Kingdom. In 1940 he settled permanently in the United States, where he was granted American citizenship in 1948.

Arthur Szyk became a renowned graphic artist and book illustrator as early as the interwar period – his works were exhibited and published not only in Poland, but also in France, the United Kingdom, Israel, and the United States. Today, Szyk is a well-known and often exhibited artist only in his last home country – the United States.

“We Jews have been telling the story of Passover through the Haggadah for almost a millennium, but never has it been as stirringly visualized as by Arthur Szyk.”

- Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Maus, 2008