This autumn Mr. Douglas Bernard Schaper, a U.S. citizen, donated three paintings by David Labkovski to the Art Collection of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum. Important locations in Jewish Vilnius – the old Jewish cemetery in Šnipiškės, the Great Synagogue, and the Shulhoif (the synagogue courtyard) are depicted in the paintings. The paintings bear the artist‘s signature and are dated 1937, 1946 and 1949 respectively.

The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum would like to extend its sincere gratitude to Mr. Schaper for this gift. The museum is also truly grateful to Mr. Schaper for the provided financial support for the restoration of the donated paintings.

The gift of Mr. Schaper is meaningful to the museum for yet another reason. The painter David Labkovski is a prominent personality of the Lithuanian Jewish art. His works are in demand at the moment: sold for collections, displayed in exhibitions.

Labkovski was born in Vilnius in 1906. Before the Nazi occupation he used to paint scenes of the lives of Vilna Jews. According to some sources, he belonged to Jung Vilne (Young Vilnius), a group of Jewish painters and writers. In 1932 he worked as a designer of the Jewish theatre in Moscow and in 1935 studied in the Art Academy of Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg). In 1938 Labkovski was sent to a Soviet Labour camp in Siberia. Upon his return to Vilnius, from 1946 to 1958 he painted scenes of the pre-war Jewish life in Vilnius. In 1958 the painter and his wife left to Israel. There the painter created a series of works „Shalom Aleichem and his heroes“. In 1959, the first exhibition of Labkovski was inaugurated. It displayed artworks, depicting the life of Jews in Vilnius before and after the war. In 1970 Labkovski started painting landscapes of Jerusalem and Tzafat, flowers and fruits, using brighter colours. The painter died in 1991.

Until now, the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum had only a few paintings of this painter. Thanks to the generous gift of Mr. Schaper, the collection of the works of David Labkovski became more diverse. Photography supplied – courtesy of Paulius Račiūnas.