© Josef Herman estate

Herman began this work in the late 1970s, reworking it in the 1990s. It was known by a number of titles including 'In Memory of the Fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto', 'In Memory of the Holocaust Survivors', 'In Memory of the Holocaust Victims' and 'Tribute to Goya's Black Pictures'. It is related to a preliminary study, which in 1993 was reproduced on the front of his wife Nini's novel 'Vellogria', depicting a grieving woman. Herman wrote in his notebook that he had begun the work as a tribute to the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, 'but the longer I worked on it I put in more emotions which wanted to cry out for all the victims of our times: the two million gypsies, the six million Jews etc. The list is too long for a small page.' He later referred to the painting as 'my only painting of suffering and protest'. Herman had long been inspired by Goya: an early watercolour, 'A lecture on Goya', depicted a working-class audience looking at a screen displaying a slide of the Goya self-portrait just glimpsed in the background to his masterly family portrait, 'My Family and I' (1941), painted during his sojourn in Glasgow. Following this, Herman learned in 1942 that his entire family had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto. During his subsequent breakdown, he was nursed back to health by fellow Polish-Jewish refugee Jankel Adler.