Portrait of Jacob Auspitz

The old Jew on this large oil painting is Jacob Auspitz, who was a Talmud teacher in Óbuda, and probably lived to be 112 years old, between 1744–1856. There is a local legend regarding this portrait: he did not allow himself to be painted in his lifetime, so Adolf Pichler, a painter from Munich who was in Óbuda at the time, painted the picture after his death. Instead of his name, he wrote a Mishnah quotation on the picture: “Don’t look at the vessel, but at what it contains.”