Henryk Gotlib (10 January 1890 – 30 December 1966) was a Polish painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and writer, who settled in England during World War II and made a significant contribution to modern British art.

Gotlib was born into a middle-class family in Kraków, where he gained his earliest artistic training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow from 1908 to 1910.

Due to pressure from his parents, he also read law at the university in Krakow during this period, although it was clear from an early age that he had a profound passion for art.

His earliest portraits of his mother, in which he experimented with a variety of styles including that of Vuillard and late Cubism, date back to when he was just 16 years old.

The following year, Gotlib returned to Krakow and became a leading member of the Polish avant-garde 'Formist' movement, exhibiting in Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris.

He went travelling once more from 1933, spending long periods in Italy, Greece and Spain, and met his Scottish wife, Janet Blanche Mareham,[1] in 1938 during a visit to London.

In the same year that this book was published, Gotlib participated in several important exhibitions in Britain, including 'Exhibition of Works of Polish and Czechoslovak Artists', at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum.

In The Burlington Magazine in 1942, Tancred Borenius wrote: "A highly personal sense of colour in a lovely, luminous totality gives the keynote to his art"; Michel Strauss commented on the "strength and sensitivity" of his work in the same Journal in 1961.