Boris Schatz (1867–1932), painter and sculptor; founder of the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem. Schatz was born in Varna, province of Kovno, Lithuania. The son of a melammed, he was sent to the yeshivah in Vilna, but broke away from his family and religious studies and turned to art. In 1889 he went to Paris and worked under the sculptor Antokolsky, and the painter Cormon. He was invited in 1895 to Bulgaria where he became court sculptor to Prince Ferdinand and was a founder of the Royal Academy of Art in Sofia. In 1900 he received the gold medal in the Paris Salon for his "Head of Old Woman." After meeting Theodor Herzl in 1903, he became an enthusiastic Zionist. Schatz first proposed the idea of an art school at the 1905 Zionist Congress and when it was accepted went to Palestine to execute it. Three years later, he settled in Jerusalem, where he established the Bezalel School of Art (1906), to which he soon added a small museum. Schatz arranged exhibitions of the Bezalel crafts in Europe and the U.S. These were the first displays of the products of Erez Israel exhibited abroad.