The period of Antokolski's life spent in Vilnius is not well researched and historians give different accounts of his biography. In the past, encyclopaedias and other publications have given the year of birth as 1843. In 2000, a worker at the Lithuanian State Historical Archives discovered a metric record proving that Antokolskis was born in 1840. From 1856 to 1861, he studied carving. His first works were noticed by the wife of Nazimov, the Governor-General of Vilnius, and her recommendations helped the future sculptor to enter the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. After graduating, he studied in Berlin, lived in Rome in 1871 and in Paris from 1879.
Died in Bad Homburg, Germany, in 1902. In the same year, during the transport of his remains to St. Petersburg, a stop was made at Vilnius railway station so that the public could say goodbye to the Vilnius-born sculptor. He was buried in the Preobrazhensky Jewish Cemetery in St. Petersburg.
Antokolsky was famous for his sculptures of historical figures (e.g. Russian Tsars: "Ivan the Terrible", "Peter the Great", "Ivan III"), and for his works on religious and philosophical themes. His work is characterised by Jewish characters and themes ("The Dispute over the Talmud", "The Head of a Jew", etc.). Most of Antokolski's works are preserved in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
M. Antokolski lived in Vilnius only until the age of 18. Later, he returned to his homeland regularly. During his stay in Vilnius, he created his early works "The Jewish Tailor" and "The Miser". He was commissioned to create a statue of the Russian Empress Catherine II, which he created in Paris during his regular visits to Vilnius. The monument was unveiled after the sculptor's death in 1904 in Vilnius, in the Cathedral Square, and in 1915 it was dismantled and transported to Russia, but it has not survived.
In 1906, a memorial plaque was unveiled in the doorway of a house in Vilnius, at 25 Didžioji Street (now the Old Town District). The inscription on the plaque states that the sculptor was born and lived in this house. In 1976, the art historian Vladas Drėma wrote that the story behind the plaque was different. Antokolskis received the house as his wife's dowry after his marriage in 1872 and entrusted it to his father to manage. It is believed that the memorial plaque stating that Antokolski was born in this house was put up after the sculptor's death by relatives who had inherited a large brick house in order to hide the sculptor's origins (his father was an innkeeper), birthplace and real name (Morduch). The sculptor's contemporaries and scholars claimed that he was in fact born and raised in his father's wooden house on a secluded street in Subačiaus . In 1993, Genrichas Agranovskis, a worker at the Vilnius Jewish Museum, wrote on the basis of archival documents that a letter from the sculptor's father, who lived in the house at 208 Didžioji Street (property No. 208 includes the current house No. 25), had been preserved, because of a conflict between the sculptor's father and his neighbours regarding the construction of an icehouse over their house. This document proves that this is the same house where Antokolskis was born.
In 2003, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the sculptor's death, another memorial plaque was unveiled on the same building at 25 Vilniaus Didžioji St., but from the side of Antokolskis St. (sculpture by Vytautas Zaranka). The plaque reads in Lithuanian and Russian that the sculptor Markas Antokolskis (1840-1902) was born and lived in this house. By the way, the memorial plaque gives the sculptor's actual year of birth as a correction.
