Born in Berlin, Germany, his father was a successful portrait painter. Goldberg studies in Paris from 1906 to 1910 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and was encouraged by Auguste Renoir; at the Academie Julian under Jean Paul Laurens, Jules Lefebvre and Robert Fleury. Tow other Canaian students were there who were later to distinguish themselves as painters, A.Y. Jackson and John Lyman. Goldberg returned to Berlin where he studied under Lovic Corinth.
Then he taught at the Berlin Academy of Art. Later he travelled to Jerusalem where he managed and taught at the Bezalel Art School for four years. He returned to Paris where he continued to paint and exhibit at the official salons du Printemps, d'Automne and de Tuileries, and held a number of solo exhibits.
He travelled to the south of France and then to Italy and on to Spain where he spent some time at the art colony of Tossa-del-Mar. He came to Canada in 1928 and settled in Montreal. His work has been exhibited in Montreal at the Dominion Gallery as well as in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati and elsewhere.
His subjects include landscapes, fishing villages and the people who live in them, still lifes; circus scenes; ballet dancers, figure studies and others. Robert Ayre summed this up during Goldberg's joint exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Gallery XII) when he noted, “Goldberg's subject is people, but in their idyllic aspects. His Gaspe fishermen are as a graceful as the ballet dancers be likes to paint, or the harlequins seen through rose-tinted spectacles...Jazz bands, beatniks in a cafe, folk dancers as well as the ballet, artists and models, children climbing, a Jewish family around the table at Friday night devotions, flowers—these are Goldberg's subjects and he paints them with ease and charm.” Eric Goldberg and his wife, Regina Seiden Goldberg, lived in Montreal and both are represented in the National Gallery of Canada.
Source: "A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume I: A-F", compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1977
