A Century of Chess: Georg Salwe (1900-1909)
As Mozart is to Salieri and Shakespeare is to Jonson, so Rubinstein is to Georg Salwe. It's hard to think of another player who, without ever having been a trainer or second, is encompassed so completely in somebody else's shadow.
I'll save the more picaresque version of the story for my post on Rubinstein, but the basics of it are that Rubinstein, as a gauche and very shy 21-year-old, moved to Lodz, then the most cosmopolitan city in Poland, and became obsessively fixated on defeating the strongest local player - the indomitable Georg Salwe. The players tied a match +5-5 in 1903. In 1904, Rubinstein succeeded in edging out Salwe +5-3, and out of that school of hard knocks - the story would have it - came Rubinstein invictus while Salwe receded into obscurity.
Actually, Salwe kind of accompanied Rubinstein into international chess. He had started very late - he wouldn't play in his first international tournament until he was almost 45 - but became a fully credible member of the elite, often finishing towards the middle of the pack in tournaments while Rubinstein won or was close to winning. It was true, though, that after about 1904 the pupil had completely superseded the master, and Rubinstein went on to score +16-3=8 against Salwe with Salwe's wins coming from blunders and time forfeits.
Nobody ever seemed to have much to say about Salwe personally - and if it's tempting to imagine him as the old salt pushing his former protégé on to ever greater heights, I haven't come across anything about their dynamic. He was apparently born to a prosperous family in Warsaw, seems to have been a successful businessman in rapidly-industrializing Lodz, and found himself with enough leisure time in the late 1900s to dedicate himself to chess for several years. 
He had a boggy style, very similar to Ratmir Kholmov, who also reached the international elite late in life - both were defensive players with little book knowledge and tremendous resourcefulness. Salwe had, as Frank Marshall wrote, "a knack of worming out of bad positions." And, in a more grandiloquent version of the same idea, Georg Marco wrote: "We first learn from misfortune. This maxim applies as well to chess players. Many grandmasters, in situations of misfortune become less – much less – while others, to whom otherwise little has been given in the way of alertness, when submitting to the blows of fate grow in stature and reveal themselves as heroes. Salwe has to be assigned to this latter class of character. He never loses his cool self-possession. Good fortune does not make him exuberant, ill fortune does not cause him to lose heart, and although by playing every move he hopes for the best, he is always prepared for the worst."
Apart from his contribution to Rubinstein's career, the easily-underestimated Salwe has left very little legacy in chess. I find myself profiling him because I wanted to put together a 'tournament' of the top sixteen players of the decade 1900-1909, left a couple of spots open and held a 'interzonal' of also-rans to see who would qualify - and, actually, wasn't particularly surprised when Salwe won that tournament easily over more famous opponents. 
In real life, Dusseldorf 1908 was the only major international event where he came close to the leaders, but he never embarrassed himself either - and was clearly a tough opponent for everybody other than Rubinstein.
Salwe's Style
1. The Art of Restricted Positions
One practical lesson that I've learned about chess is that elegance and beauty take you only so far; in competitive play, games are won as often as not by common sense and tenacity. Like a soccer team that crowds all of its players in the mouth of the goal, Salwe specialized in falling back, in maneuvering with very limited space, and waiting for his moment to counter-attack, which could often be deep in the endgame.
2. Awkwardness
A related theme is the art of winning ugly. I don't think I've ever seen this pawn structure with one pawn on d4 and another on d6, but Salwe twice won impressive games with it - against Olland and Schlechter - and the structure actually proves to be very useful in preventing a rook from getting behind the passed pawn. I don't think this is a fluke exactly, more a case of Salwe having a flexible attitude towards chess and being willing to steer towards unattractive positions that other strong players would reject.
