Lately in Polish social media suddenly one of the 19th century paintings made a significant appearance: it is “Jewess with Oranges” by Aleksander Gierymski and I decided to write about it here. It is going to be about relation between painting and photography in the 19th century – I have…
Recently, while I have been preparing my radio programme on “Battle of Grunwald” by Jan Matejko (1878, the National Museum in Warsaw) I came across an interesting information on the painting’s history. That information was given by rather a respectable source, that is a blog of conservators of the National…
Lately I had a pleasure to write a short text on “Victorian Post-Mortem Photography” (in Tygodnik Powszechny, in Polish), mainly focusing on confronting some popular (but erroneous) myths on this subject. No-one would really take a creepy picture of a corpse posed on a stand (those stands would not be…
Romanticism is one of the most important movements in the history of Polish culture. Nevertheless, in fact we did not have many painters that would be truly the representatives of theRomantic art: not only in the subject of their paintings but also in their style. Romantic painting is often described…
There are the moments, when the historian of art meets a dead end. There are some paintings that resemble nothing or the ones that resemble too many others. There are the paintings which are undatable and the painters that have to remain unknown. But sometimes there is a way to…