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…
Fake news from 90 years ago?
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…
The lost Holy Family
The National Museum in Cracow preserves two pairs of altar-wings, which are the remains of the retable from Lusina. This retable was a pentaptych (altarpiece with two pairs of wings), created in Cracow at the beginning of the 16th century. Some of its panels were painted, but the main opening…
“Hidden Mothers” in the old photographs
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…