HOME
*



picture info

World War II Looting Of Poland
The looting of Polish cultural artifacts and industrial infrastructure during World War II was carried out by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union simultaneously after the invasion of Poland of 1939. A significant portion of Poland's cultural heritage, estimated at about half a million art objects, was plundered by the occupying powers. Catalogued pieces are still occasionally recovered elsewhere in the world and returned to Poland. Priceless items of art still considered missing or found in other museums include works by Bernardo Bellotto, Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, Józef Brandt, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Lucas Cranach the Younger, Albrecht Dürer, Anthony van Dyck, Hans Holbein the Younger, Jacob Jordaens, Frans Luycx, Jacek Malczewski, Raphael, Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Henryk Siemiradzki, Veit Stoss, Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski, Leon Wyczółkowski, Jan Matejko, Henri Gervex, Ludwig Buchhorn, Józef Simmler, Henri-Pierre Danloux, Jan Miense Molenaer and many ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Zachęta
The Zachęta National Gallery of Art ( Polish: ''Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki'') is a contemporary art museum in the center of Warsaw, Poland. The Gallery's chief purpose is to present and support Polish contemporary art and artists. With numerous temporary exhibitions of well-known foreign artists, the gallery has also established itself internationally. The word "''zachęta''" means ''encouragement''. The Zachęta Gallery takes its name from ''Towarzystwo Zachęty do Sztuk Pięknych'' (the Society for Encouragement of the Fine Arts), founded in Warsaw in 1860. History Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts Before 1860 there were neither public museums nor libraries nor other generally accessible institutions that allowed for exchange between artists. The repression that resulted from the November Uprising, made higher artistic education virtually impossible. The last major exhibition took place in 1845. After protests by artists during the 1850s, the ''Wystawa Kra ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Anthony Van Dyck
Sir Anthony van Dyck (, many variant spellings; 22 March 1599 – 9 December 1641) was a Brabantian Flemish Baroque artist who became the leading court painter in England after success in the Southern Netherlands and Italy. The seventh child of Frans van Dyck, a wealthy Antwerp silk merchant, Anthony painted from an early age. He was successful as an independent painter in his late teens, and became a master in the Antwerp guild in 1618. By this time he was working in the studio of the leading northern painter of the day, Peter Paul Rubens, who became a major influence on his work. Van Dyck worked in London for some months in 1621, then returned to Flanders for a brief time, before travelling to Italy, where he stayed until 1627, mostly in Genoa. In the late 1620s he completed his greatly admired ''Iconography'' series of portrait etchings, mostly of other artists. He spent five years in Flanders after his return from Italy, and from 1630 was court painter for the arc ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Henri Gervex
Henri Gervex (Paris 10 December 1852 – 7 June 1929 Paris) was a French painter who studied painting under Alexandre Cabanel, Pierre-Nicolas Brisset, and Eugène Fromentin. Biography Early years He was the son of Joséphine Peltier and Félix Nicolas Gervex, a piano maker. When he was 15, a friend of the family helped him get admitted to the atelier of Pierre-Nicolas Brisset. Three years later, he served in the 152nd Battalion of the National Guard. In 1871 he was accepted into the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Alexandre Cabanel, where he studied for five years along with Jean-Louis Forain, Fernand Cormon, and Eugène Damas, a landscape painter. He also apprenticed himself to the Orientalist painter Eugène Fromentin. Debut His early work belonged almost exclusively to the mythological genre, which served as an excuse for the painting of the nude, but not always in the best of taste. His ''Rolla'' of 1878, based on a poem by Alfred de Musset, was rejected by the jur ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Jan Matejko
Jan Alojzy Matejko (; also known as Jan Mateyko; 24 June 1838 – 1 November 1893) was a Polish painter, a leading 19th-century exponent of history painting, known for depicting nodal events from Polish history. His works include large scale oil paintings such as '' Rejtan'' (1866), ''the Union of Lublin'' (1869), '' the Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God'' (1873), or ''the Battle of Grunwald'' (1878). He was the author of numerous portraits, a gallery of Polish monarchs in book form, and murals in St. Mary's Basilica, Kraków. He is considered by many as the most celebrated Polish painter, and sometimes as the "national painter" of Poland. Matejko was among the notable people to receive an unsolicited letter from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, as the latter tipped, in January 1889, into his psychotic breakdown while in Turin. Matejko spent most of his life in Kraków. His teachers at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts included Wojciech Korneli ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Leon Wyczółkowski
Leon Jan Wyczółkowski (; 24 April 1852 – 27 December 1936) was one of the leading painters of the Young Poland movement, as well as the principal representative of Polish Realism in art of the Interbellum. From 1895 to 1911 he served as professor of the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts (ASP) in Kraków, and from 1934, ASP in Warsaw. He was a founding member of the Society of Polish Artists "Sztuka" (Art, 1897). Work Wyczółkowski was born in Huta Miastowska near Garwolin in Congress Poland. At first, in his artistic experience he aimed at devoting himself to the genre of historical painting with documentary realism in the detail. After his trip to Paris though, he changed his focus and began implementing solutions typical of the French Impressionists. He painted dramatic landscapes, nudes and pastoral scenes with impasto and impressionist lighting effects (e.g., "Paddling Fishermen"). For a short while he came under the influence of Symbolism (e.g., "Fossilized Druid ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski
Alfred Jan Maksymilian Kowalski (Alfred ''Wierusz''-Kowalski; 11 October 184916 February 1915) was a Polish painter and representative of the Munich School. Life He was born on 11 October 1849 in Suwałki to father Teofil Kowalski of the Wieruszowa Coat of Arms and mother Teofilia (née Siewierska). Wierusz-Kowalski settled in Munich in 1876 after studies in Warsaw, Prague, and Dresden. He studied for a year at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, and worked under Józef Brandt and Alexander von Wagner. In 1890 he was nominated as an honorary professor of the Munich Academy. He was the most popular Polish painter in Munich, alongside Józef Brandt. His paintings received medals at numerous art exhibitions and were sought-after by collectors and German art dealers. He painted landscapes, generic and historical scenes. After his journey to Africa in 1903 he also undertook oriental themes. His works were sold mostly on the German market and many of them ended in private collections in ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Veit Stoss
Veit Stoss (also: ''Veit Stoß'' and ''Stuoss''; pl, Wit Stwosz; before 1450about 20 September 1533) was a leading German sculptor, mostly working with wood, whose career covered the transition between the late Gothic and the Northern Renaissance. His style emphasized pathos and emotion, helped by his virtuoso carving of billowing drapery; it has been called "late Gothic Baroque". He had a large workshop, and in addition to his own works there are a number by pupils. He is best known for the altarpiece in St. Mary's Basilica in Kraków, Poland. Life According to the contracts and other official documents written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Stoss was born in a place pronounced as Horb or Horbn. Most researchers identify this place with Horb am Neckar near Stuttgart in Germany. However, there are artistic traces indicating that Stoss's early education could take place in the modern Switzerland. Moreover, his brother was certainly born in Aarau in northern Switze ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Henryk Siemiradzki
Henryk Hektor Siemiradzki (24 October 1843 – 23 August 1902) was a Russian-born Polish painter based in Rome, best remembered for his monumental academic art. He was particularly known for his depictions of scenes from the ancient Greek-Roman world and the New Testament, owned by many national galleries of Europe.Henryk Siemiradzki. Selection of Works with Biography and Index
at ''Artyzm.com.'' Retrieved October 24, 2011.
Ewa Micke-Broniarek
Henryk Siemiradzki.
''Magazine "Culture.pl".

picture info

Peter Paul Rubens
Sir Peter Paul Rubens (; ; 28 June 1577 – 30 May 1640) was a Flemish artist and diplomat from the Duchy of Brabant in the Southern Netherlands (modern-day Belgium). He is considered the most influential artist of the Flemish Baroque tradition. Rubens's highly charged compositions reference erudite aspects of classical and Christian history. His unique and immensely popular Baroque style emphasized movement, colour, and sensuality, which followed the immediate, dramatic artistic style promoted in the Counter-Reformation. Rubens was a painter producing altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. He was also a prolific designer of cartoons for the Flemish tapestry workshops and of frontispieces for the publishers in Antwerp. In addition to running a large workshop in Antwerp that produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically educated humanist scholar and dipl ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Rembrandt Van Rijn
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (, ; 15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669), usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker and draughtsman. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art and the most important in Dutch art history.Gombrich, p. 420. Unlike most Dutch masters of the 17th century, Rembrandt's works depict a wide range of style and subject matter, from portraits and self-portraits to landscapes, genre scenes, allegorical and historical scenes, biblical and mythological themes and animal studies. His contributions to art came in a period of great wealth and cultural achievement that historians call the Dutch Golden Age, when Dutch art (especially Dutch painting), whilst antithetical to the Baroque style that dominated Europe, was prolific and innovative. This era gave rise to important new genres. Like many artists of the Dutch Golden Age, suc ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, better known as Raphael (; or ; March 28 or April 6, 1483April 6, 1520), was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period. His father was court painter to the ruler of the small but highly cultured city of Urbino. He died when Raphael was eleven, and Raphael seems to have played a role in managing the family workshop from this point. He trained in the workshop of Perugino, and was described as a fully trained "master" by 1500. He worked in or for several cities in north Italy until in 1508 he moved to Rome at the invitation of the pope, to work on the Vatican Palace. He was given a series of important commissions there and elsewhere in the city, and began to work as an architect. He was s ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Jacek Malczewski
Jacek Malczewski (; 15 July 1854 – 8 October 1929) was a Polish symbolist painter who is one of the most revered painters of Poland, associated with the patriotic Young Poland movement following a century of Partitions. He is regarded as the father of Polish Symbolism. His creative output combined the predominant style of his times with historical motifs of Polish martyrdom, the romantic ideals of independence, Christian and Greek mythology, folk tales, as well as his love of the natural world. He was the father of painter Rafał Malczewski. Childhood Malczewski was born in Radom, Congress Poland, under occupation of the Russian Empire. During his childhood and early youth he was greatly influenced by his father Julian, a Polish patriot and social activist who introduced him to the world of romantic literature inspired by the November Uprising. On his mother's side, he was related to the Szymanowski family whom they often visited on their Masovian country estate in Cyg ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]