In the second half of the nineteenth century, Poland had an incredible concentration of artistic talent, entering a vigorous phase in artistic development. It was a time when Polish national sentiment was on the rise following decades of successive failed uprisings against Prussia, Russia and Austria. The restrictions imposed by the partitioning powers towards the end of the eighteenth century on Polish educational institutions, including art colleges, shaped the country for many decades to come and by the mid-nineteenth century had caused an exodus of young artists to study abroad, mostly in Munich or Vienna.
These artists, today recognised as painters of a Golden age, wished to link their art with the life and needs of the Polish people. They depicted the tumultuous history of their home country with its dramatic uprisings, the attractiveness of the Polish landscape and associated folklore and they also embraced Realism.
Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski is considered one of the foremost Polish painters of the nineteenth century with one of his most important works Coming Home offered for sale in our European & British Art sale on 13 July. His training as an artist led him from Warsaw via Dresden and Prague to Munich, where he took up his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1873. Typically for the Munich school painters, the artist approached his subjects narratively, in compositions full of movement and colour. Coming Home depicts a wedding procession, with the party racing home in their horse-drawn cart towards the viewer through the open steppe. The wide, cinematic picture plane affording a dramatic visual sweep of the countryside under a vast grey-blue sky.
Whilst this particular generation of Polish artists were able to showcase their works in Paris Vienna and Munich, towards the end of the nineteenth century they became known in America. From the outset, Wieursz-Kowalski's work held a particular attraction to Americans, with his evocative works attracting numerous collectors from New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia. Coming Home is a fantastic example of a work that would have had such appeal, and until its appearance at auction, has had a loving home in a New England Private Collection. A painting of this scale would certainly have been painted as a submission to a major exhibition, and indeed it was purchased by the grand or great-grandfather of the present owner at a world’s fair in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Many of the most prominent American buyers were urban businessmen who romanticised country life as beneficial to good health and morals - particularly appealing as their fortunes were made from the industrialisation of rural communities at home.
