Dimensions: 76.8 x 121.3 cm
signed, inscribed and dated l.d.: 'Bohdan Kleczynski Munich 87'
signed on the loom with the number: '88', paper auction sticker and fragmentarily preserved paper inventory sticker
Origin
private collection, United States
Christie's auction house, New York, February 2016
private collection, Poland
Biography
Bohdan Kleczynski was one of the more prominent painters belonging to the circle of "Polish Munich painters". After studying in Odessa and Krakow, he studied economics at the University of Heidelberg. He began studying painting at the Warsaw Drawing Class under Wojciech Gerson. In 1880 he stayed briefly in Florence, and then enrolled in the Naturklasse at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He also studied at Jozef Brandt's private school. In 1888 he returned to his homeland and took up farming in Zielony Rog and, from 1889, at the Knyszkowice estate in Podolia, where he raised horses. In 1918 he moved to Cracow.
He painted mainly genre and hunting scenes, horsemen, sleigh rides, wolf attacks and scenes in which the horse motif reigned supreme. In his work, shaped in the circle of Józef Brandt, one can also find inspiration from the paintings of Juliusz Kossak, Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski and Józef Chełmoński.
In 1888, the artist took part in a jubilee exhibition in Munich, and he also exhibited his works in Poland - at the TZSP (1879-1881, 1889) and the Krywult Salon (1883,1888-1889) in Warsaw, and at the TPSP in Krakow (1881, 1883). His highly successful paintings were also sold in the USA and England. Today only works from this Munich period are actually known. Paintings painted in later years in Ukraine were mostly lost during the First World War.
