Henryk SIEMIRADZKI (1843 - 1902), Portrait of a Roman woman (1896)
gouache, gray-beige paper pasted on cardboard
35.5 x 29 cm
Signed and dated l.d.: "H.Siemiradzki Roma 1896".
On the reverse inscription in watercolor paint: "H.Siemiradzki / Roma 1896".
Object with research and conservation opinion of prof. Dariusz Markowski
Henryk Siemiradzki (1843 - 1902) - prominent academic painter; initially a pupil of painter Dmitry Bezperch in Kharkov, a graduate of the natural science department of Kharkov University - from 1864 he studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. He received five silver and two gold medals for his student works. In 1871, as a scholarship recipient of the Academy, he went to Munich, where he stayed for a year, studying independently and maintaining contacts with the colony of Polish artists there. From 1872 he lived permanently in Rome; initially he had a studio in via Margutta, and from 1884 in his own palazzo in via Gaetta. Honored with membership in the European Academies - St. Luke's Academy in Rome (1880), the Academy in St. Petersburg, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, Turin, repeatedly awarded medals at exhibitions, decorated with state orders (including the French Legion of Honor and the Italian order Corona d'Italia), he enjoyed great recognition and fame. He maintained constant and lively contacts with the country - he sent paintings to exhibitions, and in 1879 donated his famous painting Candlesticks of Christianity to the city of Krakow, giving rise to the collection of the National Museum. He painted curtains for theaters in Krakow (1896) and Lviv (1900; the artist's gift to the city). He sought subjects for his paintings primarily in antiquity; in the history, life and myths of ancient Greece or Rome. But he also created religious scenes (Ascension), genre paintings and portraits. With masterful technique, he painted both monumental, theatrically staged and crowded canvases, and intimate compositions, set either in ancient scenery or in contemporary realities (With the Viaticum, With Comfort and Help). He painted decorative plafonds (Spring, Dawn, Light and Darkness), and was the author of a set of paintings in the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow 1875-1879). He was fond of painting the landscape, treated either as a backdrop for the scenes set in it, and sometimes as an independent landscape plunged into the falling dusk or bathed in sunlight. With particular mastery he recreated the effects caused by light penetrating through the branches of trees, which, as H. Sienkiewicz wrote, cast a strong shadow, among which vibrate golden spots, formed by the sun's rays pressing between the leaves /.../ No one paints the movement of the sun's rays like Siemiradzki.
