Description
Oil, cardboard, 21.5 x 33.5 cm
Signed p.d.; L. Winterowski
Asking price 4000
Estimate 5000 - 5500
Leonard WINTEROWSKI
1875 Chernivtsi - 1926 Warsaw
Popular painter, battle painter. In 1895-1897 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow; initially under Leopold Loeffler, later under Teodor Axentowicz. In 1896 he received a silver medal for his schoolwork. He then continued his education at the Academy in Vienna, where he went as a scholarship holder of the National Department. He began exhibiting early - he debuted in 1897 at an exhibition at the Krakow Society of Friends of Fine Arts. He also exhibited in Lviv and in Lodz, Vienna and Berlin. During World War I, he served in the Austrian army as a painter-war correspondent. After the war he settled in Warsaw. In the earlier period of his career, he painted portraits, landscapes, genre scenes and religious paintings (St. Stanislaus Kostka of 1912 for the St. Elizabeth Church in Lviv). He also did mural painting (polychromy in the collegiate church in Yaroslavl, 1912-13) and book illustration (Twelve Legends and Tales from under Cracow, Lvov 1899). In the later period, he also painted nudes and, above all, battle paintings; most often episodes from the 1920 war. In doing so, he used his own sketches and studies drawn and painted during his military service. These dynamic battle compositions, painted with panache and bravura, found many willing buyers. Since 1920, the artist lived in Warsaw and exhibited many times at the Warsaw Zachęta Society, where a posthumous exhibition of his works was held at the Zachęta in 1928. In 1929 a similar exhibition was opened in Poznan.