Kazimierz Stabrowski “Portrait of the Artist's Wife” 1907

Coal, pastel on paper, signed and dated lower right: “K. Stabrowski 1907”.

Framed: 68x49 cm (41 x 23 cm)

Kazimierz Stabrowski (1869-1929) was a Polish painter, and director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He also founded the first lodges of the Theosophical Society in Poland. In the years 1880 to 1887, he completed his education in Białystok, after which he studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, where he was taught by Pavel Chistyakov, later (from 1895) in Ilya Repin's workshop. At the academy he gained contacts with numerous Polish painters, inter alia with Ferdynand Ruszczyc, Kazimierz Wasilkowski, Henryk Weyssenhoff, and Stanisław Bohusz-Siestrzeńcewicz, as well as with Russians. In 1893, he went on artist travels to the East, Beirut, and Palestine, in which he visited Odessa, Istanbul, Greece, and Egypt. In the years of 1897 to 1898, he did his further studies at the Académie Julian in France; it is there where he met numerous academics inter alia Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, and Jean-Paul Laurens, and has been introduced into the artistic movements of Impressionism and Fauvism. In 1902, he married Julia Janiszewska, a sculptor, who he met at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. From 1902, he became a member of the Society of Polish Artists "Sztuka" (Towarzystwo Artystów Polskich "Sztuka"). In 1903, he moved to live in Warsaw, where he engaged in organisation and pedagogue. Together with Konrad Krzyżanowski he operated a private art school, which led to the reopening of the then closed after the January Uprising, School of Fine Arts in Warsaw.