The castle in Niepołomice began as one of many fortifications throughout Małopolska initiated by King Kazimierz the Great in the 14th century, however this one soon became his favourite residence which he used as a retreat from the royal seat in Kraków. Kazimierz wasn’t the only king to fav
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The National Museum in Warsaw, which has more than 800,000 artworks in its collection, is just one of Poland’s many important museums. It’s also one of the places where these five paintings can be found.
Earlier versions of the descriptions of these paintings first appeared in 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die
, edited by Stephen Farthing (2018). Writers’ names appear in parentheses.
Meeting with the Village Mayor (1873)
While the Barbizon school of painters in France were propounding their theories on realism in art from around 1830 to 1870, there was a similar trend for realism in Poland. One of the leading figures in Polish Realist art was Józef Chełmoński, whose paintings are unerringly convincing. Although the artist traveled to Paris in 1875, where his work was received with enthusiasm, he never lost the distinctly Polish quality to his paintings. He trained in Warsaw under Wojciech Gerson, who taught many of the masters of 19th-century Polish art an