Art & Culture
July 02, 2021 For the first time the National Museum of Warsaw is casting light on the remarkable life and works of Anna Bilińska with a new exhibition aimed at restoring her memory and her place in the Polish artistic canon. Tomasz Gzell/PAP
Relatively unknown in her home country during her short lifetime, 19th century painter Anna Bilińska was a pioneer for female artists who followed, defying conventions, overcoming personal adversity and succeeding in attracting critical acclaim abroad.
Notably, she was the first Polish female artist to earn fame in Paris, considered the most important artistic centre of Europe in the second-half of the 19th century.
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The name Saxo might sound a bit odd. In fact, it is a Latinized form of an attested Norse Germanic name Saxi (Saksi, Sachso), that is more than likely related to the Saxons and their name. At the time of Saxo Grammaticus’ life, it was a common name used in Denmark.
The actual surname of this historian is, however, unknown - Grammaticus is simply a “nickname” that he earned later in his life. It means “
the Learned ”. Whether or not this nickname was in use during his life is likewise unknown - the name
Grammaticus appears first in the abovementioned Jutland Chronicle, written well after his death, and the later Zealand Chronicle (
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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