The last king of Poland, Stanisław August Poniatowski (r. 1764-95), commissioned a number of paintings on Polish history from Marcello Bacciarelli (1731–1818) and vedute of Warsaw from Canaletto (Bernardo Belotto, 1720–1780). Other early painters on Polish themes include Jean Pierre Norblin de la Gourdaine (1745–1830); his pupil Aleksander Orłowski (1777–1832), whose watercolours, drawings, and etchings depict scenes of everyday life and political events like the Kościuszko Uprising; Rome-educated Franciszek Smuglewicz (1745–1807); and Zygmunt Vogel (1764–1826), who documented the country’s historical monuments.
After the Partitions, which by 1795 ended Polish independence, the popular verse collection Śpiewy historyczne (“Historical songs”, 1816) by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz inspired early historical painting. Similar illustrative works, arranged in historical cycles, were produced by professional painters such as Michał Stachowicz (1768–1825). The sculptors Jakub Tatarkiewicz (1798–1854) and Tomasz Oskar Sosnowski (1810–1888) produced portrait medallions and busts of historical figures (full-size statues not being an option due to lack of patronage).
By the mid-century, art critics debated the Poles’ capability of creating their own visual arts, and established as a guiding principle that art should be committed to the cause of the nation. Paintings (historical, landscape, and genre paintings) accordingly focused on “native” motifs from the various regions and periods of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Censorship often imposed a coded choice of topic; thus, Machabeusze (“The Maccabees”, 1842; depicting the ancient Jewish insurgents of that name) by the Nazarene Wojciech Korneli Stattler (1800–1872) was commonly seen as a national allegory.
Art students would begin their studies in Warsaw or Cracow, and continue their training in Munich, Dresden, Vienna, or St Petersburg, often finishing in Paris. A number of academic painters specialized in historical scenes thematized not only the biblical or classical, but also the national past, the most popular being Aleksander Lesser (1814–1884), Władysław Łuszczkiewicz (1828–1900), and Józef Simmler (1823–1868), who adopted the style of Paul Delaroche and who won widespread praise for his Śmierć Barbary Radziwiłłówny (“The death of Barbara Radziwiłł”, a 16th-century queen, 1860). The Polish school of battle-painting started to develop and gain popularity with the public, its leading figure being January Suchodolski (1797–1875), a pupil of Horace Vernet. Later on, Juliusz Kossak’s (1824–1899) watercolours glorifying the Polish nobility past and present gained wide popularity. In the plastic arts, Cyprian Godebski (1835–1909) sculpted a number of monuments to great Poles, while Teofil Lenartowicz (1822–1893), a poet and ethnographer, created relief depictions of historical scenes.
After the mid-century, and as part of a general European trend, artists began a search for the national character in the contemporary countryside rather than in the heroic past. The trend began with Jan Feliks Piwarski (1795–1859), who specialized in rustic genre scenes, and with the vedute of Marcin Zaleski (1796–1877); it was continued by Franciszek Kostrzewski (1826–1911), Józef Szermentowski (1833–1876), and Aleksander Kotsis (1836–1877). The turn from “past to peasant” was also noticeable in the work of Wojciech Gerson (1831–1901), a leading art teacher, illustrator, and critic based in Warsaw: after a good many historical scenes (Kiejstut and Witold taken prisoner by Jagiello, 1873; Jan III Sobieski with his family, 1882-84; The ghost of Barbara Radziwiłł, 1886; Casimir the Restorer, 1887; Kościuszko, 1890) he turned, in the 1890s, towards realist landscape painting.
Meanwhile, in the 1860s, the two painters had emerged who more than any others have shaped a Polish national imagery: Artur Grottger and Jan Matejko. Vienna-based Grottger (1837–1867) produced collections of drawings on the January Uprising and its run-up: Warszawa (2 vols, 1861-62), Polonia (1863), Lithuania (1866), and Wojna (“War”, 1866-67); immediately distributed in print, they gained enormous and widespread popularity. Matejko (1838–1893), a pupil of Łuszczkiewicz at the Cracow School of Fine Arts and later himself a long-time teacher there, used his Academic style to express his vision of Poland’s national history. His large canvases, among others Rejtan (1866; on the Diet delegate of that name who with patriotic pathos resisted the Partition of 1772), Hołd pruski (“The Prussian tribute”, 1882; evoking how in 1525 Ducal Prussia was given in fief to Albert of Prussia, last Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, by his suzerain, the Polish King Sigismund), and Konstytucja 3 maja (1891, “The Constitution of 3 May 1791”), became iconic nation-wide. The often-recycled Bitwa pod Grunwaldem (“The Battle of Grunwald”, 1879; on the victory over the Teutonic Knights in 1410) inspired the climactic scene of Sienkiewicz’s novel Krzyżacy (“The Teutonic Knights”, 1899) and the battle’s fervent commemoration of 1902 and, especially, 1910. In 1878 Matejko was presented with a sceptre to honour his almost regal sway over Polish art and public opinion.
By this time, painting in western Europe was moving away from Academic historicism, and these modernizing influences were also reaching Poland. Although traditional battle painting continued to find popular favour (Józef Brandt, 1841–1915; Wojciech Kossak, 1857–1942), a taste for Realism focused mostly on the experiences of the rank and file of the 1863 insurgents; rustic Realism made its presence felt in the work of the Munich-educated artists Maksymilian Gierymski (1846–1874), Stanisław Witkiewicz (1850–1915), and Józef Chełmoński (1849–1914).
At the turn of the century the combined influences of Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Neo-Romanticism, and Impressionism merged into the movement called Młoda Polska (“Young Poland”), which found its centre in Cracow, where, under Habsburg rule, artistic life enjoyed more freedom. The School of Fine Arts there was reformed on modern principles and turned into the Academy in 1900. Even so, the principle of commitment to the national cause was maintained to a significant extent. The Art Society (Sztuka, 1897-1936), gathering the foremost modernists from all three parts of the country, aimed to serve the nation by raising visual arts to international standards and to position Polish art abroad as a national achievement.
The two most important artists developing the national idiom in this period were pupils of Matejko: Jacek Malczewski and Stanisław Wyspiański. Malczewski (1854–1929) began his career as a painter of folk tales and of scenes in the life of Polish prisoners exiled to Siberia (inspired by Słowacki’s 1838 symbolical elegy Anhelli, which had thematized Siberia as a Polish Golgotha). Later he developed his own symbolic imagery, influenced by Arnold Böcklin as well as Polish Romantic and Neo-Romantic poetry, and featuring fauns and chimeras in local settings. Wyspiański (1869–1907), a playwright, theatre director, painter, and designer, was more influenced by Art Nouveau. His designs for stained-glass windows depict a Polish-Slavic imagery inspired by local folklore and Greek mythology in equal parts.
Landscape painting (Leon Wyczółkowski, 1852–1936; Jan Stanisławski, 1860–1907) adopted open-air and impressionistic influences but continued to emphasize a nationalist attachment to the land; witness also the work of Julian Fałat (1853–1929) and Ferdynand Ruszczyc (1870–1936). As folklore studies fed a fascination with peasant life, painters began to specialize in rustic scenes from the Cracow countryside and Galicia: Włodzimierz Przerwa Tetmajer (1862–1923), Teodor Axentowicz (1859–1938). Similar subject-matter appeared in sculpture by Antoni Kurzawa (1842–1898) and others. Monuments to Mickiewicz and Chopin were designed by Kurzawa, Teodor Rygier, and later Wacław Szymanowski (1859–1930), who also created allegories of Polish history.
Although the creation of an independent Polish state in 1918 absolved artists from the need to proclaim a national identity, the trend was continued; folk imagery was used in Art Deco designs in order to express the identity of the new nation-state.
