Lot 1170. Antoni Piotrowski (1853-1924)
‘L’arrestation d’un gentilhomme polonais, 1863’ / The arrest of a Polish nobleman signed lower right and dated 1882 ‘Paris’ oil on canvas, 48×98 cm Auction: Venduehuis der Notarissen, Pulchri, The Hague, 28 Nov. 1928, lot 93 with ill., vlg. van Citters e.a.

Antoni Piotrowski (1853-1924)
was a Polish romanticist painter who worked as war correspondent and illustrator for various Western European weeklies and periodicals in late-19th century during the Liberation of Bulgaria. Piotrowski was born in 1853 into a family of sheet iron workers in Nietulisko DuŠ¼e near Kunów, then in the Russian sector of the partitioned Poland. From 1869 on, Piotrowski studied painting with professor Wojciech Gerson in Warsaw. Between 1875 and 1877 he studied in Munich with Wilhelm Lindenschmit the Younger. From 1877 to 1879 he studied with Poland’s painter Jan Matejko at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. In 1879, Piotrowski travelled to the newly liberated Principality of Bulgaria as a correspondent of the British weekly newspapers The Graphic and The Illustrated London News as well as the French newsmagazines Illustration and Le Monde Illustré. He moved back to Paris only to return to Bulgaria in 1885 to join the Serbo-Bulgarian War as a Bulgarian volunteer. For his merits during the fighting he was honoured with an Order of Bravery. In 1900 Piotrowski returned to Poland and settled in Warsaw. In 1905, he was a war correspondent in Manchuria. He died in 1924 in Warsaw. Depicted in the present painting is an important event in the history of Poland which is known as the ‘January Uprising of 1863’. This was an uprising in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Latvia, parts of Ukraine, and western Russia)
against the Russian Empire. It began on 22 January 1863 and lasted until the last insurgents were captured in 1864. The uprising began as a spontaneous protest by young Poles against conscription into the Imperial Russian Army. It was soon joined by high-ranking Polish-Lithuanian officers and various politicians. The insurrectionists, severely outnumbered and lacking serious outside support, were forced to resort to guerrilla warfare tactics. Public executions and deportations to Siberia led many Poles to abandon armed struggle and turn instead to the idea of “organic work”: economic and cultural self-improvement. (source: Wikipedia)

Estimate 7,000-9,000 euro. Venduehuis der Notarissen te ’s-Gravenhage, 05/17/19