jozef brandt

Polish painter. Art visionary. Studies in Paris and Munich (representative of the so-called Munich school). Creator of excellent paintings of battle scenes, horses and steppes.

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He was born on February 11, 1841 in Szczebrzeszyn.

The artist's family lived in Warsaw already in the 11th century, among his ancestors were famous doctors and architects. Józef Brandt was born in Szczebrzeszyn on February 1841, XNUMX, where his father Alfons Brandt, who worked as a doctor in the Zamoyski estate, established a hospital.

In 1845, the Brandt family returned to Warsaw, where the artist's father died a year later, helping the poor during the typhus epidemic. Mother and son lived in the Konary estate leased by her brother, Stanisław Lessel. It was here that young Józef Brandt began learning horse riding.

Intimacy with horses in childhood was the beginning of an attachment that was to last a lifetime.

In 1849, young Brandt returned to Warsaw to start studying at Jan Nepomucen Leszczyński's real school.

In the years 1854-1858 he studied at the Noble Institute, where his drawing teacher, with whom he became close acquaintance, was Juliusz Kossak.

From October 1858 to November 1860 he stayed in Paris, where he studied singing as well as drawing and painting in Léon Cogniet's atelier.

After returning from Paris, he went to Ukraine for the first time in the company of Juliusz Kossak. Impressions from this trip became for Brandt a source of lifelong fascination with Kresy and borderland life.
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If he ever painted portraits, it was usually horse portraits. He also portrayed the horses themselves. His great passion was the stud he owned in Orońsko.

During his absence, her stepson Władysław Pruszak took care of her.

The looting of the property in Orońsko, and especially the requisition of his stud, committed by the German army in 1914, depressed the artist and, according to some, contributed to his death.

Józef Brandt died in Radom on June 12, 1915.

Read more... (click to go to the Polish Digital Equestrian Library)

Author of the text: Piotr Kopszak - curator National Museum in Warsaw

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