Juliusz Kossak

A brilliant Polish painter, draftsman and illustrator. His favorite subjects of work were horses and historical painting.

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Born on October 29, 1824 in Nowy Wiśnicz.

The Nestor and at the same time the founder of the multi-talented Kossak family was Juliusz KOSSAK, whose star - as his ardent admirer Stanisław Witkiewicz wrote – for fifty years of the last century (XNUMXth century-SKK) shone with the brightest light.

Juliusz Kossak belonged to the generation of Polish Romantics interested in historical-battle and historical-genre painting, for whom creativity "to cheer hearts" and constant references to the tradition of noble customs and knightly past were important. cwhoever lived in Poland, all this lives and will live in Kossak's works - noted Stanisław Witkiewicz.

Juliusz Kossak's artistic career was shaped by the landed gentry and aristocracy. He frequents Łańcut at the Potocki family, in the borderland manors of the Baworowski, Rozwadowski, Dzieduszycki and Sanguszko families, where, as he commented in his "Autobiography": there wasn't a beautiful horse that I didn't portray (...) I painted horses, dogs, wolves and Cossacks. Juliusz Kossak also owed a lot to Władysław Rozwadowski, an expert in Arabian horses, thanks to whom he met Piotr Michałowski the greatest painter of horses.

The motif common to all periods of Juliusz Kossak's work was the horse, symbolizing romantic freedom and freedom, the hero of both historical and landscape-genre scenes, as well as independent portraits of riders and horses of various colors. There was also Juliusz Kossak, an expert on horses, always beautiful, dazzling with class, elegance of movements, and also an excellent psychologist who knew and understood the horse's psyche.

In the works of Juliusz Kossak, a special role was played by Arabian horses, which were synonymous not only with beauty, but also with the Orient, highly valued by romantics, and trips to the East to buy them became an obligatory stage of education of the young generation. Arabian horses were also the heroes of countless pages of literature, real poems sensitive to their beauty.

Juliusz Kossak captured his beloved horses masterfully. Initially, these were their rigid images, portraits of horses of noble genealogy; in the next period, horses appeared in more and more elaborate scenes, full of temperament, in compositions that stunned with noise, gallop and movement. The representations of stud farms, always painted to order in magnificent borderland landscapes, captivating with their beauty, characterized by exceptional beauty, most often Podolia, with wide, foggy horizons; these were the studs of Stanisław Dunin-Borkowski, Sanguszko, Jan Tarnowski, Przybysław Śreniawita; among them are true masterpieces such as "Studnina na Podolia" from 1886 or "Studna na Łąkiem" from 1891. He also passionately recorded scenes of hunting for wolves, bears, bustards with greyhounds, foxes, in which he entrusted the leading roles to horses, of course. He also willingly returned to scenes from horse fairs, which gave the opportunity to present various breeds and different horse temperaments.

Juliusz Kossak was also an undisputed master of the watercolor technique, in which he achieved absolute mastery. Thanks to his almost photographic memory, he created his compositions with amazing ease, slightly registering the image recorded in his memory. He introduced clean, soft, painterly watercolor, sparing in color, with a predominance of warm, rusty-golden tones.

Juliusz Kossak was the founder of a multi-talented family, both in painting and in literature. Painters - this is the ancestor Juliusz, his brother Leon, who died without children, a participant in the uprisings, a Siberian, an amateur in watercolor; Juliusz's son and continuator of his art - Wojciech; Wojciech's son - Jerzy; and finally, the second grandson of Juliusz, son of Stefan, Wojciech's brother - Karol.

Literary talents were revealed in the third generation, in both of Wojciech's daughters, the poet Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska and the writer Magdalena Starzewska-Niewidowska, writing under the pseudonym Magdalena Samowaniec, and in the daughter of Tadeusz, Wojciech's twin brother, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka-Szatkowska.

Maria Pawlikowska Jasnorzewska in the poem "Dziadzio" portrayed Juliusz in this way:

...He painted with emotion and sunshine
grays, bangs, dancing and shiny hooves,
eyes fuller of fire than those of the Spaniards
and rumps bloated like soap bubbles,
like groups of mushrooms, colorful towns and cottages,
and meadows, and heirs like moustached catfish...

Author of the text: Stefania Krzysztofowicz-Kozakowska