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 - Stanisław Witkiewicz noted.

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 the Arabian horse expert Władysław Rozwadowski, thanks to whom he met Piotr Michałowski the greatest painter of horses.

A common motif for all periods of Juliusz Kossak's work was the horse, symbolizing romantic freedom and liberty, the hero of both historical and landscape-genre scenes, as well as independent portraits of riders and horses of various colors. Juliusz Kossak was also a connoisseur of horses, always beautiful, flaunting class, elegant movements, and also an excellent psychologist, knowing and understanding 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 in a truly masterly way. Initially, these were their stiff images, portraits of horses with noble pedigrees; in the following period, horses appeared in increasingly elaborate scenes, full of temperament, in compositions that flaunted their din, galloping, and movement. The depictions of stud farms, always painted to order in magnificent, captivatingly beautiful borderland landscapes, most often Podolia, with wide, misty horizons, were characterized by exceptional beauty; these were the stud farms of Stanisław Dunin-Borkowski, the Sanguszkos, Jan Tarnowski, Przybysław Śreniawita; among them are true masterpieces such as "Stud in Podolia" from 1886, or "Stud in the Meadow" from 1891. He also passionately recorded scenes of wolf hunts, bear hunts, bustard hunts with greyhounds, and fox hunts, in which he of course gave the leading roles to horses. Similarly, he eagerly returned to scenes from horse fairs, which provided an opportunity to present different 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 literature. The painters were the progenitor Juliusz, his childless brother Leon, a participant in the uprisings, a Sybirak, an amateur watercolorist; Juliusz's son and the continuator of his art – Wojciech; Wojciech's son – Jerzy; and finally Juliusz's second grandson, the 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 Samozwaniec, as well as in the daughter of Tadeusz, Wojciech's twin brother, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka-Szatkowska.

Maria Pawlikowska Jasnorzewska portrayed Juliusz in her poem "Dziadzio":

...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