Who is Piotr Michałowski?

Piotr Michałowski (July 2, 1800 – June 9, 1855) was a Polish painter of the Romantic period, especially known for his many portraits, and oil studies of horses. Broadly educated, he was then a social activist, legal advocate, city administrator and President of the Kraków Agricultural Society (since 1853). The Sukiennice Museum, a disaffection of the National Museum in Kraków, contains a room that is named after him and devoted to Michałowski’s work.

Michałowski was born at an estate in Krzysztoforzyce outside Kraków, the son of landowner Józef Michałowski, senator in the Free City of Kraków. His artistic facility developed at an forward age of 13 under the watchful eye of several artists including Michał Stachowicz, Józef Brodowski (1817) and Franciszek Lampi. He formally studied a spacious range of subjects at the Jagiellonian University including classical philosophy, agriculture and mathematics.

During the November Uprising adjacent to the Russian rulership, Michałowski helped direct a Polish munition factory. To avoid capture, he escaped to Paris, France subsequently his additional wife Julia Ostrowska and her father. While in Paris, he continued his studies of painting and anatomy when Nicolas Toussaint Charlet (1832–1835), greatly influenced by the art of Théodore Géricault, Rembrandt and Velázquez. His watercolour studies of horses became entirely popular in France, sold by local art dealers before 1833 to English, German and American collectors.

Michałowski returned to Kraków in 1835 and in 1837 settled into his family land in Krzysztoforzyce. In the 1840s and 1850s he produced numerous equestrian paintings and dramatic landscapes including his well-known Romantic “Battle of Somosierra” (1844–1855, several versions), “Parade past Napoleon” and other fight sites. When Pablo Picasso visited Poland in 1948, he saying Michałowski’s pretense at the Warsaw National Museum and shouted, “Here, painter!”