Memoirs published in the periodical "Sztuki Piękne", 1930. Antoni Madeyski recalls a dozen or so Polish artists active in Rome in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Their selection is subjective, the artist recalling those with whom he was in close contact, including Aleksander Stankiewicz, Wiktor Brodzki, Tadeusz Rygier, Pius Weloński and others.

A modernised reading of the text

Polish artists in Rome.

Old people used to say that in the old days, in the times of their youth, life was better in the world, - the former frequenters of some frequented place say the same to newcomers. And we, the younger ones, have heard the same thing about Rome from the old ones we found here, but in this case it was not just the usual old grumbling. The living and working conditions in Rome, especially for artists, have been gradually changing for the worse over the past few decades, and since the beginning of this century it has even gone at a very accelerated pace.

The eternal city was losing its ancient, ancient character. Typical age-old neighbourhoods were disappearing, respectable ruins rose higher above the ditched and leveled ground, but stripped of their age-old growths, bare and stiff, they stood firm against the new buildings. The city was growing, populating, regulating and cleaning itself, expanding rapidly, but losing much of its special charm.

Today's sprawling, modernised, lavish capital is not the former secluded, picturesque and, in spite of its venerable magnificence, somehow familiar and pleasant Rome. That one years ago was a paradise for artists. Here, in beautiful surroundings, they had the most ideal conditions for their work: studios, models, materials, resources and support staff (especially for sculptors) in abundance and at no cost.

Life was cheap, the wine was excellent and, at the same time, Rome was a good market all those years ago. This is why young art students from all over the world flocked here, whether as winners of academies and scholarship recipients of their governments, or with their own resources, or merely with a sulfurous enthusiasm and a will to persevere. Some liked their stay in Rome so much that they prolonged their studies, postponed their departure from year to year, dozens of years passed and sometimes the former studiosus, as patriarch of the colony, laid down his bones on the Campo Verano.

Apart from the mass of secular and cloistered clerical associations of various nationalities, the international artistic community was the most numerous in Rome and set the tone to some extent for the life of the eternal city. The artists felt at home here. They would come to the "trattoria" at noon for lunch in work blouses, and sculptors and in paper caps on their heads. No one was offended by this. The most colourful parades and the most lavish parties in the carnival, the most cheerful and imaginative carciofolades in April were organised by artists. The Roman people liked them and regarded them as their own, whether they were Italians or foreigners.

Polish artists began arriving in Rome in large numbers in the first half of the last century, either as scholarship holders at the country's universities, or those who, having graduated from Warsaw's School of Fine Arts or the Faculty of Art at Vilnius University, went on to further study at St Petersburg's Academy, and having won distinctions and medals there, were sent abroad. Others came from the School of Kraków, and later Lviv, in increasing numbers as artistic studies developed in Poland.

Of this large number, a dozen or so spent a considerable part of their lives in Rome, produced their most outstanding works here, and a few are buried for ever in the local cemetery. I have devoted more extensive notes to those Polish artists who once lived in Rome, with whom I had close relations years ago, or about whom I have some information from their friends, and finally to those who have either passed away or left Rome, but whose memory is still vivid here.

There are still people alive who remember in Rome the sympathetic figure of the painter Aleksander Stankiewicz. As a child in Warsaw, he was a neighbour and schoolmate of Chopin. After graduating from the Warsaw drawing school, he was sent to St Petersburg's Academy of Fine Arts, where he enjoyed the support of Minister Turkull. Of great ability, an excellent draughtsman, he gracefully and subtly painted and drew small portraits. His colleagues at the Academy considered it an honour when he corrected their drawings. Stankiewicz had supposedly arrived in Rome before 1848, and already that year he was to be part of the Roman colony that did honours to Mickiewicz, who came here with his legion. Unfortunately, Stankiewicz was too soft, too servile, too good a companion on excursions and in pubs, and the visitors loved his company and abused his servility.

He painted too little. The fondest memory of him remains with those who knew him, but as an artist he squandered a great ability, left no legacy. He died around 1890. Stankiewicz's contemporary was Henryk Cieszkowski, also like the latter, liked and respected by his own people as well as by strangers, a gifted landscape painter, enamoured of the atmospheric charm of the Roman campaign, whose melancholic he recreated with deep feeling. His paintings were eagerly bought by dealers, going mostly to England and America. Cieszkowski died a few years after Stankiewicz, buried in a common grave with him. A typical Polish Roman was the sculptor Wiktor Łodzia Brodzki, a laureate of the St Petersburg Academy. He visited Rome several times while still a student, before 1855, and this was to execute in marble several commissions from the Russian court. Around 1855, he settled here permanently.

Born in Aleksinek, Volhynia in 1817, he was brought up in Polesie owrk with his relative, Mrs Stolnikowa Załęska. His colourful stories about the life of a country manor in the deaf Polesie in the first half of the last century were reminiscent of paragraphs from the diaries of Dietiuk, and sometimes of Duklan Ochocki. After graduating from secondary school in Mozyr, he practised in a lawyer's office in Zhytomyr, then was a clerk in Ovrucz. There, while passing through the city, he was discovered and persuaded to go to study in St Petersburg by Zelwietr, a famous khudothevist of the time, who is so interestingly characterised in his memoirs "In Peterburg" by Stanislav Morawski.

Hard-working and diligent, Brodzki won prizes at the Academy and, graduating, was awarded a great gold medal and a scholarship to Rome for his group of Adonis at the spring. A spate of Tsarist and private works followed, his Roman studio was frequented by foreigners and Poles alike, and he had to repeat many works several times, as more and more new ones found buyers. In the cloister of the Campo Verano cemetery, the statue that Brodzki created in the tomb chapel of Baroness Giordano Apostoli is often referred to as the most beautiful monument in the cemetery.

With all this in mind, he was not a strong artistic individuality: he made too little use of nature, he never managed to free himself from the shackles of the cold conventional pseudo-classical manner in his treatment of the body and drapery, he was already rather romantic in his composition, he sometimes introduced so many significant details that they harmed the whole and could not be understood without explanation. His best works were three decorative pieces: two Cupids in conchs and a rococo fireplace in the Tsarskoyevsky Palace near St Petersburg. He was a noble, helpful and charitable man. He retained an ardent attachment to his country; almost every Polish museum has some work by Brodzki, sometimes of larger size in marble, and these are his gifts. It was to his credit that there is a bust of Mickiewicz on the Capitol Hill in the Palace of the Conservators, and that the appropriate marble plaque on the house in via del Pozzetto explains that the Bard lived there in 1848.

He endowed Polish churches and generously supported his compatriots, especially during his period of great success. He possessed a proper, somewhat mischievous wit which, despite some of his quirks of irritability, made him engaging in company. He had great success with women, especially in his mature age, when he had gained self-confidence; in his youth he had been very shy,-his upbringing with the mistress of the carpenter's office was of the old-fashioned method: a bachelor on his departure for school and on his arrival for holidays, regardless of good or bad censure, received a beating on the carriage, if not as a punishment.

Such a system, in the absence of familial affection, deprived the young man of his contenance. Brodzki's weakness (already in Rome) was the belief that he had invented a motor and a way to steer a balloon. This idea of his was utterly childish; one did not need to be a technician to know, upon seeing the model of the mechanism he had constructed from wood, reeds and paper, that it was worthless. Here is a description of the instrument in a few words: underneath a cigar-shaped balloon, there is a light plane, sloping downwards towards the rear, crossed by two horizontal axes, ending with pinwheels at the back and with propellers at the front; It was impossible to convince the worthy inventor that the motor had to stop after it had stopped ascending; after all, whoever knew him better dared not express his doubts about the value of the motor in front of him, as the master would get heart palpitations and hold a grudge against the unfortunate critic forever.

Suspicious and distrustful, he was, especially in his old age, afraid that someone would not assimilate his discovery. The last few years of his life he no longer worked, living modestly, reliving the savings of his former glorious days. Touched by paralysis, he vegetated for several months, strengthening himself and collapsing again. He died in the hospital of the Fathers of St. John of God on Isola Tiberina in 1904, and was buried in a tomb shared with Aleksander Gierymski on Campo Verano. Slightly older than Brodzki was the sculptor Oskar Sosnowski, an alumnus of the Krzemieniec Lyceum. A wealthy citizen of Volhynia, almost a magnate, highly scaled in the country, he devoted himself to sculpture with passion and dedication, living in his studio like an ascetic. Unfortunately, his love for art was not matched by much talent. His sculptures were cold and stiff, devoid of expression, and were often quite inept.

A typical specimen of this ineptitude is the group of Jadwiga and Jagiello donated by Sosnowski to the new Jagiellonian University building. The university authorities, unwilling to accept this gift, postponed the setting up of this sculpture under various pretences and, after the death of the author and donor, gave it up to the city, which placed the group on the so-called Mayer's hill, in the Plantations. This was in the 1980s. Other sculptures of this kind by Sosnowski, in plaster and marble, are kept at the Polish College in via dei Maroniti and at the Fathers of the Resurrectionists,- while his figure of Christ in the Tomb, in the church of the Carmelite Fathers in Warsaw, stands out favourably. To the younger generation than the previous one belong the sculptors Pius Weloński and Teodor Rygier.

The former, also a laureate of St Petersburg, where he was awarded a gold medal, author of the beautiful "Bojana" group, which in marble adorns the staircase of the St Petersburg Academy, and in bronze, dedicated to the memory of Bohdan Zaleski, stands among the greenery of the Krakow Plantations, worked for many years in Rome, where he made the famous "Gladiator" statue and many other works. Twenty-odd years ago, he returned to his country, where his work includes the large Stations of the Cross at Jasna Góra in Częstochowa. He currently lives and works in Warsaw. Teodor Rygier, the author of the Mickiewicz monument on the Krakow Market Square, spent most of his life in Rome and died here suddenly a dozen years ago. One of his most beautiful works is a small statue of Copernicus sitting in an armchair.

The statue of Mickiewicz did not bring him any luck; he deserved a better fame with his works than that of his compatriots. In 1872, Henryk Siemiradzki settled in Rome. Born in Kharkiv in 1843, he graduated from the mathematics and natural sciences department there and then went to the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, where he won a great gold medal. Here in Rome he creates a number of his great paintings, as well as curtains for the theatres in Krakow and Lviv. With the donation of the "Torches of Nero" to Krakow in 1881, he laid the foundation for the National Museum. His works adorn the museums of St. Petersburg and Moscow, many are in private hands in Poland and Russia, more in America and England.

His villa in Via Gaeta brings together a handful of Poles scattered around Rome for a "holy mass". Incurably ill in 1902, he travels to Poland and soon dies there. His widow and now his son carefully preserve his father's rich legacy. The walls of the beautiful studio are still covered with studies and sketches by the unforgettable artist, and the centre of the studio is adorned with his last great painting, "Christ surrounded by children", on an easel.

At present, the earliest Roman is Stefan Bakalowiecz, and he was awarded a gold medal in St Petersburg, the son of the painter Wladyslaw, recently deceased in Paris, and Wiktoria née Szymanowska, an excellent dramatic artist. He settled in Rome in 1882, painting at first genre scenes from the life of the ancient Romans, then also Egyptian scenes, and finally, after several trips to the East and North Africa, also reproducing views and scenes from these countries. More recently, he has produced some successful portraits of church dignitaries, both our own and foreign. His paintings, mostly in small format, are characterised by correct drawing, miniature finish, meticulous accuracy in rendering ancient backgrounds and costumes, and enjoyed great success in Russia,- none of those sent to exhibitions there were returned to the author.

Despite his advanced age, the artist enjoys good health and works as he did in his youth in his secluded studio in via del Babuino. We should also mention the oldest painter in the series, Roman Postempski, who died in Rome in 1878. Born in the Ukraine, he finished school in Humań, then was a pupil of Rustem at Vilnius University, and after studying in Paris for several years, he settled in Rome and started a family there, marrying an Italian woman. His son, a famous surgeon and director of the San Giacomo hospital, who died a few years ago, had no Polish sentiments apart from his name and type. If I mention them both here, it is only because Poles visiting Rome, due to the surgeon's popularity, must have heard the name more than once.

Of Roman Postempski's works, I know of one that is in Poland: it is a portrait of General Karol Różycki at the Society of Friends of Science in Poznań,- he also once did an engraving of Mickiewicz. In addition to these, so to speak, patriarchs of the Polish artistic colony in Rome, over the past few decades, not to mention seasonal or transient visitors, a whole host of Polish artists stayed here for several years or more. In the first quarter of the last century, near Rome, near Subiaco, a pupil of Rustem's, the engraver Juliusz Miszewski, born in Vilnius in 1790, tragically died, falling off a cliff while drawing a landscape.

From 1822, within a few years, Wojciech Stattler, a Cracovian (born 1800, died in Warsaw in 1882), a pupil of Brodowski, Peszke and the younger Lampi, studied at the Academy of St Luke. In Rome, he became friends with Mickiewicz, and remained there until 1833. Soon after his return to Poland, he became professor, then director of the Kraków School of Fine Arts. In 1853, he returned to Rome for a few years. It was also at this time that his son Henryk, a sculptor, studied here and in 1851 produced his large medal (16 cm in diameter) to commemorate the fire of Krakow in 1850. In Rome, after a longer stay here, the sculptor Władysław Oleszczyński, brother of the engraver Antoni, dies in 1866.

In the 1830s, Rafał Hadziewicz, the landscape painter Jan Nepomucen Głowacki, Konstanty Rusiecki, the battle painter January Suchodolski, father of Zdzisław, the religious painter, and Jan Maszkowski, later a professor at the Lviv School of Painting, teacher of Grottger, Juliusz Kossak and his son Marceli, studied here for several years each. The religious painter Leopold Nowotny, a pupil of Fuhrich in Vienna and Kaulbach in Munich, settled here around 1845. He was appointed curator of the gallery of the Dukes of Odescalchis in Rome and died there in 1875. Also in his 30th year in Rome, Ksawery Kaniewski, a Varsovian who was awarded a gold medal at the St Petersburg Academy.

The author of these memoirs acquired his two nice watercolour portraits of some young Italian couple in Rome, dated: Rome 1836. Aleksander Kamiński, a long-serving professor at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts, works for several years in Rome after 1847. He did his initial studies in Warsaw; the St Petersburg Academy awards him a gold medal. In 1852, Albert Zamêtt from Vilnius, a contributor to the Album of Vilnius, winner of the St. Petersburg Academy (also a gold medal), supported by Count Benedikt Tyszkiewicz, went to Rome for several years of studies, painting genre pictures and landscapes. Around 1856, Henryk Pillati, from Warsaw, arrives in Rome from Munich with Kaulbach.

Having returned to Warsaw in 1857, he paints historical and genre paintings and two satirical paintings: "The Tournament of Artists" and "The Dissension of Nations" (a rivalry at school and an expedition of young artists abroad), which are parodies of Kaulbach's great cartoons. He was incapacitated by an attack of paralysis in 1878 and died in 1891. He was the older brother of the well-known draughtsman and illustrator Xavier. Their father came from a Hungarian family, married a Polish woman and settled in Poland. Also in his 50s, after Dresden and Munich, a former pupil of the Lviv School of Fine Arts, Ignacy Gierdziejewski, spent time in Rome, painting genre and fantasy paintings, such as "The Plague and the Drowning Man", "The Devil and Mr Twardowski" and others (ob. the catalogue of the Lviv exhibition from 1894). He dies in his 30th year (1860). At the same time, the landscape painter Józef Warszewski, born in Warsaw in 1825, works in Rome for a few years. He studied in Warsaw under A. Kokular, then from 1851 to 1856 at the St. Petersburg Academy, where he wins two silver medals. After St. Petersburg, Paris and Rome. He dies in Warsaw in 1883.

Around 1857, after graduating from the St Petersburg Academy, Wojciech Gerson, born in Warsaw in 1831, enters Rome on his tour of western Europe. A talented landscape painter and art historian, he is better known, though less referenced, as an author of historical scenes. In 1860, Michał Elwiro Andriolli, a well-known draughtsman and illustrator, was in Rome. Also in the 1960s, the sculptor Marceli Guyski works in Rome. Born in Krzywoszyniecce in the Skvirsk district of Ukraine, he graduated from gymnasium in Niemirów in Podolia, and after studying in Warsaw for a few years, he studied sculpture in Bologna, Florence and finally for a few years here in Rome, in the workshop of Luigi Amici, author of the statue of Gregory XVI in St Peter's Basilica. Guyski abandoned compositional subjects early on, - his speciality was portraits of busts and reliefs of heads, rarely only whole figures.

After Rome, he worked in Paris for ten years before settling in Krakow, where he died in 1903. He left a rich legacy in portraits carved in marble. Nearly all the aristocratic families in Poland have his exquisite busts. The Kraków National Museum has his magnificent bust of Mickiewicz in bronze and a marble bust of Mrs Kochańska, née Chodek, and such a medallion with the figure of an Angel, his youthful work. In particular, Guyski rendered the likeness and grace of the female face with extraordinary subtlety, and was unsurpassed in his treatment of bas-relief.

And so sure was his hand and eye that he forged several of his beautiful busts without any previous modelling, directly in a block of marble. This is how he made the above-mentioned bust of Mrs Kochańska, daughter of Leonard Chodźko, in Paris. I have often witnessed such portraiture, when in 1885 or 1886 Adam Asnyk posed for his bust. Unfortunately, after the master's death, this masterpiece, instead of going to a museum, fell into the hands of a lady from Podolia, who assured the guardian of the deceased artist's estate that the author had given her this bust. Today, perhaps its remains, like so many other invaluable monuments of Polish culture, lie somewhere, crammed by a Bolshevik boot into the slippery mud of the Podolia soil, dripping with blood.

Guyski, a great artist, was also a noble man: kind, without a shadow of vanity, he loved young people and would gladly pour all his knowledge and experience into those who came to him. Gentle and subtle himself, he morbidly detested brutality and baseness. All those who knew him closely felt his demise as the loss of a loved one. In Kraków, around 1880, he was offered the position of head of the sculpture workshop at the School of Fine Arts, but as sculpture was then treated neglected there, as an additional subject (associate professorship), and there were insufficient premises for it, and the number of hours was small and unspecified, after strenuous and fruitless efforts to obtain more favourable conditions for his subject, he resigned and for many years taught ladies' modelling at Baraniecki's courses.

At the same time as Guyski, the prematurely deceased, talented painter Leonard Straszyński, Guyski's neighbour and colleague, was in Rome. He painted genre-historical and religious paintings. His painting is in the main altar of the church in Skvira. Somewhere, I saw another one, of a mock-heroic content, 'Stanislaus Augustus in Baciarelli's studio'. - The king, hidden behind a screen, is looking through a crack at a naked lady posing naked.

I also saw at the artist's sister's a portfolio of his excellent drawings, and here in Rome I acquired at a sale left by Doctor Mazzoni his small watercolour, a miniature finished study of a knight, dedicated to the doctor, dated 1862. Around 1870, after spending time in Dresden and Berlin, a young talented sculptor from Warsaw, Karol Kloss, arrives in Rome, works here for a few years, and in 1873 returns to Warsaw, where he dies eight years later, in his 32nd year.

The Warsaw Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts owns his marble group, the half life-size "Tarpejska Rock": an athletically built naked man, with a somewhat jerky effort, knocks a terrified, desperately resisting woman into an abyss. Before 1880, the painter Ludwik Wiesiołowski, winner of the St. Petersburg Academy (gold medal), arrived here - after studying in Rome and Paris for several years, he returned to Warsaw, painted pictures of historical content and founded the School of Fine Arts for Women there.

Soon after him, Count Stanislav Roztworowski, like the previous gold medallist in St. Petersburg, goes to Rome and spends a few years there. In addition to genre paintings, he painted landscapes, an exceptional talent, but unfortunately, like his contemporary Wiesiołowski (both born in 1856), he died young in Krakow in 1888, and Wiesiołowski in Warsaw in 1892. In 1873, the great painter Maksymilian Gierymski, born in Warsaw in 1846, arrived here for a short stay, already seriously ill with breast cancer.

But the mild Roman climate does not bring him relief, and he dies in 1874 in Reichenhall. A little later the brother of the deceased, Aleksander, three years younger than Maksym, stayed in Rome, where he painted, among others, his excellent paintings "Game in Mora", "Austeria in Rome" and others, the original illumination from two opposite sides in one of these paintings found an imitator-parasite in a Munich painter who, having created for himself a canteen of such illumination, made a fortune with it.

In general, many of our and foreign painters were influenced by Aleksander Gierymski and tried to imitate the unsurpassable power and harmony of his lights and colours, only he himself did not imitate anyone but nature, not even himself, because he did not repeat himself, but was constantly looking for new ways, observing the ever more elusive secrets of beauty in nature. In 1899, Aleksander Gierymski comes to Rome again. He is overtired and his nerves are so shattered that every little thing throws him off balance. He avoids people but works fiercely - unfortunately, a certain decline gradually begins to show in the results of his work. Nervousness and anxiety increase, especially after the sudden death of his engineer friend Bruno Abakanowicz.

Entirely absorbed in his art, Gierymski was completely unsociable in financial matters, especially in the last years of his life. Abakanowicz would take finished paintings out of his studio and cash them in himself, and in his coffers Gierymski had a permanent and secure conto corrente; he did not need to concern himself with his own needs, which were in fact limited to a minimum. Abakanowicz's death took away his peace of mind about tomorrow, - his diseased nerves could not withstand the strong shock, and an ordeal of several weeks was followed by an attack on his brain and a violent paralysis of his internal organs.

Mental insensibility lasted only four days; two days before his death he regained consciousness. He died in 1901. His corpse is buried in Rome's Campo Verano cemetery, on a hill called Pincetto, - the tomb has a travertine monument with a bronze bust of the deceased. His tomb, which can accommodate several coffins, is also the last resting place for distinguished but poverty-stricken Polish artists whose corpses would be in danger of being buried in a common temporary pit.

The mortal remains of Wiktor Brodzki have already lain there, as I mentioned elsewhere. In the 1880s, a young Cracovian, Franciszek Krudowski, born in 1860, arrived in Rome as a laureate and scholarship holder of the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts - he stayed in Rome for several years, went to Kraków and Munich and returned here again until he settled in Kraków around 1900, where he has lived ever since. During his studies in Vienna, Krudowski's talent promises to be so great that professors and colleagues see him as a future Raphael, and his studies remain at the Academy as a memento of an exceptional pupil.

In Rome, commissions from home and abroad pour in, so impressed is he with his first religious paintings. Here he painted larger canvases for the Church of the Resurrectionists and for the Polish College in Via dei Maroniti, as well as for private individuals, but the more orders came in, the less eager he was to accept them, the slower he was to complete them, and the longer the clients waited for their paintings to be finished. And it's not just an unwillingness to work for an office, he stops painting altogether. He reluctantly opens the door to those who come to visit him in his sky-high studio under the crematorium of the Venetian palace tower.

He is said to be absorbed in philosophical studies, the occult, music theory... Perhaps what he is writing, perhaps composing musical pieces, no one knows, but will he create anything in this direction? Whether this work of his will come to light and whether it will be worth anything - no one knows, while after his first paintings it seemed certain that as a painter he would leave a rich legacy, of very high value. Unfortunately, it was not only his own talent that Krudowski neglected: his amiable company, his extremely interesting conversation, as well as his distinction and a unique kind of charm, attracted younger colleagues towards him. The immensely talented young sculptor Piotr Wojtowicz, a native of Przemyśl, succumbed to this attraction.

Coming from a very poor family, he had to leave school early and earn his living on his own. He worked for a wood-carver in his home town. In the craftsman's workshop, the boy's love of art and desire to learn its secrets was awakened. With the courage of a fanatical pilgrim, he, a frail boy of a dozen or so, reaches Krakow without any means, but does not stay there long.

Whether he encountered difficulties when he wanted to enter the School of Fine Arts, or whether he was enticed by the heard glories of the Danube capital, enough that he wanders on to Vienna. And there it takes him a long time to work for a living, but he is admitted to the Academy on Professor Hellmer's course (Allgemeine Bildhauerschule). Despite long and frequent interruptions in his studies, he makes great progress. He sometimes arrives at the sculpture room at six in the morning to make up for the time lost in the workshop, and not having the means to hire a model at overtime, he strips naked and studies shapes and muscle play on himself. He often under-eats, grows miserable and thin, but his talent develops and solidifies. Professor Hellmer becomes aware of Wojtowicz's great talent and calls on him to help model the large Stahrenberg statue for St Stephen's Church.

He entrusts him with making the statue of the Virgin Mary at the top of the monument and the figure of Sobieski. Both figures are delicious; the Madonna charms with her saintly charm, Sobieski with his dignity and strength. Wojtowicz moves on to Professor Zumbusch's Meisterschule, but even there he gets little use of the studio and the free model; he has to earn his keep in the city. The two-year deadline for the competition work for the Roman prize is coming to an end; it is early April 1890. Wojtowicz's colleagues, two Germans, a Hungarian and a Swiss, are working on their pieces for the second year. The subject of the composition arbitrary. Wojtowicz gets down to sketching.

He overlays it, reworks it, agonises and struggles... he settles on a theme: he will model the 'Abduction of Sabin'. He builds the scaffolding for the life-size group himself, - it is ready for 1 May. He works tirelessly, on 20 July the jury is to decide on the award. Wojtowicz is getting weaker and weaker, but the group is progressing day by day. He has moments of discouragement, loses faith in victory, in the impartiality of the court... But his colleagues, his competitors, their faces grow thinner and thinner, and they look with concern at the Roman's powerful, beautiful figure, at the lovely body of Sabina, helplessly bent over his shoulder. On 20 July, Wojtowicz became the winner of the Roman prize.

He was not only an exceptionally gifted artist, but possessed an uncommon intelligence which, under the right conditions, would have excelled and facilitated his general education. Unfortunately, neither at home nor in Vienna did he have the means or the time for this. He went to Rome culturally underprepared. With the relative prosperity provided by his scholarship, his reaction after many years of poverty and working beyond his means, the thawing heat of the south, good wine and the pleasant company of the "unemployed" Krudowski, Wojtowicz did not make the most of his stay in Rome. He was left with the material side of his talent, so to speak, and did not enrich it with knowledge or deepen it with emotion. Having left Rome, he spent several years in Lviv working mostly on decorative sculptures for new buildings. A couple of his exquisite figures adorn the façade of the Lwow theatre.

He then lived mostly in Budapest. He is very popular with builders, but his works are not displayed at art exhibitions, neither at home, nor abroad, and he does not take part in the few competitions in our country. The world is silent about him, and yet he was one of the most promising sculptural talents of our time. His beautiful competition group, this "Kidnapping of the Sabine", stands in the National Museum in Krakow in a fragile, flimsy plaster model. "Competent agents" did not get around to casting this beautiful sculpture in bronze! The same Museum owns his graceful 3/4 life-size figure, the "Girl Braiding a Braid", this one is in bronze casting, because as bronze it accidentally came into the Museum.

Wojtowicz now lives in Lviv. In the 1980s, at the same time as Krudowski, from his generation, the painters Unierzyski, Jan Styka and the sculptor Tadeusz Błotnicki each studied in Rome for several years. The former, the future son-in-law of Jan Matejko and professor at Krakow's School of Fine Arts, both painted mostly religious pictures. Over time, Styka made a considerable fortune, staying mainly at his estate in Garches, near Paris, and after the war he purchased a beautiful villa on Capri, where he spent his summers. He dies in Rome in 1926. After returning from Rome, Błotnicki works for a long time in Krakow, then in Lviv, and dies recently.

During the last thirty years, which I spent mostly in Rome, I witnessed the slow disappearance of the Polish artistic colony on the Tiber. I had to bury Aleksander Gierymski, Wiktor Brodzki, Siemiradzki died soon after Gierymski, and Rygier was missing for decades after Brodzki. Today, the oldest among us and the most ancient Roman is Stefan Bakałowicz. Of my contemporaries, the painter Edward Okuń and the sculptor Henryk Glizenstein, a Polish-born Israelite, stayed here for a long time. They arrived in Rome a year or so earlier than me.

The former had moved to Warsaw shortly after the war, the latter had interrupted his stay in Rome with longer trips to Germany, Switzerland and England over the past dozen years or so, and was currently playing in the United States with his painter son. At the same time with them also arrived a young painter, Edward Grajnert, a Varsovian - modest, serious and not much to say hard-working, fierce, memorable in his work. He was not without ability, but he was not easy to work with; he had to acquire technique by hard effort, and his own industry the means of making a living. By nature sociable, even cheerful, he came to cafes, to colleagues for a short time, he did not sit down, he was often silent, absent-minded: he was constantly thinking about his work and an effective way of earning some pennies to live. Perhaps some people thought him not very funny, but everyone must have respected him, 3 or 4 years in a row he returned to Rome, the last time with his young, amiable, like himself modest and serious wife.

One had to work even harder to make a living for the two of them. He wrote a good guide to Rome. In 1905, the sad news of Grajnert's tragic death reached us. Comrades-turned-terrorists murdered him "by mistake" in Lodz, where he was then a drawing teacher at one of the grammar schools. Their victim was supposed to be someone else, also a drawing teacher, an active opponent of the 'comrades'. When I settled in Rome, in the spring of 1898, I found a nice group of young painters.

There was the unforgettable, prematurely deceased Konrad Krzyżanowski, his colleague from the St. Petersburg Academy, Edward Trojanowski, today a professor at the Warsaw School, there was Gosienicki from Poznań, Mann, Radwański from Warsaw, two Dyzmański brothers, later Jan Wysocki arrived, then a painter, now a sculptor and medallist, a professor at the School of the Artistic Industry in Poznań, someone new kept arriving, but these were short-lived expeditions of a few weeks, rarely a few months, and very few stayed for a year or more. Most were not resourceful, but Rome was also so cheap at the time that a poverty-hardened Polish student, if he had 50 to 60 lira a month to spend on his upkeep, could sleep soundly.

Today this seems improbable. Here is a register of the main expenses of such a happy citizen: a room with service of 20 lira a month, lunch in a modest tracteria (e.g. Volpini's in via Vittoria), consisting of soup di uerdura (very thick and nutritious) cent. 10, half a portion of pasta - 15 cents, a quart of wine - 15 cents, and a large piece of bread - 5 cents, cost a total of 45 cents. If, instead of pasta, one ate a piece of meat with a vegetable, one paid 10 cents more, - if one alternated between a vegetable and a meat dinner for a day, one spent a whole 15 lira a month. This left 10 or 20 lira for breakfast in the morning, dinners and extraordinary expenses.

Lucky those who had more, but it was enough to sustain life and good humour. We, who were older and somewhat more affluent, ate in tracts a little more expensive and cleaner. I, for example, during nearly twenty years and for the duration of my last stay in Rome, Gierymski, and also Stanisław Kętrzyński, ate during the day at the 'Trattoria dei Tre Re' in via Flaminia, near my studio. We would eat there to our heart's content, from 1 lira 10 cents to 1.50 cents. There was a more orderly room in the back of the pub, with several tables where artists of different nationalities gathered: to the left of mine, the larger table was occupied by Germans.

Among them, the famous Berlin horse sculptor Louis Tuaillon had been a regular guest for many years, and his circle of friends, painters and sculptors, was often augmented by someone passing through, sometimes by some German celebrity. The small table in front of mine, mostly international, was for a time occupied by Italians headed by Gabriel D'Annunzio and the painter Michetti. Aristide Sartorio and many other prominent Italian artists ate there for a long time. With the outbreak of war, the German table lost its regulars, but the neighbouring long table was manned by Pepino Garibaldi (grandson of the great) with his supporters.

What sulphurous discussions on intervention there were then, as the map of Europe was being drawn! And my table was often haunted by distinguished visitors from the country and even fussy gourmets praised the fresh crawfish and sole, fritto scelto, bistecche alla parigina... e carcioffi alla giudia were no worse than at old Abram Piperno's in Piazza Cenci. Our conversations from table to table in different languages were interesting. Collegial friendliness prevailed among this heterogeneous bunch: even the Germans, swept away by the cheerful Roman mood, curbed their arrogance and talked calmly about sensitive political matters. In the evening, the small Polish circle would gather in another, slightly larger tract, at Fiorelli's, behind the church of St Charles, in the via Delle Colonette.

The elderly Wiktor Brodzki had been a regular guest there for decades. Our young historians working in the Vatican archives often dined there with us, so the present General Secretary of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Krakow, Professor Stanisław Kutrzeba, the current MP in The Hague, Stanisław Kętrzyński, Professor Ptaśnik and others. Occasionally, one of the older professors or artists who were staying in Rome would come there, always one of the many Poles visiting Rome at the time. But the place with a voucher, the meeting place of minor groups, broken up into several different eateries, was the eternal "Caffe Greco Antico", in via Dei Condotti.

There, over the years and a half, several generations of artists had their rallying point. It was there that, in 1848, friends and admirers, Poles and foreigners, bid farewell to Mickiewicz as he was leaving Rome. It was there that Mickiewicz's plush waistcoat, which one of his friends had brought with him on his departure, forgotten in his now abandoned flat in via Del Pozzetto, was quartered into pieces and taken apart as a memento. It was certainly there that Mickiewicz and Odyniec, in the company of Wojciech Stattler and other members of the then artistic Polish colony in Rome, often sat during their first stay in Rome. In the days of Canova and Thorvaldsen, this café grew from a single room on the street side into several toilets, squeezing deep into the house and courtyard.

The last room on the right, a narrow, railway carriage-shaped room, was requisitioned for itself at the end of the 1890s by Polish young artists. There was a packet with several dozen books in it, it was a lending library, on the sharagas hung several Polish newspapers and weeklies sent to us for free or at a significant discount by the editors. Above the charags we placed a portrait of Mickiewicz, painted for this "institution" by Edward Okun. The membership fee was the 'substantial' sum of 20 cents a month. It was here that newcomers met incumbent Romans; it was here that discussions and arguments about new directions in art were held; and the Kraków weekly Życie informed us of the latest works by Przybyszewski and Wyspiański, and of artistic life in the country.

On Saturday evenings in particular, the narrow hard benches against the walls of the hall were densely occupied until late at night. Projects for collective excursions were formed there; from there, on a moonlit spring or summer night, one would go to the Colosseum or the Janiculum. I remember once, in May 1898, during such a walk, when at 3 o'clock, after a prolonged siesta on the scraps of the inner walls of the Colosseum, the company was returning home, Konrad Krzyżanowski and one of the other younger painters separated from the group and walked to the Via Appia.

They did not return until the following night... From the Via Appia Antica, via Campania, they made their way cross-country to Albano, Genzano to the shores of Lake Nemi, where, while the companion slept on the turf, Krzyżanowski, who had paints with him, painted two good studies. They made the return trip, as well as the excursion, on foot, by moonlight. During the few months of his stay in Rome in 1899, Alfred Wysocki, then a young publicist who had come here from Norway, Przybyszewski's companion in Berlin, and the current Deputy Foreign Minister, had adhered to our circle.

Meetings at the Caffe Greco did not ruin anyone: coffee, milk, water with juice or vermouth cost between 15 and 25 cents, and we did not play cards or billiards at all. After a few years of revival, life in our reading room at the Caffe Greco began to die down: some of its first members returned to the country, the rest split into smaller circles, living separately, the editors stopped sending their publications, the reading room ceased to exist. Visiting Poles, and occasionally some of the locals, used to and still do occasionally visit the Caffe Greco, but only the portrait of Mickiewicz, buried in smoke and dust, reminds us that it was once the rallying point of the Polish artistic colony.