Cyprian Godebski (30 October 1835 Méry-sur-Cher k. Bourges - 25 November 1909 Paris) - sculptor, organiser of artistic life and art critic. Grandson of Cyprian Godebski (coat-of-arms Godziemba), colonel in the Polish army killed at Raszyn in 1809, well-known poet, publicist and translator of French literature. The sculptor's father was Franciszek Ksawery, an eminent activist of the post-1831 emigration in Paris, writer, translator, literary historian, co-worker of Adam Mickiewicz in the publication of the "Trybuna Ludów", co-founder and lecturer of the Polish national school in Paris (the so-called Batiniol school). Cyprian owed his father's contacts to his education at this school and his first artistic contacts. He studied drawing under Fernand Dupuis, and from 1853, he was probably already in the studio of the well-known Parisian sculptor François Jouffroy and began his sculpting career, producing busts of Tadeusz Czacki and Stanisław Konarski for the façade of the Batiniol school building. When Franciszek Ksawery moved to Lviv in 1858, where he became the custodian of the Ossolineum, Cyprian settled there with him, gaining his first commissions through his father's contacts. In addition to several tombstone and monumental works in Galicia, in Lviv itself he left busts and medallions of local dignitaries, writers and artists, as well as the monumental sculptural decoration of the Military Invalids Building, built in 1855-1863. The works attributed to him at the Lychakiv Cemetery were forged in sandstone by Godebski's workshop, and his personal contribution to these works is not clear. In 1861, he settled in Vienna, where he received a prestigious commission for two marble statues for the Feldhernhalle, the Imperial Arsenal, depicting the 18th-century marshals Franz M. Lacy and Gideon E. Laudon. He also executed an unspecified number of portraits and tombstones in Vienna. In the spring of 1863, he was imprisoned (during a brief stay in Lviv) for sympathising with the January Uprising. It was probably this event that prompted him to return to Paris after leaving custody. At the Salon of 1864, he soon exhibited two sculptures related to the uprising there. Still at the end of that year, Godebski found himself in Belgium, where, in January 1865, he married Eugénie Sophie Léopoldine Servais, daughter of the eminent cellist Adrien-François Servais. In the town of Halle (French: Hal) near Brussels, he took care of the decoration of the family's villa (terracotta bas-reliefs on the façades with musical themes), made a statue of his father-in-law (1869, unveiled 1871 on the Grote Markt in Halle) and, thanks to family contacts, benefited for a long time from his acquaintance in the European music world. He portrayed Franz Liszt, Gioaccino Rossini and Henri Vieuxtemps, among others. The artist spent the following years travelling and working in Belgium, Paris and St Petersburg, where he produced numerous portraits of court figures, musicians and actors, and was appointed a Free Honorary Member of the Imperial Academy of Arts there (1870). His wife Sophie died there in 1872; Godebski carved her tombstone in St Petersburg (not preserved). In the same year he designed a monument to Fryderyk Chopin in Warsaw (not realised), and he also worked on a monument to Stanislaw Moniuszko (completed in 1875 but not unveiled until 1887 in the porch of All Saints' Church, not preserved). Particularly important was Godebski's stay in Warsaw in 1875, when, already with his second wife, Matilda Natanson (they were married in 1874 in Carrara), he briefly ran a literary and artistic salon and played a significant role in the integration of the circle of young, modern-minded painters and critics (the circle of the so-called studio at the Hotel Europejski). At the same time, Godebski undertook to write correspondence to the "Gazeta Polska" from Paris, which were essentially a lecture on his views on art, a collection of opinions on contemporary events in Paris, the state of sculpture, and so on. These articles, called 'Letters on Art', were published for almost a year, from 16 August 1875 to 10 July 1876. Godebski was discouraged by the lack of wider recognition in Warsaw's artistic circles and the lack of a major public response to the solo exhibition he organised in Warsaw, as well as by the publicity gained by the monument unveiled in 1875 in the Montmartre cemetery of Théophile Gautier's gravestone monument with his sculpture, ultimately prompted him to settle in Paris in 1876. From then on, with interruptions for short visits to Krakow, Warsaw, Lviv (most often, his last stay in 1905), work in Carrara and stays in Brittany, he lived there until his death. In a grandly decorated house in the Monceau district, he led a rich social life, a salon frequented by artists, writers from all over Europe. He exhibited regularly at the Paris Salons, organised performances of 'living paintings', and won further French commissions (including a sculpture for the façade of the opera house in Monte Carlo in 1879, a medallion of Hector Berlioz for his tombstone in the Montmartre cemetery in 1884, and a statue of General Adolphe Le Flô in Lesneven, Brittany, in 1899). He obtained membership of the Urbino and Volterra academies, Belgian and French orders. He was in constant contact with the Polish émigré community, producing various commemorative works, the most impressive of which is the statue of Gratitude to France in the courtyard of the Polish school (the so-called Batiniol school), with a bust of Dr Seweryn Gałęzowski (1879). He helped many Polish artists (such as Kazimierz Alchimowicz, Józef Chełmoński, Wacław Szymanowski and Jan Woydyga) in their early careers in Paris. This side of Godebski's activity, forgotten today, did not only concern budding painters and sculptors. Henryk Sienkiewicz was said to owe him his efforts to obtain a French edition of his novel "Quo vadis", and Władysław Reymont also benefited from his help in Paris. From 1897, Godebski was president of the Polish Artistic and Literary Circle (from 1902 the Society) in Paris, of which he was a co-founder. He tried to get Polish art to participate in the 1900 World Exhibition, and after this plan fell through, he organised a cross-sectional exhibition of 19th-century Polish painting at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. It did not meet with much interest or a favourable assessment of Poles, so the sculptor withdrew from further activity in emigration organisations.

Undoubtedly, portrait work was the artist's main source of income. Some images were repeated in several versions (plaster, terracotta, marble, bronze casts). Godebski was excellent at meeting demand, oscillating between factual characterisation of the model and a certain amount of idealisation or stylisation. He portrayed some of Belgium's greatest music makers (including for the Royal Conservatory in Brussels), famous Frenchmen (the writer and critic Armand Silvestre in 1883, National Museum in Warsaw; Breton poet, Léocadie Salaun-Penquer, 1889 , Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brest) and Poles (including General Ludwik Mieroslawski in 1883, on his tombstone in Montparnasse Cemetery; Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Polish Library in Paris). One of Godebski's best busts is a marble portrait of his first wife, Sophie (c. 1864-1865; National Museum in Warsaw).

A large part of his oeuvre is occupied by monuments. Despite Godebski's victory in a competition for a monument to Adam Mickiewicz in Kraków (1888), this work was not realised. There was, however, a monument to the bard in Warsaw, unveiled in 1899, while in Cracow there was a small statue of Nicolaus Copernicus (1899) and a bust of Aleksander Fredro (1900), in Lviv of the governor of Galicia, Agenor Gołuchowski (1900, not preserved), and a bust of Taras Shevchenko (1905). The monument to the Battle of Sevastopol in the Crimea, once mentioned in his oeuvre (probably designed in 1870), was never realised, as was the design for a monument to the Hungarian politician Ferenc Deák in 1876 and a monument to Christopher Columbus. He was also wrongly credited with the realisation of monuments to Franz Liszt in Weimar and Henri Vieuxtemps in Verviers, Belgium. The great realisation of a monument for the Peruvian Republic remains mysterious - an international competition was supposedly won by Godebski, and he worked on a model of the multi-faceted composition until 1869, but the monument was never exhibited in Lima. In these works, the artist generally used the conventional formula of a standing figure on a pedestal (less often a bust), in a few monuments with rich pedestal settings (allegorical figures, bas-reliefs), but he was able to make excellent portrait characterisations of some of the people he commemorated (e.g. Servais, Le Flô).

Godebski was also successful as the author of allegorical compositions (e.g. Liberation, 1872; Genius and Brute Force, 1888; Dream of Fame, 1894) and salon sculptures with mythological themes (e.g. the group Temptation or Persuasion of 1881, repeated in many versions). They were often a display of Godebski's technical virtuosity. The deliberate use in them of references to early classicism or to French rococo, fashionable in the last quarter of the 19th century, ensured that these works were successful with the public. His tombstones are similarly conventional, following the traditional cemetery allegory of the 19th century (the angel on the tomb of the Tamberlick and Gałęzowski families in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, 1886) or referring to the simple formula of a stele with a portrait bust (the draughtsman Constantin Guys on his tomb in the Pantin cemetery near Paris, 1908). He rarely took up genre subjects, but his naturalistically rendered head of a Russian Drunken Peasant (first version in St Petersburg, 1870, later repeated in France) was a major success. Religious works were also marginal to his oeuvre, but Godebski's greatest work, and one of his best sculptures, is a group of Madonna of castaways, exhibited in 1904 at Cape Pointe du Raz in Brittany, on the rocks above the Atlantic. The great ceremony of its inauguration was, incidentally, the artist's last public success.

Godebski also led a lavish life at his summer house near Paris, at Valvins on the Seine, receiving there, among others, well-known French writers and artists. After the death of his second wife in 1887, he almost immediately married a third time to the aristocrat Mathilde de la Frenaye and moved to the exclusive Auteuil district. There, the Godebski family also ran an art salon.

The sculptor also became known as an entrepreneur. He leased his own quarry in Carrara and undertook similar activities in the Pyrenees. In Avon near Fontainebleau, he bought a decaying ceramic factory, where he and Alchimowicz experimented with painting on faience and porcelain. These ventures, in the absence of more precise data, are difficult to assess, including in terms of financial success. Undoubtedly, however, Godebski excelled in directing his international career, making use of his connections in many countries and circles. He carried out some commissions without royalties or organised the transport of works at his own expense, which won him a clientele.

Research on this remarkable figure is only just beginning. Cyprian Godebski remains in the history of Polish culture first and foremost the father of the more famous Misa Godebska and the author of the Warsaw monument to Mickiewicz (whose statue in the post-war reconstruction only makes a general reference to his work). His patronage and collecting, his organisational and entrepreneurial projects, his excellent image-building, are still little realised by our art history. Much of his sculptural work also remains unknown, still not found in private collections. An assessment of his vast and varied sculptural output, on the other hand, cannot be conclusive, apart from the indisputable quality of his workmanship. Although he declared himself an advocate of many innovations, as a sculptor he remained essentially a traditionalist. His 'Letters on Art' have been appreciated in various studies of Polish art criticism, but this one-off attempt in this area by the sculptor is nevertheless seen on the margins of the discipline.