"I love Poland and Gauguin", used to say Władysław Ślewiński, whose artistic biography was initiated by his meeting with Paul Gauguin in Paris in 1888. Gauguin became a master and a friend to the Polish painter. Fascinated by the charismatic French symbolist, he soon joined the circle of painters of the so-called Pont Aven school, settling permanently in Brittany. Proof of this friendship and recognition is a portrait of Ślewiński painted by the master and with a dedication from him. The painting is today in the collection of the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.

"A nobleman can only do farming or art "
The story began far from Japan, in Białynin, near Rawa Mazowiecka (now Lodz Voivodeship), in a noble family with uprising traditions. Władysław Ślewiński was born on 1 June 1856. Raised and educated to be an heir and administrator, he was given the Pilaszkowice estate in the Lublin region by his father to settle down as his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Instead of flourishing, however, he brings the estate to ruin. He leaves abruptly for Paris, without saying goodbye in 1888, but rather escapes the sequester of the tax office, his creditors and his father's wrath. Viewed from today's perspective - fortunately.

Ślewiński did not have a specific profession or any artistic studies. He was 32 years old and could not rely on his family for support, but he nevertheless enrolled in two private drawing schools: Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi. He met Paul Gauguin in the famous Parisian dairy at Madame Charlotte's, where the international artistic and literary bohemia met.

"You have a great talent, you should paint! "
According to Slevinsky's own account, while he was sitting at a café table, he made a sketch on a napkin that interested Gauguin. The Frenchman invited him to his studio, set up a still life, after painting which the Pole was to hear: "You have a great talent, you should paint!".

Was it possible to argue with the opinion of the great Gauguin? His passionate attitude to art, his demands to create it anew, to discover its original sources, his disdain for everything conventional, captivated Władysław Ślewiński. He decided to take up painting seriously, but not by entering an academy, choosing Gauguin as his master. He therefore left with him and a group of painters for Brittany.

This northern region of France had attracted travellers and artists since the early 19th century with its cultural distinctiveness, traces of its Celtic past and the beauty of its rocky, maritime, wild landscape; but also with its folk religiosity and local folklore. It became the subject of many paintings by the community of painters working in Pont Aven.

Paul Gauguin and Władysław Ślewiński - similarities and differences
Gauguin did not run a school or studio here. Ślewiński became his diligent pupil and used the principles of Gauguin's syntheticism, with expressive contour, flat colour patches and conventionally treated space. He remained self-taught, but was a diligent pupil who worked in the circle of Paul Gauguin, but did not imitate him. He indulged in his own artistic pursuits and developed an individual style. He created almost all his life in Brittany, in Le Pouldu, then in Dolëan.

Gauguin - the king of Parisian bohemianism, sociable and witty, a skilled boxer and swordsman, a disruptor of order in the artistic world - was the opposite of the thoughtful and focused Ślewiński. Both, however, had a similar approach to artistic work and were linked by a similar biography and a process of total dedication to art, with a great deal of courage and risk.

They abandoned a stable life: Gauguin as a successful stockbroker on the Paris stock exchange and father of four children, Ślewiński as an only son, a would-be heir who, after a fiasco with the administration of a landed estate, fled Poland and, although the son of a deportee to Siberia, married a Russian woman. Both did not go through a formal process of academic art education. When creating, they were largely self-taught. Initially, they created in their spare time, and they decided to become 'professional' painters rather late in life, only in their thirties, which was considered a ripe age at the time.

Paul Gauguin and Władysław Ślewiński - friendship between master and pupil
In 1891 in Paris, Paul Gauguin created a portrait of Wladyslaw Slewinski sitting at a table, emphasising his fondness for painting flowers. The portraitist looks at the viewer from the left side of the canvas and leaves most of the space to a large bouquet of flowers in a clay jug. The painting appears to be a portrait of zinnias, Slevinsky's favourite flowers, resplendent in shades of yellow, white and pink, more so than the painter himself positioned to the side, with only his head painted. The foreground, in warm ochres, browns and reds, stands apart from the cool indigo of the background, the favourite colour of the work's author. In the dedication, Gauguin wrote: "Au Grand Artiste" - "To the Great Artist".

Ślewiński returned to Poland in 1905 as suddenly as he had left it. He became a professor at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts. He also established his own school in a Warsaw studio on Polna Street. He created magnificent Tatra paintings in Podhale and exhibited in Lvov, Warsaw and Vienna.

In 1910, however, he returned disillusioned to his second homeland, Brittany. He died in a Paris hospital on 24 March 1918 and was buried in the cemetery at Bagneux, near Paris. In 1930, after his contract expired, his grave was sold.

The fate of the portrait by Władysław Ślewiński
For a long time, the portrait was known only from the accounts and memories of the artist's contemporaries. It was found in the vaults of the Louvre thanks to the efforts of Władysława Jaworska, a researcher of Ślewiński's work.

It soon became clear why the portrait had disappeared not only from the pages of history. After Paul Gauguin's death, it was sold by Władysław Ślewiński's wife, Eugenia, and acquired by the Japanese collector Kojiro Matsukata in 1921, already out of the gallery. At the end of the Second World War, part of the Japanese's collection, left in Paris in the care of the director of the Musée du Luxembourg, was confiscated as the property of the enemy state. It was only in 1959, in a sign of renewed friendship between France and Japan, that Matsukata's collection returned to Japan and gave rise to the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.