Artur Grottger: between art, political engagement and love story
December 21, 2024
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Artur Grottger was one of the most prominent Polish Romantic painters. He was born in 1837 in Ottyniowice in Eastern Galicia (now Otynevychi, Ukraine), and despite his very short life (he died at 30 years old in 1867), he became one of the most prominent Polish artists of the 19th century. He lived during the period of the foreign partitions of Poland, and as the patriot he was, he devoted much of his artistic creation to the narrative of his country’s liberation struggles. But he is not only known for his work of art, but also for his (tragic) love story with Wanda Monné.
When the Emperor Franz Joseph I visited Lviv on October 16, 1851, Artur Grottger, then aged 14 years old, painted the monarch’s entrance into the city. After seeing its work, the emperor granted the young artist a scholarship and instructed him to pursue his education in Kraków, then in Vienna. But Artur lost this scholarship a decade later, when he provided assistance to refugees during the January Uprising (1863) and a Pole who was suspected of conspiracy was arrested in his apartment. He was then forced to leave Vienna due to poverty.
During his time in Vienna, however, Artur Grottger started his artistic career as an illustrator working with popular newspapers such as Mussustunden and Illustrierte Zeitung. Grottger also illustrated books by well-known authors including Goethe, Schiller, and Mickiewicz. His paintings were mostly characterised by depictions of military combat. His series of paintings Warszawa I (1861), Warszawa II (1862), Polonia (1863), and Lituania (1864–1866) portray the events of the unsuccessful January Uprising in 1863, as well the occupiers’ ensuing repression.
The series created the canon of martyrological iconography and imbued the memory and aspirations of several Polish generations with depictions of rebel conflicts, suffering, martyrdom, and national solidarity. The School of the Polish Nobleman, Artur Grottger’s first cycle of paintings from 1858, already suggests an interest in genre and intimacy of representations. Grottger’s early work was influenced by late romanticism, which explains why he was drawn to Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings among others’. His works such as The Evening Prayer of the Farmer have been compared to those of the German painter.
After his Viennese career ended, the indebted artist went back to his homeland and started touring the Polish noble courts of Galicia, selling his painting talents in exchange for hospitality. His life took a turn when he attended a ball held at the Riflemen’s Association in Lviv, on January 13, 1866. This is where he met sixteen-year-old Wanda Monné. He started court shipping her by proposing to paint her, so that he could visit her home and win her favour, as well as Wanda’s reluctant mother and aunt, who were looking for a richer and better-connected match for their only child.
Wanda became Artur’s muse and she can be seen in nearly all of his paintings of female characters. Their love blossomed as one of the painter’s friends, Bołoz Antoniewicz, testified: “[…] to love and be loved, to fight for a holy cause and die for it, and even after death to have the love of an idolised woman – this is the circle of thought in which Grottger’s imagination so willingly revolves.”
Artur was given hospitality by Izydora and Julian Skolimowski, who owned the estate in Dyniska. Izydora was also friends with Wanda’s mother and invited the girl for a vacation, arranging her meeting with Artur. The lovers spent two weeks there in June 1866. They rode horses, attended church services, walked in the manor park and the surrounding meadows. During one of their walks, they reached a lonely pine tree and carved their love into it. Unfortunately, today the tree is no longer there, as it was torn out of the ground during a storm in 2011. But two years later, as a token to their romantic love, two young pine trees were planted near the old one. They were named Artur and Wanda.
Following their engagement, Artur set off for Paris in December 1866 with the intention of securing the much-needed success there by the display of his work at the Universal Exhibition in the spring of 1867. In Paris, Artur accepted a number of extra jobs and painted portraits of the amiable Polish residents in order to supplement his income. But as he suffered from tuberculosis, which was an incurable disease at the time, Grottger was forced to relocate to Pau in southern France in November 1867 due to his health. He subsequently made his last resting place at a spa resort in Amélie-les-Bains, where he died on December 13, 1867.
The artist’s remains were brought to Lviv by his fiancée after selling all of her jewellery and a part of her dowry. In 1868, Grottger was laid to rest in the Lychakiv Cemetery, in a location he had himself selected while out on a stroll with his fiancée. The painter was buried where he desired, close to the Cross of the Fallen (1863). Devastated by her lover’s loss, Wanda made a romantic monument to him. With the help of her friend Parys Filippi, a Polish sculptor, a tombstone monument was erected on Artur’s grave. The most prominent element of this tombstone was a statue of a sad, young lady, kneeling on a rock beside a falcon with outstretched wings. Beneath these two sculptures was a medallion with Artur’s image (modelled by Wanda herself, who became a gifted sculptor), a broken painting palette and a lyre with broken strings, symbols of the artist’s talent and creativity interrupted by death.
Although she later married Artur’s friend Karol Młodnicki, a Lviv painter and woodcut artist (according to her lover’s will), Wanda Monné cultivated his memory until the end of her life. She could often be seen at her fiancé’s grave, which she visited regularly. For years following both of their deaths, in Lviv, people talked about lovers that “love like Artur and Wanda”. Legend has it Artur and Wanda’s ghosts can sometimes be seen wandering in the moonlight of the Lychakiv Cemetery.
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