Portrait of Ignacy Jan Paderewski Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1890

Portrait of Ignacy Jan Paderewski
Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1890
From the collection of
The National Museum in Warsaw
This painting depicts Ignacy Paderewski, a world-renowned pianist and composer and the Prime Minister of Poland in 1919. It was painted in London in 1891, during the pianist’s first tour of England. One of Paderewski’s private concerts took place in the home of the Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who had settled permanently in England and enjoyed tremendous popularity in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. It was there that this exceptional portrait was painted.

The artist presents Paderewski against a backdrop composed of two colour fields, an orange-yellow Japanese textile and wood panelling of a uniform, dark-olive colour. Alma-Tadema was an expert on and collector of Japanese art. He was known to be enamoured with Japanese woodcuts already during his first visit to London in 1872, and twenty years later he became a member of the Japan Society, whose mandate was to promote Japanese art and culture. Coincidentally, the subject of the portrait also nurtured a fascination with Far Eastern culture. While on tour, Paderewski amassed a rich collection of Japanese and Chinese art, which he would later bequeath to the National Museum in Warsaw.

Inscribed in the upper right corner, next to the artist’s signature, we notice a designation associated with music – OP, along with the number 311 written in Roman numerals. This is explained by the fact that Alma-Tadema liked to number his works in the way that composers do.
Details
Title: Portrait of Ignacy Jan Paderewski
Creator: Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Date: 1890
Physical Dimensions: w59 x h45.5 cm
Inv. no.: M.Ob.1850 NMW
Type: Paintings
External Link: Digital National Museum in Warsaw http://cyfrowe.mnw.art.pl/dmuseion/docmetadata?id=15677&show_nav=true
Medium: oil on canvas

The Walters Art Museum
Baltimore, United States

The Walters Art Museum is one of only a few museums in the world to present a panorama of art from the third millennium B.C. to the early 20th century. The thousands of treasures range from mummies to arms and armor, from old master paintings to Art Nouveau jewelry. The Walters’ Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ethiopian and Western Medieval art collections are among the finest in the nation, as are the museum’s holdings of Renaissance and Asian art and a spectacular reserve of illuminated manuscripts and rare books. Every major trend in French painting during the 19th century is represented in the collection.

The National Museum in Warsaw
Warszawa, Poland

From medieval African masters to Botticelli, Rembrandt and Picasso, from Egyptian mummies to the most important examples of Polish design, from sacral art to Natalia LL’s feminist Consumer Art… The National Museum in Warsaw is much more than just masterpieces known from school textbooks, although Jan Matejko’s The Battle of Grunwald, Józef Chełmoński’s Storks or Strange Garden by Józef Mehoffer occupy an important place in the collection, which today boasts over 830 thousand works.

The most important of them – representing not just painting or sculpture, but also photography and new media art – are presented in the modernist building located in the centre of Warsaw as well as online, on the Digital NMW website.

The Museum has four branches: the Poster Museum at Wilanów, the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture at the Królikarnia Palace (Warsaw), the Museum of Interiors in Otwock Wielki and the Radziwiłł Palace in Nieborów and Romantic Park in Arkadia. They are located in splendid mansions surrounded by picturesque parks.

Since 2012 – the year marking the 150th anniversary of the NMW – subsequent permanent galleries are being thoroughly rearranged in order to present the most valuable works in a modern and friendly setting.

The refurbished Prof. Kazimierz Michałowski’s Faras Gallery was honoured with a number of awards, such as the Grand Prix of the Sybilla 2014 competition for the museum event of the year. The Faras Gallery is the only European exhibition of early Christian Nubian painting.
In it, treasures of a civilization that blossomed over 1500 years ago are accompanied by multimedia exhibits, including a 3D film projection.

The Gallery of Medieval Art offers the most diverse showcase of the artistic heritage of this era in Poland.

The Gallery of 19th Century Art presents flagship works by Polish artists in the context of their European counterparts. The Gallery of 20th and 21st Century Art is the only Warsaw-based display of the artistic output of the last century of that magnitude and calibre.

The new permanent galleries are going to showcase European and Old Polish craft, painting and sculpture (Gallery of Old Art), masterpieces of antiquity (the newly refurbished Gallery of Ancient Art) and the icons of Polish design (Gallery of Design).

Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Jan 8, 1836 - Jun 25, 1912

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, OM, RA was a Frisian painter of special British denizenship.
Born in Dronrijp, the Netherlands, and trained at the Royal Academy of Antwerp, Belgium, he settled in England in 1870 and spent the rest of his life there. A classical-subject painter, he became famous for his depictions of the luxury and decadence of the Roman Empire, with languorous figures set in fabulous marbled interiors or against a backdrop of dazzling blue Mediterranean Sea and sky.
Though admired during his lifetime for his draftsmanship and depictions of Classical antiquity, his work fell into disrepute after his death, and only since the 1960s has it been re-evaluated for its importance within nineteenth-century English art.
http://hisour.com/art-medium/paintings/portrait-of-ignacy-jan-paderewski-lawrence-alma-tadema-1890/