Bolesław Rusiecki

Biography

The canvas “The Confluence of the Viliya into the Neman” earned Bolesław Rusiecki the title of Academician in 1853, but the painting itself has not survived. Sketches remain, along with someone else's description: under an oak an old man and a young woman hold urns from which two streams flow, the Kaunas valley lies in the distance, and a crowd gathers before a statue of Perkūnas.

He was born in Rome on 23 November 1824; the exact date varies from source to source. His father, Kanuty Rusiecki, was a painter who from 1834 taught drawing at the Vilna Institute for the Nobility, where his son also went to study. Another future painter, Alfred Romer, studied there too and remained Rusiecki's friend for life; their portraits of each other survive. Rusiecki then entered the medical faculty of the University of St Petersburg, but did not become a doctor.

From 1843 to 1850 Rusiecki studied at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts as an auditor, a non-enrolled student, under Karl Bryullov and Fyodor Bruni. He left portraits of both teachers. In 1850, for a portrait painted from life, he was given the title of Free Artist. For the almanac “Rocznik Literacki”, published in St Petersburg, he made a lithographed portrait of his father and copies of some of his father's works. In July 1854 he married Stefania Karpowicz, and for a time they lived at the Janowicze estate near Białystok, which belonged to her parents. He then received a two-year scholarship from the Academy to improve his skills abroad. In 1857 they set out on a journey through Warsaw, Kraków, Dresden, Prague, Vienna and Trieste, and in 1858–1861 they lived in Rome, to which he returned many times. In a Capuchin monastery in Rome an old monk showed him Adam Mickiewicz's watch and a watercolour portrait of the poet; Rusiecki's copies of these relics are kept in the archives of the Ossolineum. In 1857 he painted a picture of Saint Casimir for a church in Grodno and decorated churches in Grodno and Turczany with murals.

In 1866 Stefania died.

Rusiecki moved to Vilna and began teaching drawing at the progymnasium. In 1887 he bought a house on St John's Street and spent his summers on a small estate outside the city. He gave private lessons, let flats and appraised works of art. He seldom took part in exhibitions: his self-portrait was shown in Lviv at an exhibition of Polish art in 1894, and in 1897 in Vilna he showed a self-portrait and a small watercolour. He painted portraits, landscapes, genre scenes and religious compositions in oil, watercolour and pastel. His work is realist, at times close to naturalism. The Lithuanian National Museum of Art holds “Woman with a Fan” (1840), “Portrait of the Artist's Wife” (1850), “Self-Portrait” (1852), “Vilna, Bernardine Cemetery” and landscapes, among them “A Peasant Farmstead in the Village of Pavieniškės” (1873). For Vilnius Cathedral he painted a picture of Saint Ladislaus. His works are also in museums in Kraków and Warsaw and in the Wroblewski Library in Vilnius.

He collected the work of others as well: pieces by Italian masters, archaeological finds, and material on the history of the Vilna school of art, especially works by Franciszek Smuglewicz and Wincenty Dmochowski. To my mind, his contemporaries valued him as a connoisseur of the Vilna school no less than as a painter. In 1880 he took part in restoring the gravestone of the father of the poet Juliusz Słowacki in the Rasos Cemetery.

From 1897 Rusiecki sat on the committee for a monument to Mickiewicz in Vilna. In Kraków he bought from Count Zygmunt Pusłowski one of three busts cast in Paris, the work of Marceli Guyski. The monument was designed by the architect Tadeusz Stryjeński, and the sculptor Jan Rudnicki oversaw its installation in the Church of St John's. The poet's centenary on 24 December 1898 was marked with a solemn requiem Mass, and the monument was unveiled without publicity on 18 June 1899. To the displeased local administration the church's parish priest explained that it had been set up at the request of the poet's son and was a private matter.

Rusiecki bequeathed his library, archive and collection to the Society of the Friends of Science in Vilna and donated 10,000 roubles toward the construction of the society's building. He died in Vilna on 31 January 1913 and was buried in the Bernardine Cemetery beside his parents, brothers, sister and wife. The gravestone was erected by Olgierd Kucharski, who described himself in the inscription as a grandson, although the painter had no children or grandchildren: he was a distant relative.