Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski

In 1910 he made another attempt to regain his dwindling popularity by preparing a panorama-like version of Attacked by Wolves (5 x 10 metres in size) for an exhibition: a work he had completed many years ago. He reckoned with a success and a sale of the work, whose sketches that had hung for many years in his workshop in Herzogstraße 15 (Ill. 28), and attracted enthusiastic reactions from both critics and visitors alike.

In the end he submitted to the feeling of his fading glory, unable to understand the changes taking place around him and occupied by the difficulties of his life, the expensive upkeep of an estate he had purchased in 1896 in Mikorzyn, near Konin, his growing children, his wife’s ailments and his own malaise.

After the outbreak of the First World War the family – the Wierusz-Kowalskis were subjects of the Russian Czar – was split up between fronts and borders. Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski died on 15th February 1915 and was buried at the Waldfriedhof in Munich.[30] His workshop was dissolved by the family and the circumstances of great difficulty. In April 1917 the pictures were sold at an auction in the Hugo Helbing Kunsthaus. His workshop equipment, the furniture, the easels and his remaining artistic estate and archive were taken to Poland. In Munich there remained only the memory and the pictures, witnesses to 40 years of masterly artistic work.

Eliza Ptaszyńska, May 2017