Roman Kochanowski (1857-1945) - the last “Münchener” from Poland

In 1874, he enrolled in Christian Grippenkerl’s class and in the class held by the landscape painter Eduard Lichtenfels. Financial problems in his family meant that Kochanowski’s early years of study were anything but easy. As a result, he made every effort to be independent as quickly as possible. He sold his first pieces and took part in exhibitions in Kraków, Warsaw (Warszawa) and Lemberg (Lwów; today Lwiw in the Ukraine). In 1881, after completing his studies, he decided to go to Munich. For decades, the city had attracted generations of aspiring artists. A few years after Kochanowski had settled in the Bavarian metropolis, his younger colleague Marian Trzebiński remembered their time at the Kraków art school: “time and again, some ‘Münchener’ would pop up (…) and tell us about the wonders of Munich (…). Just paint and sell. On top of that, life was fantastically cheap .”[6] The well developed art market, its high standard and the lively exhibition scene had a powerful attraction on Kochanowski as well. In Munich, he began to work for himself instead of continuing his studies. He sent his pictures to exhibitions in Vienna and Berlin and also exhibited in Munich and Poland. Then in 1888, he celebrated a win when Emperor Franz Joseph acquired his painting “Polish Winter” (Zima w Polsce)[7]. A few years later, the monarch again purchased one of his works, this time the painting “Autumn” (Jesień).[8] Kochanowski created many paintings around this theme.

In 1888, during a brief stay in Paris, the artist got to know the works of the painter Jean Baptist Corot and the works of other representatives of the Barbizon School, which, as often emphasised, had an influence on his creativity. [9] Kochanowski did not travel to any other European centres of art. But he did visit Kraków regularly and he wandered through the meadows and the moors in the countryside around Munich, which was then reproduced on his canvases, supposedly as the wetlands in Mazovia or in the Kraków region. In his memory he stored impassable areas, small towns inhabited by poor people, landscapes that were picturesque in their melancholy and inconspicuousness, and later put them into pictures.

One of the longest journeys that Roman Kochanowski undertook was a trek along the border in south-eastern Galicia. The aim of this journey was to prepare drawings of geographically and historically interesting places. Subsequently, Emperor Franz Joseph commissioned the multi-volume monography “Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy in Words and Pictures“, which contained numerous descriptions and illustrations of its regions. Roman Kochanowski and other Polish artists, such as Julian Fałat, Wojciech Kossak and Piotr Stachiewicz, created illustrations for the volume dedicated to Galicia. [10] At the time, Kochanowski had been working for some time as an illustrator and front cover designer  for the society and culture magazine “Świat” (The World), which was founded in Kraków in 1888. The person largely responsible for this engagement was Piotr Stachiewicz, who was a very important person to Kochanowski and with whom he was friends and shared common ideas and interests. Reproductions of Kochanowski’s pictures also appeared in two other Polish weekly magazines, in “Biesiada Literacka” (Literary Round Table) and in “Tygodnik Ilustrowany” (Illustrated Weekly Magazine).