Humility (portrait of Maria Elena Julia Mickevičiūtė)

The portrait, conditionally titled Humbleness after the image of the woman shown in it, portrays a young woman dressed in the black attire of mourning, with a prayer-book in one hand. The plain cross adorning her chest highlights the theme of devotion to the will of the Lord and of faith further still. Quite possibly, this image was a part of a much larger composition that was cropped later (there are two figures of elderly men that can be glimpsed in the shadows on both sides of the woman). Judging by the portrait similarity, the woman in the picture could be Maria Elena Julia Mickiewicz, daughter of the poet Adam Mickiewicz and the pianist Celina Szimanowska, born in 1835 and married to the painter Tadeusz Gorecki (1825–1868) in the fall of 1857; she survived her husband and died in her home town of Paris in 1922. In 1855, her parents died one after the other, and in early 1856 Mickiewicz’s remains were brought from Istanbul to France to be buried at the Les Champeaux cemetery in Montmorency near Paris (in 1890, the remains were disinterred and entombed in the crypts of Wawel Cathedral). It was this period of grief and mourning that could have seen the making of the allegory of Humbleness, which breathes gentle sorrow and the solace of faith, the themes that are characteristic of other paintings by Gorecki as well.