Kraków Bronowice cottage

The model was made in 1901 by Bronowice carpenters under the supervision of Włodzimierz Tetmajer and with the participation of a painter, Antoni Procajłowicz.

The piece was commissioned by Jerzy Warchałowski on the occasion of the First Exhibition of the Polish Applied Arts Society in Kraków. The architectural model in a 1:10 scale is traditionally modelled after the cottage of Błażej Czepiec of Bronowice, a participant of Stanisław Wyspiański’s Wesele [Wedding]. It represents a wooden cottage with two rows of residential rooms, with a long side facing the road, and an area for livestock. The building is covered with a hipped thatched roof. The model with walls made in the log cabin construction system has a Lusatian structure supporting the roof structure, typical of Bronowice houses. The walls of the building are covered with a polychrome in brown and white strips imitating whitewashing. The frames of the windows and the semi-circular recess of the entrance are ornamented with floral decorations against a white background.

The model made for the needs of exhibitions promoting handicraft products became a germ of a collection of models developed by the Ethnographic Museum in the following decades.