The ceramic sculpture by Stanislaw Reychan from the Matthew Bateson Collection in London, the UK

Stanisław Reychan (1897-1994), the author of the small ceramic sculpture depicting a zebra, studied ceramics in London at the Central School of Art. He came from a family of Lviv artists, he was a descendant of four generations of painters, and his father, Stanisław Reychan, was a professor at the Lviv Industrial School. The artist arrived in London with the first wave of post-war emigration in 1946. After graduation, in 1950, he opened his own ceramics studio, where he continued his work until the 1980s. He exhibited his works in many galleries and took part in the Paris Salon, where he won a silver medal in 1960.
Shortly after the Second World War there were about one hundred and fifty thousand Polish emigrants in Great Britain. They reached the British Isles by various routes. They were, for example, soldiers and civilians evacuated from France in 1940, refugees from POW and labor camps, those who followed the route of General Anders' Army from the USSR through the Middle East, and finally emigrants from People's Republic of Poland in the post-war years. Among such a large Polish community there were also artists, who formed a Polish artistic community in Britain. This was an important current of Polish post-war art, which developed in two different ways in two different places - at home and in exile, where different social and political conditions resulted in a different character of their artistic output.

Projects of POLONIKA Institute
2020 - research and publication of the book "Polska sztuka na emigracji w londyńskiej kolekcji Matthew Batesona" / [Polish emigree art in the London collection of Matthew Bateson], by Jan Wiktor Sienkiewicz