Vilnius

Juozapas Kamarauskas (1874–1946) passionately loved old Vilnius. An engineer and architect by profession, he learned the rudiments of art at the Vilnius School of Drawing, and studied architecture at Baron Stieglitz’s Central School of Technical Drawing in St Petersburg. Between 1897 and 1910, he worked for the Northwest Railway Building Bureau of Engineers. He lived in Vilnius from 1922, and produced many drawings and watercolours of the city’s architecture. He used old images and his imagination to reconstruct and convey its past grandeur: the rulers’ castles and palaces, and the city wall and its towers. But Kamarauskas’ watercolour Vilnius is not an imagined but a real picture of the Bernardine Gardens, with church towers in the background, painted from Bekešas Hill. A sea of autumnal trees is weltering in the park, the foliage is decoratively stylised, and the buildings are precisely drawn. Polish flags fly among the thick trees: in the interwar period, the Bernardine Gardens were used for exhibitions of Polish economic and industrial achievements, and attracted many visitors. In the lower part of the picture, by the River Vilnia, we can see paths for visitors, swings, and benches for rest and entertainment. Text author Laima Laučkaitė.