Tatra landscape

Eligiusz Niewiadomski (1869-1923) was a respected painter educated at Wojciech Gerson’s School of Drawing, at the Academy of St. Petersburg, and in Paris. His painting style, initially naturalistic, with time took on more expression and mood, being compared with the work of Arnold Böcklin. After 1915, the artist leaned towards decorativeness and expression. Landscapes of the Tatra Mountain were a common theme in Niewiadomski’s work, particularly in his early days. His Tatra Mountain Landscape, exhibited at the Society of Friends of the Fine Arts in 1897 and awarded third prize, is a technically well-composed work showing an apparently realistic yet in fact somewhat altered view of the peak Kościelec. Niewiadomski painted multiple images of the Tatra Mountains during hiking trips, of which he was a great enthusiast; in 1899, he developed a hiking map of the Tatras and also transported the underground publications “Przegląd wszechpolski” (All-Poland Review) and “Polak” (The Pole) across borders. Niewiadomski’s painting as well as his work as a historian, art critic, and organiser of artistic life in the newly independent Poland has been largely forgotten. His name is remembered for the assassination which he committed; on 16 December 1922, during the opening of an exhibition at the Zachęta art gallery in Warsaw, he drew a revolver and shot and killed the president of the new Republic of Poland, Gabriel Narutowicz.