Bronisława Rychter-Janowska
Bronisława Anna Waleria Rychter-Janowska (1868–1953) – Polish painter and publicist.
She spent her early years in Stary Sącz with her mother, a teacher at a local school. There, she began her education at a boarding school run by the Poor Clares, which she later continued at a teacher training college in Kraków. Her first drawing and painting teacher was her older brother, Stanisław Janowski, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. In 1896, after several years of working at a rural school in Siołkowa near Grybów, she received a scholarship and her brother’s support to travel to Munich, where she studied painting in the private schools of Anton Ažbe and Simon Hollósy. She also took lessons from the renowned portrait artist Franz von Lenbach. Later, as a married woman, she continued her studies in Florence and Rome.
Rychter-Janowska’s work is distinguished by its subtlety, mood, and masterful play of light and shadow. Her favorite subjects were Polish manors and their interiors, small churches, village cottages, and landscapes. She also gained recognition as a portraitist, thanks in large part to her lessons with “the prince of painters,” von Lenbach. She used a wide range of techniques – oil, pastels, watercolors – and created charcoal drawings, tapestries, and appliqués. She collaborated with the "Zielony Balonik" cabaret at the Jama Michalikowa in Kraków and with cabarets in Lviv, for which she designed puppets. Her works were exhibited in Kraków, Lviv, Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Rome, Venice, and Florence.
Between 1906 and 1915, she returned to live with her mother in Stary Sącz, although she frequently traveled throughout almost all of Europe and North Africa, documenting her impressions in sketchbooks and on canvas. She had a particular love for Italy – she spent nearly three years in Rome, Naples, and Sicily. She also traveled to Turkey, partly for artistic inspiration and partly in an attempt to reconnect with distant relatives, descendants of Konstanty Borzęcki.
In 1909, she opened a painting school in Stary Sącz but quickly abandoned the project due to the hostility of the town’s petty bourgeois community.
A lesser-known aspect of Rychter-Janowska’s work is her writing and journalism. She published in Gazeta Lwowska, Reforma, and other Kraków-, Lviv-, and Vienna-based outlets. She authored several plays and extensive memoirs that span her long and rich artistic life.
In 1917, she settled permanently in Kraków, where her home became one of the city’s most famous artistic salons. She continued creating art until the very end of her life. The artist herself estimated her body of work at several thousand pieces. Her paintings are held in many museums in Poland and abroad, including the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków, the Museum of the Mazovian Nobility in Ciechanów, the Vatican Museums, as well as private collections. Due to their unmistakable Art Nouveau decorative qualities, her works remain highly sought after at antique auctions. Her manuscript legacy is preserved in the Special Collections of the PAU and PAN Scientific Library in Kraków.
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