Antoni Adam PIOTROWSKI, Girl at the Toilet

oil, cardboard, 58 x 48 cm, signed p. d.: A. Piotrowski, on the back stamps of Regina Aleksandrowicz's warehouse in Basztowa Street, Kraków, and Schoenfeld's factory of painting materials in Dusseldorf.

Beginning in 1869, he studied at the Warsaw drawing class of Wojciech Gerson, from 1875 to 1877 he studied at the Munich Academy, and from 1877 to 1879 he was a student of Jan Matejko at the Cracow School of Fine Arts. From 1885 to 1887 he traveled to Bulgaria as a correspondent-illustrator for English and French magazines documenting the Bulgarian-Serbian War. While in Bulgaria, he painted a series of paintings for the National Gallery in Sofia and made a career as a portraitist of the aristocracy. In 1897 and 1903 he traveled to the Middle East, from where he sent correspondence and drawings from the Greco-Turkish War. He painted mainly genre scenes, often of Mazovian village life. He also painted historical paintings, episodes from the January Uprising and portraits. He participated in the painting of the Berezina panorama.