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Wankowicz, Walenty
(b Kaluzyca, nr Minsk, 14 Feb 1799; d Paris, 12 May 1842). Polish painter. He began his studies in 1818 at the Fine Arts Department of the University of Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania) under Jan Rustem (1762–1835), before studying (1825–9) under Vasily Shebuyev, Aleksey Yegorov (1776–1851) and Aleksandr Ivanov at the St Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, where he won a gold medal. Despite his training in the classicizing style of Rustem, Wankowicz was more influenced by Romantic painting. In Vilna and St Petersburg he became acquainted with Aleksandr Pushkin and maintained close contact with the literary and artistic circle around the great Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, whose portrait he painted in 1827–8 (oil on canvas; Warsaw, N. Mus.). This was exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg in 1828, and its exceptional popularity encouraged Wankowicz to make several copies of it. From 1829 to 1840 Wankowicz lived on his family’s estate in Slepianka, near Minsk. During this period he became a disciple of Andrzej Towianski, a theosophist and the founder of a mystical sect of Polish emigrés in France. His portraits of this period, for example of Andrzej Towianski and of Karolina Towianska (both oil on canvas, 1831; Warsaw, N. Mus.), are closer to the Biedermeier style. Although primarily a portrait painter, Wankowicz also painted religious and symbolic paintings, which propagated Towianski’s ideas, as well as many compositions commemorating Napoleon, such as Napoleon by the Fire (oil on canvas, 1834; Warsaw, N. Mus.). In 1840 he visited Dresden and Munich before going to Paris at Mickiewicz’s invitation in the autumn of 1841.
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