Z Polski do Odessy – z Odessy do Polski. Roman Chojnacki i Stanisław Chlebowski

Abstract

Lots of Poles are attached to Odessa. During the Partitions, the city was the destination particularly for migrants from the Russian part. Some, like Chlebowski’s family, would come there escaping persecutions; some, like Romuald Chojnacki – to recuperate. The men met, incidentally, in Odessa, sharing the same thinking about art, talents for painting, as well as illness. But soon their paths diverged – Chojnacki stayed put in Odessa, where he died and was buried; Chlebowski, after long wanderings came to Cracow, where he died and was buried in the Rakowicki cemetery, in the grave adjacent to Henryk Rodakowski’s, a notable painter himself. Chojnacki and Chlebowski are attached to Cracow, and their paintings, irrespective of whether painted in Odessa, Paris, Constantinople, or Cracow, are kept in the National Museum. As has been discovered recently, Roman Chojnacki was born in 1816 and not, as all his biographies indicate, two years earlier. The pieces serving Stanisław Chlebowski as props, which were discovered in the Czartoryski Museum, throw new light on the life and artistic achievement of the painter.