Kazimierz Sichulski’s Galician Landscapes 1

A few weeks ago, when I showed paintings of the Hutsul peoples of the Carpathian Mountains, I came across the work of Kazimierz Sichulski (1879–1942), who’s generally recognised as one of the major Polish artists of the early twentieth century, but was both born and died in Lviv in western Ukraine. In this article and its sequel next week, I look more generally at Sichulski’s remarkable paintings.

Sichulski was born in the city of Lviv in what is now Ukraine. From 1349 to 1772, that city, then known as Lwów, was the capital of the Ruthenian domain of the Kingdom of Poland. At the time of Sichulski’s birth it was the capital of the Galician province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, although it still had strong ties to Poland, for example in being the home of the Polish Academy of Arts. During Sichulski’s lifetime, Lviv was a multilingual and multicultural centre…