Mohammed Abdullah (1904), African Portrait, Ahmed Kelil (1904)

Mohammed Abdullah (1904)

Signed upper left: ‘St. Bakalowicz’

Titled, located, dated upper right: ‘Mohammed Abdullah, Luqsor 1904’

African portrait

Signed and dated lower right: ‘St. Bakałowicz’

Ahmed Kelil

titled, located, dated and signed upper right: ‘Ahmed Kelil, Luqsor 28 March 1904 St. Bakałowicz’

Born in Warsaw in 1857, Stefan Bakałowicz found himself immersed in the world of painting at a very early age thanks to his father Wladislaw, a genre painter. Following in his father’s footsteps, his mother was the theatre actress Wiktoryna Bakałowiczowa, he began his artistic training in 1874 with the landscape painter Wojciech Gerson, continuing in 1876 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

Between 1876 and 1882, he attended the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, obtaining a scholarship that allowed him to move first to Paris, where he became a pupil of Jules Lefèvre, and then to Rome (unpublished manuscript, Bakalowicz heirs).

Although his artistic career was marked by numerous travels, it was to the Eternal City that he returned several times, eventually choosing to remain there for the rest of his life with his wife Giuseppina Aloisi. In Rome, he joined the circle of Polish painters, including Henryk Siemiradzki, with whom he shared a fascination for antiquity and a predilection for the Neo-Pompeian genre, set in the Rome of the Caesars.

The exotic also stimulated the artist’s creative inspiration, as he was intensely fascinated by faraway places, as shown in his Indian-themed work Morning Symphony, so evocative that it seems to have been painted de visu. His first trip was to Algeria in 1883, followed in 1903 by explorations in Egypt and Tripoli, which gave rise to a series of works such as Last Houses of Tripoli on the Sea, Under the Pyramid of Chefren, and Head of a Sudanese, presented at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931, to considerable acclaim. The five portraits on display in the exhibition are part of this distinctly Orientalist corpus: they are of young Egyptian men, as suggested by the inscription in the upper right-hand corner of the painting (Luqsor, or Luxor, a city on the east bank of the Nile). The artist’s attention to detail and ethnographic interest inspired his perception of the Egyptian universe (Humbert 1989). Both his exotic and ancient Roman-inspired works are of a high formal quality that is highly appreciated on the international market, particularly in Russia, where the artist continued to send works to his collectors over the years. After achieving significant success until the early 20th century, he slowly began his definitive retirement in 1936. He died in Rome in 1947 at the age of ninety.

Gilda Soriente