Jozef Oleszkiewicz as a Participant of an Academic Exhibition in 1814

Abstract

Jozef Oleszkiewicz, a native of the Polish-Lithuanian lands, was a talented portrait painter who settled on the banks of the Neva at the beginning of the 19th century and was elected academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Oleszkiewicz was known to the Polish community of St. Petersburg not only as an artist who had his own unique painting style and gained popularity among the fair sex for his ability to create inspired portraits of women, but also as a mystic, philosopher, and inspired poet. Now Oleszkiewicz is known primarily as the hero of Adam Mickiewicz’s poem “Dziady”. Part III of the poem, completed in 1832, contains the “Oleszkiewicz” section. On the eve of the famous St. Petersburg flood of 1824, the artist uttered a prophecy that correlated with the biblical plot and marked the beginning of the formation of an apocalyptic myth about the death of the city from the Neva waters. Despite the major historical and cultural significance of Oleszkiewicz’s personality and work for Polish culture in the first quarter of the 19th century, the artist’s biography needs additional study, and there are no special research works devoted to his artistic career. The personality of the artist received a mythological interpretation in historiography; the real person disappeared into the artistic image created by Mickiewicz. It seems necessary to fill the gaps that exist in our knowledge about the life and work of this Polish-Lithuanian artist, to con-duct additional archival research, which will help not only to clarify some details of his biography, but also in the future to find and attribute his paintings. The article is devoted to Oleszkiewicz’s participation in the academic exhibition of 1814 and to establishing the names of the paintings that were exhibited by Oleszkiewicz in that year. The study was conducted on archival materials (Russian State Historical Archive).