Leon Wyczółkowski

Leon Wyczółkowski began as a painter of Polish history in careful, documentary detail, the kind of grand national subject his generation was expected to take up. A trip to Paris changed him. He came home drawn to light and open air and turned to landscapes, flowers and still life, laid on with thick, bright paint in the manner of the French Impressionists.

For years he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, the old royal capital and the heart of Young Poland, the country's turn-of-the-century flowering in the arts. He was a founding member of its leading artists' society and painted much of Kraków's cultural world in portraits, from writers to fellow painters.

After his death his widow gave hundreds of his works and personal belongings to the museum in Bydgoszcz, a city in northern Poland, which now carries his name.