Tadeusz Ajdukiewicz
1852–1916 · Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria · Realism
The story
Tadeusz Ajdukiewicz made his name painting the powerful of late 19th-century Europe and their horses. Born in 1852 in the Austrian-ruled part of a partitioned Poland, he trained in Kraków and Munich, then set out on a career that carried him from Vienna, where he worked on commission for the aristocracy, to London, where in 1883 he painted the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII.
He travelled to Paris and the Near East with a Polish count, and worked in Bucharest for the Romanian war ministry on an album of army uniforms. His specialty was the standing society portrait and the equestrian scene, among them a well-known portrait of the actress Helena Modrzejewska, famous on both sides of the Atlantic under the stage name Modjeska.
He died near Kraków in 1916, during the First World War, in the years his partitioned homeland was fighting its way back toward independence.
