Portrait of Paul Nauen

Munich in 1893 had one of the most admired art academies in Europe, and it did not admit women. Olga Boznańska, who had come from Kraków a few years earlier, worked instead in the private studios that had grown up around the academy to teach the students it turned away. This portrait is the picture that got her noticed. The sitter is Paul Nauen, a German painter she knew, six years older than she was, and she signed and dated the canvas in the top right corner, Boznańska 93. In 1896 the National Museum in Kraków bought it. She herself never settled in Poland again, and spent the rest of her working life in Munich and then Paris.