Oil on panel, 55 x 73 cm within a new double frame measuring 81 x 64 cm; signed lower left “Lurczyński”; on the reverse, the artist’s address in Paris in his own hand.
Mieczysław Lurczyński (born December 14, 1907, in St. Petersburg; died 1992 in Paris)—a Polish writer, poet, and painter who worked in exile in Paris after 1945. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Between 1930 and 1939, his paintings were exhibited in many Polish galleries, including the Zachęta in Warsaw (1934, 1937). After the outbreak of hostilities, he joined the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ) and later the Home Army, under the alias Jan Kozłowski. In 1943, he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Warsaw’s Pawiak, and then sent by transport to Majdanek, where he was assigned to a work detail. He was subsequently transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp. In March 1945, during the evacuation of the camp, he escaped from a rail car and made his way to Hanover. At the urging of his friend, the painter Stanisław Eleszkiewicz, he moved to Paris in 1949, where he lived and worked until his death.
