Oil on panel, signed "W. Rutkowski".
Dimensions with frame: 45x90 cm (smaller: 22x18 cm; center: 22x28 cm)
Włodzimierz Albin Rutkowski (Warsaw 1915–1992 Warsaw). His uncle, the artist and painter Aleksander Wołowski, first awakened the child’s great talent for drawing, followed by his art teacher at the high school in Krzemieniec (his father, Józef Rutkowski, an organ concertmaster, was a music professor there). In Warsaw, he attended the Municipal School of Decorative Arts and Painting. He was a student of the painter Czesław Wasilewski, whose work had a profound influence on his own painting. Horses and atmospheric landscapes became the dominant themes in his work, and his friendship and collaboration with Wasilewski lasted until the latter’s death in 1946. During the interwar period, he participated in the artistic life of the city by exhibiting his paintings in Warsaw galleries and at exhibitions of Polish painting organized by his aunt Emilia Wołowska throughout the then Republic of Poland. After the war, he worked in Włocławek, Kujawy, where he participated in several group exhibitions at the local museum. In 1960, he returned to Warsaw and painted mainly scenes of Warsaw. Together with his son Wojciech, who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1968, he exhibited in Warsaw galleries and abroad—in Germany, Austria, and the United States.
