Ars: časopis Ústavu Dejín Umenia Slovenskej Akadémie Vied (45.2012)

9. Franciszek Kostryen'ski: Kostryewski is Drawing a Peasant, 1859, watercolour on paper. Apro: The Olszyhski Album, V, No. 523 A.
Warsaw, National Museum.

the available means to support his artist friends: by
providing them with living quarters in his own large
apartment, collecting and preserving their works,
lending money to those in trouble, and taking pho-
tographs during their famous walking trips to the
countryside as well as at parties [Fig. 8], but also by
securing commissions for illustrations in one of the
most lavishly illustrated Warsaw journal, K/osy, when
he took on the post of its artistic editor.
Alongside highly finished drawings, oil sketches
and water colours, the latter especially favoured by
Gerson, Olszynski’s albums contain a plethora of
caricatures and comic drawings which, produced in
large quantities during every evening, drawn in the
presence of the group, often using the same sheet

of paper, sometimes composed of barely a few lineš,
frequendy unfinished, but all of them scrupulously
preserved by Olszewski, and glued carefully onto
the pages of his albums.40 As with the bohemian
Warsaw poets, caricature was also the privileged me-
dium of the painters, proving again its suitability for
spontaneous commentary, stressing the informality
and playfulness of the group’s activities, but also its
40 On the fashion for albums in the fist half of the nineteenth
Century, see LEČA, B.: Before Photography: The Album and
the French Graphie Tradition in the Early Nineteenth Cen-
tury. In: BANN, S. (ed.): Art and the Early Photographie Album.
New Haven 2011, pp. 31-54; LE MEN, S.: Le Livre Blanc.
In: BRUGEROLLES, E. (ed.): E’Oeil et la plume: caricatures de
Charles Garnier. Paris 2010 — 2011, pp. 7-18.

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