Houses at Szeroka street in Lublin

Jan Kanty Gumowski (1883-1946) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. Already during his studies, he worked at the National Museum in Kraków, taking stock of historical monuments. Gumowski's ability to accurately depict the appearance of buildings and the charm of Polish landscapes resulted in the publication of eight graphic volumes devoted to monuments of architecture and wooden buildings, roadside crosses and chapels, which, apart from the reconstructive approach, are characterized by technical excellence. In 1914, Gumowski joined the Polish Legions, and thanks to the portraits of legionaries and views of battle sites created with great sensitivity, he soon became the draughtsman of the First Brigade. At the same time, he collected materials for the volumes he started before the war. One of the earlier ones he devoted to Lublin, where he came several times in 1916. He arrived here for the first time in September, from Chełm, to convalesce after a bout of disinfection. The artist's subsequent stays in the city lasted until 1917. It was probably then that he made drawings and watercolours documenting the monuments of Lublin, based on which he created a series of fifteen lithographs published in the Lublin portfolio. Motywy architektury polskiej Jana Gumowskiego [Motives of Polish Architecture by Jan Gumowski], b. 3, published in Krakow in 1918. On multicolour or black-and-white sheets, he depicted mainly the buildings of the Jewish quarter in Podzamcze, the gates of the Old Town, the buildings of the Kalinowszczyzna and Tatary districts. Gumowski constructed the sheets according to the adopted composition scheme, placing the view of a separate building in the centre and sometimes supplementing it with the ground plan. One of the colourful pages is devoted to the tenements situated at Szeroka Street (in the place of today's Plac Zamkowy), which was the centre of the Jewish quarter in Podzamcze. In the ground floors of tall, two- and three-storey tenement houses, Jewish merchants and craftsmen had their shops and premises, and there were also synagogues and houses of prayer. The buildings visible on Gumowski's lithograph were located on the odd-numbered side of the street, under the numbers 13, 11 and 9. The most magnificent four-storey tenement house was crowned with a triangular gable, decorated with volutes, to which the architecture of the tenements of Castle Square, called Mariensztat in Lublin, erected in 1954, refers.

Anna Hałata