Easter Market on Bernardine Square in Lviv

Small size painting, framed in a wide mount, painted in watercolour technique. It depicts a genre scene - a pre-Christmas fair on the Bernardine Square in Lviv. The painting comes from the museum’s collection, it is framed in a narrow wooden frame decorated with a narrow band of gilded geometric ornamentation. The painting is signed in the lower left corner with the inscription ”Plac Bernardyński r. 1894 Stare domy i Restauracja pod Słowikiem. Targ Wielkanocny. Mal. z nat. T Rybkowski” (Bernardyński Square in 1894. Old houses and Pod Słowikiem Restaurant. Easter market. Painted from nature. T Rybkowski). The painter lived for some time near the Bernardine Square in Lviv, hence the inscription ‘from nature’. Painted with meticulously depicted details (stalls, architecture, sellers and buyers at the fair), characteristic of the painter’s work. Tadeusz Rybkowski (born in 1848 in Kielce, died in September 1926 in Lviv) was a Polish painter and illustrator. After passing his matriculation exams in Kielce, he studied at the School of Fine Arts in Kraków under Władysław Łuszczkiewicz, and then for two years in Vienna at the local Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a student of the Viennese painter Hans Makart. In 1878 he set up his studio in Vienna. In 1893 he settled permanently in Lviv, where he became a professor at the Public Industrial School and also opened a private school of painting for women. He painted a lot, especially small-size pictures (like the one kept in Łańcut), depicting scenes from the life of the people, weddings, fairs, inns, but also, during the First World War, paintings related to the fights. He was also a portrait artist. He most often used the watercolour technique, but also worked in oil. In Lviv he designed tapestries for the meeting hall of the railway directorate and wall paintings for the Municipal Theatre. In his paintings of genre scenes, he rendered the details of folk costumes with great precision, his watercolour paintings had a reportage character. He was also the author of scenes from the life of Emperor Franz Joseph, depicted on fans which Roman Potocki, the Third Entailer of Łańcut, presented to the two Archduchesses at the Polish Ball in Vienna in 1886. The (three) small-size paintings, including the present one, are exhibited in the Northern Corridor on the second floor of the castle.