Idalia Pol

According to the inscription on the back of the photograph, it was taken in the photographic studio ‘Adela’, run by Robert Schaller in Lviv. Initially his company was located on Kopernika Street (1890-1900), but later moved nearby to the newly constructed Mikolasch Passage – the most famous ‘shopping mall’ in the city at the time. Considering the age of the photographed woman, her biography and the history of the atelier, the portrait must have been made between 1900 and 1914.

Idalia Pol was born in Warsaw in 1882. She was the daughter of the younger of Wincenty Pol's sons, Marek Stanisław and Maria née Zienkowicza, the sister of Juliusz Pol (1878-1921), painter, and the half-sister of Jerzy Pol (1888-1935), a major in the Polish Army. After graduating from the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament Secondary School in Lviv, she was a teacher from 1910 to 1914 in primary schools in Kuliki (Złoczow district) and Danilicz (near Rohatyn). In 1914 she took a Red Cross nursing course and worked in Kraków hospitals during the war. From 1919 to 1924, she was an educator in the Society of Friends of Children and the director of a centre for children from poor families. In the years 1925-1949, she worked as a school hygienist at the Cracow City Board. Continuing her family's literary traditions, she wrote poems which she presented in the circle of her relatives and friends (they were not published). In her youth, she had a fiancé, a legionary, who was killed in battle. She remained single until the end of her life. She died in Cracow in 1971 and is buried at the Rakowicki cemetery.