Portrait of Zofia Jachimecka

As a child, Konstanty Laszczka was already sculpting in wood and modelling in clay animal and religious figures and caricatures of teachers of an elementary school in Dobre in Mazovia. In 1885, thanks to the financial support of Jan Ostrowski, the owner of a nearby estate, he left for Warsaw to practice in the workshop of the neo-classicist Jan Kryński. After the master's death in 1890, Laszczka moved to the studio of Ludwik Pyrowicz - a medallist and portraitist educated in the Drawing Class of Wojciech Gerson. The social-patriotic involvement inspired a series of images of outstanding historical figures which won the first prize in a competition organized by the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts (1890). The scholarship allowed the artist to go to Paris to study for five years. Between 1890 and 1892, he studied under Antoine Mercier at the Académie Julian and then under Alexandre Falguière at the School of Fine Arts (1892-1896). There he also attended a private course in fine art with Jean-Léon Gérôme. In 1896, Laszczka returned to Warsaw, where he received a post of a drawing teacher at Aniela Hoene's female boarding school and Edward Aleksander Rontaler's commercial school. In 1899, he became a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. There, he created the Art Nouveau female figures Żal [The Sorrowful] (1901) and Zrozpaczona [The Desperate] (1902), portraits of writers (Stanisław Wyspiański, 1907; Juliusz Słowacki, 1927; Adam Mickiewicz, c. 1930) and actresses (Helena Sulima, 1901; Stanisława Wysocka, 1903/1904). Zofia Jachimecka, née Godzicka, immortalised in the years 1911-1912, combined both milieus as a translator of the classics of French and Italian drama. At the same time, as she and her husband Zdzisław, a musicologist, composer and lecturer at Jagiellonian University, ran a popular Krakow salon, she became the muse of many painters and sculptors, including Teodor Axentowicz, Xawery Dunikowski and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak