A portrait of the artist's wife
A painting by Jozef Mehoffer is coming home to Krakow after the National Museum bought it for 250,000 zloty.
Red Umbrella will be exhibited permanently at the Mehoffer House.
The picture shows the artist’s wife Jadwiga sheltering beneath a red parasol in the garden of their home at Jankowice, close to the Beskidy mountains. Jadwiga’s image was to become a hallmark of Mehoffer’s work, and he described her as his inspiration as well as his model. The picture was painted in 1917, as a farewell to the house he and his wife had lived in for almost a decade.
Mehoffer is considered to have been one of the driving forces of the Mloda Polska (Young Poland) movement – a loose collective of artists and intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was a student of one of Krakow’s greatest artists, Jan Matejko.