Golden Roses

Olga Boznańska (15 April 1865 – 26 October 1940) was a Polish painter who was stylistically associated with the French impressionism, though she rejected this label.

Boznańska was born in Kraków during foreign partitions of Poland. She was the daughter of Adam Nowina Boznański, (from a noble Polish family but influenced by positivism to take up work as a railway engineer) and teacher Eugénie née Mondan originally from Valence, France.

Boznańska learned drawing first from her mother who was a teacher in the convent school of Premonstratensians in Imbramowice near Kraków, then with Józef Siedlecki, Kazimierz Pochwalski and Antoni Piotrowski between 1883-6. She then studied at the Adrian Baraniecki School for Women. She débuted in 1886 at the Kraków Association of Friends of Fine Arts exhibition.

From 1886 to 1890 she studied art in the private schools of Karl Kricheldorf and Wilhelm Dürr in Munich - as women were not yet permitted at the Munich Academy.

From then on she devoted herself mostly to portraits, still lifes and occasionally landscapes.