He began his education in 1855 in the Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg. From 1858 he continued his education at Jan Pankiewicz Middle School in Warsaw. In 1861 he studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Agriculture and Forestry in Nowa Aleksandria (Puławy), where he made friends with Maksymilian Gierymski. In 1863 he joined the armed struggle in the January Uprising. After the Battle of Grochowiska, he was interned by the Austrians and deported to Olomouc, before managing to escape and join the squad of Colonel Zygmunt Chmieleński. He lost his left leg in the Battle of Mełchów,. The family’s intervention saved him from being sent deep into Russia – he was sentenced to forced emigration instead and moved to Paris. In 1865 he returned to Warsaw, where he took up drawing lessons, most likely with Rafał Hadziewicz and Ksawery Kaniewski. In 1866 he also began studying at the engineering department of the University of Ghent. The following year he left Belgium to return to Paris. Living in 1868 in the Latin Quarter, he shared a painting studio with the German Karl Goetz. Upon his return to Kraków in 1869, he met Lucjan Siemieński, a writer, poet and art critic. Siemieński’s aesthetic views had a fundamental influence on the formation of Chmielowski’s artistic attitude.
Having received a scholarship from Włodzimierz Dzieduszycki thanks to the patronage of a critic, he left for Munich, where he joined the circles of the Polish artistic colony. He befriended the Gierymski brothers, Maksymilian and Aleksander, Józef Chełmoński and Józef Brandt. In 1870 he was officially accepted as a student of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Alexander Strähuber and Herman Anschütz were his professors for his four years of education there. In the Polish environment centred around Brandt, Chmielowski was perceived as an authority in the field of art theory. His opinion-forming influence encompassed both early and contemporary art. In 1874 he returned to Poland, initially living in Kraków. In 1875 he settled in Warsaw, occupying a painting studio at the European Hotel together with Stanisław Witkiewicz, Antoni Piotrowski and Józef Chełmoński. The artists quickly found themselves as regulars at Helena Modjeska’s artistic and literary salon. Their atelier was visited by Henryk Sienkiewicz and Antoni Sygietyński, an art composer and critic and a leading promoter of the realistic movement.
Chmielowski took part in exhibitions of the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Kraków (from 1870), Warsaw Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts and Aleksander Krywult’s salon (1880). In 1876, he published a dissertation on aesthetics titled On the Essence of Art in Ateneum magazine.
In 1879 he moved to Lviv, where he lived with Leon Wyczółkowski. In the same year, he took part in a spiritual retreat with the Jesuits in Ternopil; in 1880 he entered the order’s novitiate in Stara Wieś near Lviv. However, after a few months, he showed symptoms of mental illness, which resulted in his expulsion from the order and hospitalisation in Kulparków near Lviv. In 1882, he left the hospital to be taken care of by his brother Stanisław in the Kudryńce nad Zbruczem manor farm he leased. Having overcome depression, he began missionary activity in Podolia, Podlachia and Volhynia as a tertiary of the Third Order of St. Francis. He also carried out conservation works in churches.
In 1884, in fear of the tsarist repressions, he returned to Kraków. Between 1885 and 1887 he was a valued participant in the life of the local artistic and intellectual elite, but in 1887 he gave up his brilliant social career to join the Capuchin Order and took the name of Brother Albert. In 1888, he became a member of the St. Vincent à Paulo Conference and began to take care of Kraków’s homeless and poor, an activity which he continued until the end of his life with the congregations of Albertine Brothers and Albertine Sisters Servants of the Poor (which he founded). In 1888 he also joined the Society of Painters and Sculptors. He died in 1916 in the Congregation’s home in Kazimierz, Kraków. In 1938, a retrospective exhibition of Chmielowski’s works was held at the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Kraków. In the same year, the President of the Republic of Poland, Ignacy Mościcki, posthumously awarded Brother Albert with the Great Ribbon of the Order of Polonia Restituta ‘for outstanding merits in independence activities and in the field of social work’. Subsequent monographic exhibitions of the artist’s body of work were held at the National Museum in Warsaw (1939), the Museum of the Warsaw Archdiocese (1984) and the Archdiocese Museum in Kraków (1995). On 12th November 1989, the Holy Father John Paul II canonised him Blessed Brother Albert Adam Chmielowski.
Chmielowski’s oeuvre is small, not only because the artist focused on theory, but also because as early as 1888, less than a year after the beginning of his monastic life, he abandoned painting entirely, considering it an activity devoid of any significant meaning. Moreover, due to the turbulence of history, the legacy of twenty-three years of artistic output did not survive in its entirety. Chmielowski’s creative attitude and aesthetic views were initially influenced by the artistic ethos of Munich. In Paris, where he stayed between 1867 and 1868, he had to face various tendencies in art, including the realism of Corot, Millet and Courbet. Munich’s education – environmental influences rather than the academy’s workshop routine – aroused his interest in this trend, just as it happened in the case of the Kossaks, Gierymski, Chełmoński and Brandt.
In the circle of the Polish colony centred around Brandt’s studio, Chmielowski figure quickly became an authority in the fields of ethics and aesthetics and a mentor who inextricably combined these two fields of philosophy. Academic teaching, based on technical perfectionism and rigid artistic norms, triggered a contradictory reaction in the creator, who strived to emphasise individualism and subjective sensitivity. Chmielowski distinguished himself thanks to his talent for palette work, as well as an excellent sense of colour nuances and chromatic outfits. However, he valued the art of the Nazarenes, including Julius von Carolsfeld, who highly exposed the values of the linework, as well as the painting of Anselm Feuerbach, who operated with a narrow chromatic range. His neo-romantic inclinations were influenced by Arnold Böcklin’s art. Chmielowski spent a lot of time in the Old Pinacotheque contemplating the paintings of old masters, primarily Valazquez. Both the admiration for ‘museum art’ and the widespread historism in Munich’s circles manifested itself in his compositions modelled after the paintings of the 16th century Venetians, such as Siesta Italiana (1870) and Francesca and Paolo – costume genre scenes evoking a poetic aura. Chmielowski sought literary inspiration for Idyll (1870) in Theocritus’ Idylls, reaching into an even more distant past, to the times of ancient Greece. He was also attracted to the world of fairy tales, legends and myths in which he found the ethical and existential values of truth (The Fairy Tale about the Good Son, c. 1874). He belonged to the group of Munich artists who contested the formula of historical painting developed by both Jan Matejko and Bavarian master Karl Piloty. He turned to the recent past, still present and determining the Polish nation’s tragic fate, to the epoch of the January Uprising. However, he created a different perspective of this vision than the one taken by Artur Grottger, creator of the pathetic and heroic canon of patriotic iconography. In his canvases, Chmielowski, like Maksymilian Gierymski, showed the coarse everyday life of the armed uprising, painted small episodes of camp life, presented the harsh conditions of camping (Insurgent Camp in the Forest, 1873-1874), the arduous effort of pickets and exhausting marches (Insurgents).