Elwiro Michał Andriolli

A painter, as well as leading Polish illustrator on the book and press market in the second half of the 19th century, January Uprising insurgent and creator of the first 'Świdermajers' near Warsaw. Born in Vilnius on 14th November 1836, died in Nałęczów on 23rd August 1893.

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A portrait drawing of Michal Elwiro Andriolli by Władysław Walkiewicz, photo: Wikimedia.org

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He was born the son of Francesco Andriolli, an Italian who was taken prisoner by Russia in 1812 whilst participating in the Napoleonic Wars. Francesco then settled in Vilnius, together with Petronela Gośniewska, a noblewoman whom he married. Elwiro was surrounded by art since he was a child – Francesco, although he never achieved a fraction of his son's fame, continued to create in art even after settling in Vilnius, especially woodcarving, stone carving and minor restoration work.

Antoni Zalewski, a then-well-known but today completely forgotten artist in the middle of the 19th century became Andriolli's second teacher from his youth and a lifelong friend. His illustrations to the classic of Sarmatian literature, the memoirs of Jan Chryzostom Pasek, were reproduced in lithographic form and hung on the walls of many manor houses in the Vilnius region, where the young Elwiro also came into contact with them and became enthralled, later recalling this moment as a formative moment:

I know that firmly from that moment I had a clear path in front of me: to know the country, its history – and – if I would be capable of that, to recreate it.

A close relationship with literature and a nostalgia for a noble culture that was becoming a thing of the past actually underpinned his career. The young Andriolli was also active in other fields – he belonged, amongst others, to a choir founded and directed by Stanisław Moniuszko – not only a famous composer but also, from 1840, an organist in St John’s Church in Vilnius.

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'A scene from the November Uprising in Lithuania (Emilia Plater)' by Michał Elwiro Andriolli, 1889, photo: National Museum in Kraków

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Although he received his first education from his father, he took up proper artistic studies in defiance of him – Francesco Andriolli insisted that Elwiro should follow his older brother who was studying medicine in Moscow. Initially, he complied with his father’s wishes, but soon abandoned the medical faculty in favour of the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, and then the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, where he studied under the guidance of the portraitist, Sergey Zaryanko. Although Andriolli's graduation painting in 1858 was also a portrait, after returning to Vilnius he quickly concentrated on historical painting, exhibiting the Skirmish Between Lithuanians and Teutonic Knights in the Forest, which was not preserved until today.

He did not stay long in his hometown; around 1859 he went to Rome to study at the prestigious Academy of St Luke. More important than his studies under the guidance of Roman professors, however, turned out to be the opportunity to meet Władysław Mickiewicz, the son of the poet whom Andriolli adored endlessly. During his stay in Italy, Andriolli also created a group of early landscape sketches, which were lost in a fire in the artist’s house in 1884.

After the Rome episode, however, the now-formed artist did not manage to develop his career. In 1863, he became involved in the January Uprising, the consequences of which he felt for much longer than the uprising itself. Initially, Andriolli recruited volunteers and commanded a small unit, then he fought under the command of Ludwik Narbutt. When the uprising was coming to an end, he fled from repression along the same route he had taken a few years earlier as a student – through Moscow to St Petersburg. There, he fell into the hands of the police but managed to escape from prison and return once again to Vilnius. Elwiro, gifted with a talent for eloquence, spun out different accounts of his escapes, changing identities of the people who hid him, details of disguises and hiding places, although none of them would make a writer of adventurous novels proud. According to one version, he supposedly hid in his family house, walled up in a small recess in the chimney and received meals through the crack.

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'Boruta', woodcut based on a drawing by M. E. Andriolli, engraving by Jan Holewiński; illustration for Kazimierz Władysław Wójcicki's book 'Klechda, ancient traditions and folk stories', 1876, photo: National Library Polona

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Andriolli, disguised, then fled to Riga, from there to London and then Paris. He started to work with L'Illustration and was involved in the circle of Polish émigré activists. He renewed his relationship with Władysław Mickiewicz, who commissioned him to illustrate Henryk Rzewuski’s Memories of an Old Lithuanian Nobleman. Under an assumed name, Andriolli set off back to Poland via Turkey. On the way, however, he was arrested again and again attempted to escape, this time unsuccessfully. In July 1868, as a political offender, he was sentenced to fifteen years of exile. In another twist, as if from an adventure novel, the artist managed to have his sentence reduced thanks to the intervention of the governor’s wife.

In Vyatka, as an exile, Andriolli quickly took up portraying the local inhabitants; he also did some minor conservation work and painted iconostases for Orthodox churches in several nearby villages. There, he became the teacher of the then 12-year-old Anna Bilińska, the daughter of a doctor practising in Vyatka, and soon an outstanding painter. He also started to cooperate with Tygodnik Ilustrowany, sending illustrations to the poetic texts published there. In 1871, he regained his freedom, left for Warsaw and started to work with several other illustrated periodicals – including Kłosy, Wędrowiec and Tygodnik Powszechny.

Andriolli made up for almost a decade spent on wandering, hiding, and finally in exile by working extra hard, and the centre of gravity of his art shifted from painting to illustration. At that time Wojciech Gerson, Franciszek Kostrzewski and Ksawery Pillati also worked in Polish periodicals as illustrators, but they were also active in other fields, which meant that they were present in the press less often. Concentrating fully on his illustration activities, Andriolli soon became a leading figure in this market.

A series of illustrations by Andriolli to Antoni Malczewski’s Maria was reproduced in Poland using a new technique – in the form of photographic prints of large-format crayon drawings. After some time it proved not to be very durable; the photographs faded quickly. Much more durable was the dominant, at that time, woodcut illustration, in which the artist’s drawing, usually applied directly onto a primed wooden block, from which the matrix was made, was already prepared for printing by a wood engraver interpreting the artist’s composition. In the case of less-skilled craftsmen, there was a risk of simplification and distortion of the original composition. Although Andriolli sometimes complained about it, the beginning of his career turned out to be a string of successes. He worked a lot and earned a lot, and soon he bought a small brick manor house in Stasinowo near Warsaw (today in Mińsk Mazowiecki).

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Illustration to Adam Mickiewicz's 'Pan Tadeusz' by Michał Elwiro Andriolli, 1881, watercolor, gouache, paper, 40 x 31 cm, photo: the property of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw

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In 1879 he received a commission for a series of illustrations to Pan Tadeusz from the Lviv-based publisher Herman Altenberg. The edition of the poem with illustrations by Andriolli was published in 1882 and was the first illustrated edition of the work. A few years earlier, Juliusz Kossak had tried to illustrate Pan Tadeusz, but without success; the drawings were never published. Stanisław Witkiewicz was critical of these sketches, but he did not spare Andriolli’s illustrations either. Although there was no shortage of enthusiastic voices in the press, on the occasion of Pan Tadeusz there also appeared clear reservations concerning the work of the illustrator, who at a time when realism gained strength and illustrations by, amongst others, Józef Chełmoński, began to appear in the press, was increasingly often accused of repetitiveness, mannerism, excessive complication of forms and departing from nature. Witkiewicz expressed these accusations most clearly, seeing in Andriolli:

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A talent that has been completely tarnished, deprived of the two capital features of Mickiewicz’s poem: simplicity and truth, as well as knowledge of life and the people it was supposed to represent [...], a thoroughly ornamental talent, a vignette [...].

Andriolli himself accepted this assessment, explaining his failure by personal problems combined with the eternal nightmare of all artists – the deadline hanging over his neck. The artist wrote in a letter to Teofil Lenartowicz:

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'Pan Tadeusz' did not work out well for me. I made it at the bedside of my dying mother, not long after the loss of her child, burdened with all sorts of troubles, depressed, but forced by the contract and the deadline.

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Illustration for Eliza Orzeszkowa's 'Meir Ezofowicz' by Michał Elwiro Andriolli, photo: National Library Polona

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However, this was not his last attempt at the subject. In 1883 Andriolli returned to Paris for several years, where he quickly established contacts with local publishers and was inundated with further commissions. In the same year, Gustave Doré died, an icon of French illustration for several decades, also admired by Andriolli, in whom French critics saw a kind of continuation of his work. Also in Paris, on the commission of Count Benedict Henryk Tyszkiewicz, he made a large-format drawing illustrating The Concert of Concerts from Pan Tadeusz, received much more enthusiastically than his earlier illustrations. At the end of 1887, he created another version of the same scene for Tyszkiewicz, and from this commission germinated the idea of illustrating all the poetic and dramatic texts by the beloved bard, whose works he knew almost by heart. The plan did not come to fruition – the artist died only a few years later, his drawings for Dziady languishing and never reaching publication.

Apart from Mickiewicz, Andriolli illustrated texts by the other two Romantic bards, Słowacki and Krasiński, as well as more contemporary literature, such as the works of Orzeszkowa. Not only as a reader did Andriolli have a special affection for the Romantics, but also in his art he remained a Romantic in spirit. 'Andriolli’s inner romanticism outlived the movement', wrote critic Henryk Piątkowski in a sketch about his work shortly after the artist’s death. Complicated compositions, a wealth of details, accessories, a variety of costumes and expressive physiognomies, violent gestures and dramatic chiaroscuro are the basis of Andriolli's artistic vocabulary. This 'romantic spirit' is also revealed in the landscapes, especially in the illustrations to An Ancient Tale or Pan Tadeusz, where dense forests with huge, age-old pines and oaks with thick trunks and twisted, spreading branches thrive. He also expressed his fondness for his native landscape in writing:

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Why do our landscape painters paint the sad Roman campania or the dull French countryside! One should look over here, where the vegetation is suffocating, where we have lovely meadows, large trees, hills with villages, churches and manors, a capricious river with a bizarre bridge, some peculiar smithy, [...] an inn amongst the trees, a pond below.

This landscape recurred in numerous landscape drawings from his regular trips around the country. At the same time, Andriolli's 'positivist' face surfaced, closer aligned to realism. Ethnographic passions and sense of observation are revealed in his landscape drawings and reporter's sketches from his journeys, as well as in his individual literary illustrations, especially for Orzeszkowa’s Meir Ezofowicz.

Andriolli remained faithful to his early chosen formula, despite the changing realities – it is enough to say that the artist left for Paris a few days before Manet's death. However, Andriolli himself was not deaf to the signals of new trends in art, even though he made significant re-evaluations of his own work under their influence. He noted, for example:

Impressionism brought new elements into art, widened the scale of impressions by a more diligent observation of nature and increased the richness of colouristic means.

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'Ruins of the castle in Czersk' by Michał Elwiro Andriolli, 1900, photo: National Library Polona

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Even before he departed for Paris, the artist had already converted his former modest manor house into a new home. In 1880, he bought from Zygmunt Kurtz a forest-covered part of the Anielin manor farm (huge in size, amounting to about 200 hectares), later renamed Brzegi, through which flows the Świder river, not far from the railway station in Otwock, built shortly before. On the site, he built his own house and villas for summer visitors. In this way, Andriolli became a pioneer in transforming the Otwock area on the bank of the Świder into a summer resort, driven both by his love for nature near Warsaw and by his business passion.

He was also the creator of a unique variety of local architecture – he built the first house on the Świder almost by himself and developed both the aesthetics of the decoration and the wall construction, which was a variation on the half-timbered construction. The eclectic, decorative style of the houses combined architectural elements of the so-called Alpine style (also known as the Swiss and Tyrolean styles), widely imitated at that time in the resorts of this part of Europe, before the development of the Zakopane style in, amongst others, the Polish Tatra Mountains, as well as elements of local construction and the imagination of Andriolli himself. The houses, covered with openwork woodcarving ornaments decorating wooden gables, balustrades and turrets, built by Andriolli’s followers, became known as 'Świdermajers' thanks to Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński and his 1949 poem A Trip to Świder.

Unlike Witkiewicz’s Zakopane style, which emerged as a national contrast to the Alpine style, Świdermajer, after all also a local variety of spa architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was not a consciously designed style. Andriolli was not guided by any programme; he did not encase his holiday resort in a theory, but only put the architectural elements he saw here and there through the filter of his own sensitivity. This may partly be the reason why Świdermajers from the area of Otwock were given their names, and also protection and appreciation, only after many decades, and none of the initial buildings erected by the artist survived to this day.

During the period of the uprising, hiding and exile, Andriolli started his career relatively late, being already in his 30s, and despite the vitality and vigour which he displayed for most of his life, he did not live to be 60 – his career closes in only 20 years. During this time, however, he managed to gain fame both at home and in Paris, the undisputed capital of art at the time. Ironically, however, it was the not entirely successful illustrations to Pan Tadeusz and the local architectural style initiated in passing, and not the most celebrated works of the artist’s lifetime, that became Andriolli’s best-remembered legacy.

Originally compiled in Polish by PP, March 2021, translated tino English by PG, December 2021

michał elwiro andriolli