Janusz Towpik’s speciality as an illustrator was animals. Considered one of the foremost animalists in post-war Polish illustration, Towpik attached great importance to the accurate depiction of both the appearance and the characteristic movements and behaviour of animals. He was not one of those illustrators who were confined to the studio and relied only on their own imagination. He sketched from nature, drawing plants, landscapes that changed with the seasons, and finally animals. He could draw dogs and cats at home, but he also studied species from completely different parts of the world, which he also observed live, regularly visiting Warsaw Zoo. When travelling, he would take a haversack, which instead of provisions contained small cardboard boxes with tracing paper, crayons and fixatives. He combined observation and sketching from nature with the study of specialised nature literature and photography. The protagonists of his earliest drawings were mainly horses. This fascination later became evident not only in subsequent illustrations, but also evolved into a passion for riding.
A commitment to realism translated into illustration commissions. While most of the representatives of the so-called Polish school of illustration had mainly children’s books in their oeuvre, a significant part of Towpik’s legacy are popular science books or nature atlases. In this respect, his work is unique – he is one of the few artists who did not specialise in just one field, but combined his work on free, stylised illustrations for children’s books and popular science illustration subject to the rigours of realism throughout his career.
The first book illustrated by Towpik was Kruczek Chudy Nie Miał Budy (Skinny Kruczek Didn’t Have a Kennel) by Maria Kownacka in 1960. The story of a homeless country dog who, together with other animal companions, goes to the forest to collect material for a kennel, allowed the artist to demonstrate his sense of observation in his depictions of dogs and forest creatures in his first book commission, although their form is highly synthetic. The characters are outlined with a few brushstrokes and flat spots, but the artist has rendered their movements with great naturalness. In Kruczek Chudy Nie Miał Kenny, colour and black-and-white illustrations alternate, which may have been due, as Jacek Friedrich suggested, to a shortage on the publishing market. In subsequent years, however, Towpik returned to differentiating colour illustrations, based on more detail and subtle colour combinations, with black and white graphic forms.
Despite his debut in a children’s book, for the next few years Towpik did not take on similar commissions, concentrating on the other branch of his illustration work, namely scientific and popular science illustration. In the 1960s, Towpik’s depictions of animals and plants appeared in school geography textbooks, the constantly reissued atlas Ssaki Polski (Mammals of Poland) by Włodzimierz Serafiński, the atlas Ryby Wód Polskich (Fish of Polish Waters) by Andrzej Rudnicki or even handbooks such as Gospodarski Chów Bydła (Farming Cattle).
In the case of the zoological and botanical drawings, the synthetic nature of the first book illustrations is evident, for example, in the absence of a spatial background and the placement of carefully drawn plants or animal silhouettes in various positions on the neutral white of the page. It is also marked by the balance between naturalism and graphicness. Towpik is above all faultless in depicting the movements of the animals he depicts, and he does not omit details related to, for example, the differentiation of their colouring, yet he never strives for the illusion of total, photographic naturalism; he operates with clear contours, very delicate chiaroscuro and as much detail as scientific fidelity requires. This synthesis finally results in the universality desired in scientific publications – the artist, as Jacek Friedrich wrote in a text in Towpik, published in the album Janusz Towpik 1934-1981: ‘without losing sight of the individual animal, he created at the same time, as it were, a model of a given species: the wolf, the lynx or the bear as such.’
However, the artist’s constant study of local nature, whether during visits to the zoo, plein-air events with students or visits to horse studs where he practised riding, was not limited to this convention. In addition to his book commissions, he also developed a ‘calendar’ series of twelve gouaches, depicting various ecosystems – forests, forested wetlands and river floodplains – in successive seasons. These panels, full of detail and overgrown by flocks of birds, roe deer, wild boar or bison, prove that Towpik’s sense of observation was not limited to individual animals.
He returned to illustrating fictional books at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, preparing illustrations for subsequent stories starring animals, such as Leśna Ścieżka (Forest Path) by Mieczysława Buczkówna or Psie Rozmowy (Dog Conversations) by Halina Pietrusiewicz. In the latter, the artist, in a way, develops the formula from his first works – the dog characters are painted in an abbreviated, synthetic manner, sometimes literally with a few brushstrokes, and placed on uniform, white or single-colour backgrounds, so their poses and movements become crucial. In the case of Leśna Ścieżka, the stylization goes the other way – freedom of gesture is replaced by decorative rhythmicity. The backgrounds are no longer completely flat – most scenes feature plants, bushes or tree branches, maintained in vivid colours, simplified and sometimes even approaching abstraction. The silhouettes of the animals also remain expressive yet decoratively simplified – the herd of wild boar in one illustration even resembles a rhythmic ornament.
Although this kind of work would be difficult to associate with his zoological illustrations at first glance, even the stylised, fairy-tale representations of animals betray Towpik’s hand as a scientific illustrator, who is always careful to maintain correctness in the depiction of the characteristics of individual species and basic fidelity to reality. So if we are looking at illustrations for a fairy tale set in India, we can be sure that Towpik will only include bird or monkey species appropriate to that region, and the elephant will clearly be an Indian elephant, not an African one.
At this time, the artist also created illustrations for Sienkiewicz’s In Desert and Wilderness (1969) – economical, in black and white, almost calligraphic. The illustrations to the collection of Bulgarian fairy tales entitled Trzej Bracia i Złota Jabłoń (Three Brothers and a Golden Apple Tree) are at the opposite stylistic pole – the artist uses vivid colour and places several scenes on one page, combining them into sequences framed by a border, with one central motif and several side ones in each illustration. Towpik was also keen to illustrate stories set in fairy-tale Eastern settings, where the subject matter also matched the style – illustrations for the book Myśliwy Charibu: Baśnie Wschodnie (Charibu The Hunter: Oriental Tales) bear both traces of the synthetic freedom of Towpik’s first illustrations and stylistic elements characteristic of Persian miniatures, visible in the flattening and piling up of perspective and the silhouettes of horses and human figures. This was not the only instance of such stylisation adapted to the content of the book. The illustrations for the collection O Śpiącym Królewiczu: Greckie Baśnie Ludowe (On the Sleeping Prince: Greek Folk Tales) have features of Byzantine mosaics and miniatures from the Justinian era, while the stories from Greek mythology in Jadwiga Żylińska’s work clearly allude to black and red-figure vase painting. Janina Lasocka’s illustrations for Król Poluje (The King is Hunting) combine motifs from medieval illuminations, renaissance tapestries and baroque portraits, while Ewa Szelburg-Zarembina’s Lech, Czech i Rus combines naturalistic observation with stylisation reminiscent of folk glass painting.
Thus, while in his nature illustrations the artist strived for a combination of realism and synthesis over the years, refining the formula he had developed early on, in his illustrations to fairy tales or young people’s novels he adopted quite the opposite strategy – he modified the style and adapted it each time to the content of the illustrated works, just as several other illustrators of the time did, including Zbigniew Rychlicki. He himself commented on this strategy: ‘Since I illustrate fairy tales from different nations, I am helped [...] by studying their ancient art in choosing the right artistic concept.’ One of the most intriguing examples of this approach is Friedrich Feld’s The Parrot of Isfahan, in which one composition is inscribed with another through forms reminiscent of comic book ‘balloons’, corresponding to the narrative of the book itself, in which oral tales, flowing seamlessly from one to the next, form the heart of the narrative. As Jacek Friedrich wrote: ‘As a result, Towpik has introduced a kind of “Russian doll” composition modelled on Eastern fairy tales, in which another story is spun out of one.’
Towpik also undertook formal experiments in popular science illustrations from the second half of the 1970s, an example of which is Lucian Sterpellony’s The Miracle Machine, which won the Book of the Year award in 1979. Aimed at children, this book about the structure and functioning of the human body was illustrated by Towpik using several conventions interwoven in single panels. The ‘base’ is made up of simple, crayon-drawn, childlike outlines of figures, accompanied by much more detailed fragments, such as representations of internal organs reminiscent of diagrams of mechanical devices or a skeleton straight out of an anatomical atlas, as well as schematic forms reminiscent of simple graphic signs.
Although he specialised in illustration, Janusz Towpik also carried out other types of graphic commissions – he designed postcards, match labels, playing cards, logos or ex-librises. He was the author of postage stamps commemorating the 50th anniversary of Warsaw Zoo in 1978. As an artist who had studied the zoo’s animal inhabitants from nature on numerous occasions, for his own purposes and as part of an official collaboration, he was a natural candidate for this jubilee assignment. He also designed a new logo for the capital’s zoo on the same occasion, with a motif of a Warsaw mermaid arranged in a shape resembling the letter ‘z’ and two ‘o’s resembling a double shield. At the end of the 1970s, he also began to paint acrylic landscapes, among other plein-air paintings in Janów Podlaski.
One of Towpik’s most recent works were designs for tapestries depicting old Polish hunting customs, made at the end of the 1970s, prepared as part of a nationwide competition for tapestry designs for castles in southern Poland. Awarded one of two equal first prizes (alongside Helena Tchórzewska), Towpik’s designs were intended for the interiors of the castle in Krasiczyn. Before his untimely death, the artist managed to prepare only three final designs on a scale of 1:1, which were realised in the form of tapestries, today kept at the castle in Nowy Wiśnicz. In the meantime, at the turn of 1980 and 1981, Towpik prepared analogous intarsia designs with hunting scenes, at the invitation of cabinetmaker Zbigniew Rząsa. The artist’s magnum opus, however, was intended to be a work representing the trend in which he made his strongest mark – zoological popular science illustration. Janusz Towpik set himself an almost utopian task – he planned to compile a multi-volume atlas covering all mammals of the world. He managed to complete one, Małpy i Małpiatki (Apes and Monkeys), which was published after his death.
