Portrait of Izabela Szembekowa

Painted in 1912, the year before the First World War's approach cast its shadow over Galician cultural life, this portrait of Izabela Szembekowa belongs to Axentowicz's final flourishing as a portraitist of Kraków's aristocratic and professional society. The Szembek family had deep roots in Polish noble life, and a commission from this circle represented both social and artistic prestige. By 1912 Axentowicz's reputation was fully established: he had been professor at the Kraków Academy for over two decades, his portraits hung in the leading collections of Galicia, and his pastel works were internationally recognized. The portrait of Szembekowa thus represents the accumulated mastery of an artist at his apex — his technical and psychological resources fully developed and applied with confident authority.

In his late portraits Axentowicz shows particular mastery of the relationship between the sitter's lit face and the surrounding atmospheric environment — the boundary between figure and ground handled with gradations of tone and temperature that make the sitter appear to inhabit rather than merely stand before the background.