Willmann, the Silesian Rembrandt ()

One of the distinctive parts in the National Museum in Wrocław collections of paintings is the set of more than 400 pictures historically linked to Silesia, created locally in the modern era up to around the year 1800 (later works are treated as the collection of German paintings, and those dated after 1945 as contemporary Polish art). Among those Silesian paintings dating from modern times, there are two particularly noteworthy sets, each comprising approximately fifty artefacts: the modern painted epitaphs and the paintings by Baroque artist, Michael Leopold Willmann (1630-1706).

For those who are interested in the artistic past of Silesia, Willmann and his works represent the most recognisable phenomenon. The painter was professionally active in Silesia during the time of the region’s prosperity, which for a century following the Thirty Years War enjoyed the benefits of peacetime. Willmann originated from the then Königsberg, but spent his entire adult life in Silesia, where he settled in 1660 in Lubiąż in the neighbourhood of the famous Cistercian abbey. Most of the enormous artistic legacy of that ‘village painter’ from Lubiąż in the form of religious paintings and frescoes is also linked to the areas of Cistercian artistic patronage – Lubiąż, Henryków, and Krzeszów.
The paintings which once decorated the walls of monasteries and abbots’ residences, after the 1810 secularisation of the Church assets in Prussia, became the property of the state, and some of them started already then to function as museum artefacts, while Willmann himself was being promoted as the Silesian equivalent of Rubens . After 1945, these were joined by another section of the Master’s works (e.g. paintings from the church in the Abbey of Lubiąż, even though around thirty of his huge canvases became dispersed after being lent out as decorations for some churches in Warsaw). Today, the National Museum in Wrocław is a depositary of almost the entire museum legacy of Willmann in Poland.
[Marek Pierzchała]

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