Kielce – The National Museum in Kielce (Amalfi Cathedral by Aleksander Gierymski)

This was a pleasant reminder of my trip to Amalfi last year when I went into this cathedral, with this 1890s painting looking like the scene when I visited, so little has changed. Well, there were now people standing there taking selfies, but the buildings hadn’t changed. Gierymski was a Polish painter who lived from 1850 until 1901, born in Warsaw in 1850, but he spent most of the 1870s in Rome after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He lived between Warsaw and Italy for the rest of his life, spending his final years in various parts of Italy.

Another one of this artist’s paintings, the Jewess with Oranges, was featured in the international press when the National Museum (in Warsaw, the museum in Kielce is one of its outposts) purchased it. It was more of a repurchase, as it had been stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War and only came to light again in 2010. The National Museum will never get back everything that was stolen from it, but bit by bit, they get artworks back from time to time.