Zygmunt Sidorowicz (1846 Lviv - 1881 Vienna), In Winter, 1880.

oil, board, 15 × 19.5 cm
Signed and dated p. d.: "Sidorowicz.1880."

In Zygmunt Sidorowicz's painting work, landscape became the dominant motif. Sidorowicz at first focused mainly on portrait painting and genre scenes, and landscape representations were not in his circle of interest. The painter owes the adoption of this trend in his art to his acquaintance with two artists with whom he shared a studio in Munich - Walery Brochocki and Aleksandr Kotsis. As Tadeusz Wiśniowiecki, a friend of the artist, recalled: "Sidorowicz's first, one might say, teacher in landscape painting was Walery Brochocki, with whom he shared a studio for a long time. It was he who, together with Alexander Kotsis, facilitated his first steps, and through his eyes he looked at nature in the early days. That Sidorovich turned out to be an eager pupil is easy to understand, because, faithful to the fact that he was a finished painter, he also developed in a short time into an excellent landscape painter, and as such we must consider him from now on. [...] From now on, Sigismund paints exclusively landscapes. Probably he had no idea at the time when he first painted a landscape that he would abandon his years-long study of the forms of the human body forever, that the path he took would lead him into a new world, from which, unfortunately, he would never return. I don't mean this in the sense that Sidorovich-landscape painter ever felt like a renegade, he liked nature in its wide expanses with all his heart, painted landscapes willingly and a lot, feeling happier under the golem of the sky than in stuffy chambers. This expression of regret comes out, not from his lips, but from mine - I, along with friends of his talent, regret that the brush of the genre painter, which he already wielded so bravely, broke lightheartedly. [...] Sidorovich, as a landscape painter, is too well known for me to need to dwell on it, and we have him too well, probably all of us, in memory to recall here the splendid qualities of his brush --- I think it will suffice if I outline in a few features how this new talent developed in him and how he conceived and painted his landscapes. [...] His landscapes, which, thanks to his later skill and great diligence, he distributed so generously, were spread all over the world, and today it would be difficult to want to acquire them for the country. They passed from hand to hand of wandering merchants, from where the greater half got to America. This was the case in Munich, and later in Vienna, where our artist moved in 1877. He sent little to his country, and although Sidorowicz's paintings were found annually at exhibitions in Warsaw, Krakow and Lviv, this is such a small percentage of the capital of his work that, if we wanted to judge Sigismund from domestic exhibitions, we would not have a proper idea of his work. [...] for every true artist, so also for Sidorowicz, his landscapes had in composition, in drawing, in general mood, and in those intangible things that constitute the spiritual side of each work, a type so much related to each other that without a signature, at first glance you could recognize that this was Sidorowicz. ("Zygmunt Sidorowicz. Silhouette from the life of an artist. From the notes of Tadeusz Wiśniowiecki," Nasz Kraj, 1906, z. 17, pp.23-24.)