Antoni Piotrowski

[1] Piotrowski was born in 1853 into a family of sheet iron worker in Nietulisko Duże near Kunów, then in the Russian sector of the partitioned Poland.

Between 1875 and 1877 he studied in Munich with Wilhelm Lindenschmit the Younger, and from 1877 to 1879, with Poland's nominal painter Jan Matejko at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.

He moved back to Paris only to return to Bulgaria in 1885 to join the Serbo-Bulgarian War as a Bulgarian volunteer.

Among his works were portraits of Bulgarian princes (knyaze) Alexander of Battenberg and Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha; Piotrowski was awarded an Order of Civil Merit by the latter.

All his nine historical battle-scenes painted in Bulgaria were purchased by the Bulgarian state, and are exhibited in the National Museum of Military History in Sofia.

Self-portrait with Palette (1893, National Museum, Warsaw )
The raising of Batak painted by Piotrowski in 1899