Witold Pruszkowski

The family emigrated to Dieppe in 1860, and he relocated to Paris in 1866, where he had his first drawing lessons with the portrait painter, Tadeusz Gorecki, the son-in-law of Adam Mickiewicz.

[2] In 1892, he became a member of the construction committee for a monument to Artur Grottger, whose works inspired a trio of Pruszkowski's most famous paintings: Lithuania, Poland, and War.

[3] In the early 1890s, Pruszkowski was inspired by the prose poem Anhelli by Juliusz Słowacki (1837) to create multiple pastels and oil paintings illustrating the plight of the Polish exiles in Siberia.

For example, in Eloe among the Graves, the angel does not command the unquiet dead to cease their groaning with a thunderclap of his wings as in the epic, but instead is an ethereal feminine figure that gently spreads its arms in a soothing gesture.

Its whereabouts were unknown for many years, but it was found in a private collection after World War II and is now in the Lviv National Art Gallery.