On Stanislawa de Karlowska by Natalia Puchalska
Stanisława de Karłowska remains a lesser-known yet important artist associated with the Fitzroy Street and Camden Town Groups, exhibiting societies active in London at the beginning of the 20th century. Her body of work, now dispersed across public and private collections, serves as a testimony to both the rapid social and cultural transformation of Edwardian England, and to the artist’s more personal experiences as a woman and an expatriate.
Stanisława de Karłowska [Fig. 1] was born at the family estate at Szeliwy (now Wszeliwy) [Fig. 2] in 1876 in then Russian-occupied Poland. Following schooling in Warsaw and Kraków, she went on to study art at the Académie Julian in Paris. She left for Paris in 1895 and enrolled at the academy in 1896. [Fig. 3][Fig. 4]
The private Académie Julian differed from other artistic academies, such as the École des Beaux-Arts, in that the school was one of the very first to admit female students. Adepts included many successful female painters, among others, Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz and Marie Bashkirtseff, who would later praise the academy for the solid and efficient training for women artists.1 Julian and his staff encouraged all pupils to compete anonymously in the in-house artistic contests intended to prepare the students to leave the academy with confidence and solid artistic background. This sense of equality and commitment to cultural democracy resonated in Karłowska’s life later, as she gracefully made her way up to the top of London’s artistic circles.
After graduating in 1897 and marrying an English painter, Robert Bevan, [Fig. 5] the same year, she moved to England, eventually settling down in London’s Swiss Cottage in 1900. [Fig. 6] Despite being busy with her new marital life and a growing family (she gave birth to a daughter, Edith Halina, in 1898, and a son, Robert Alexander, ‘Bobby’ in 1901), she continued to lead a cosmopolitan lifestyle and pursue painting [Fig.7]. She travelled extensively; sometimes alone, as at the time when, while being pregnant with her first child, she went to visit a friend, Janina Flamm, in Paris; or with her husband.
Karłowska’s works from that period contemplated her travels and a fascination with modern French art, shared with her husband. After studying at Académie Julian in the early 1890s, Robert Bevan moved to Brittany for several years, where he befriended and worked with Paul Gauguin and August Renoir. The encounter with Gauguin significantly impacted Bevan’s early works, leading him to what Philip Hendy called ‘one of the first exercises in the expressive use of pure colour in this century’.
Unlike her husband, Karłowska kept the use of colours to a bare minimum, occasionally enriching the palette with a pop of pure blue, as in Woman Sitting [Fig. 8] (Undated, Private Collection) or yellow, as in Reclining Woman [Fig. 9] (Undated, Private Collection). Quickly applied, thick brushstrokes in Rock in Anglesey (1900, Cardiff Museum) and in two undated cityscapes of Paris [Fig. 10 and 11] (Private Collection) indicate her fondness for modern styles and deep interest in the principle of light inherited from French Impressionism.
1. Stanisława de Karłowska, 1898, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
2. The Karlowski Estate at Szeliwy, c. 1897/1898 second from the left Robert Bevan and Stanisława de Karłowska to his right, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
3. Stanisława de Karłowska at the Académie Julian with fellow students, c. 1897, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
4. Young Stanisława in a Boater Hat, late 1890s, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
5. Robert Bevan, Date Unknown, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
6. Stanisława de Karłowska in Her Drawing Room in Swiss Cottage, London, Date Uknown, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
7. Stanisława de Karłowska in the Artist Smock, c. 1897-1898, courtesy of Patrick Baty
8. Woman Sitting, Date unknown, Private Collection, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
9. Reclining Woman, Date unknown, Private Collection, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
10. Early Paris 1, Date unknown, Private Collection, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
11. Early Paris 2, date unknown, private collection, courtesy of Patrick Baty
Shortly after moving to London, Karłowska became actively involved in the city’s artistic scene. In 1900 she began exhibiting with the Women’s International Art Club (WIAC), the Allied Artists Association, and the New English Art Club. The culturally diverse, metropolitan city offered Karłowska and her husband an abundance of opportunities to make new, valuable contacts. The couple complemented one another on social grounds; while Karłowska’s bubbly and jovial personality helped the reserved and self-doubting Bevan meet like-minded artists, his social background and reputation as an avant-gardist allowed the couple to reassert their status. In 1908, they both exhibited at the Allied Artists Association’s show in London’s Royal Albert Hall, where Bevan was noticed by his future peers from the Fitzroy Street and Camden Town Groups – Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman. Soon after, Bevan became a regular at weekly gatherings on Fitzroy Street. This exhibition body, established by Walter Sickert in 1907, later evolved into the Camden Town Group. Although short-lived (the society held only two exhibitions 1909-1912), it distinguished itself as the leading force of London’s art scene at the beginning of the 20th century.
Only Bevan could attend the Fitzroy Street and Camden Town Group meetings, following the rule that debarred women from the membership. Each Saturday, however, the couple met Bevan’s peers at the fashionable Café Royal on Regent Street. The café was frequented by leading figures of London’s artistic and intellectual circles, such as Walter Sickert, Harold Gilman, Lucien Pissarro, and Spencer Gore, Augustus John, Katherine Mansfield and Nancy Cunard.2 Karłowska became lifelong friends with many of them, most notably with Harold Gilman, to whom she would sit for several portraits [Fig. 12 , Karłowska by Harold Gilman, NPG]. On Sundays, the Bevans would invite fellow artists to their home in Hampstead. Bobby Bevan recalled later in his memoir:
Both immediately before 1914 and later through the war, the Bevan house in Hampstead was a rallying point not only for his [Bevan’s] closest associates but also for a number of other young artists. Teatime on Sunday afternoons, often followed by a simple cold supper, usually saw quite a gathering which often included T.E. Hulme, Ashley Dukes, and the Gaudier-Brzeskas, as well as Sickert, Walter Bayes, Lucien Pissarro, Manson, and Wyndham Lewis.3
Karłowska’s fascination with modernity and close observation of everyday urban life in her works at the time corresponded to the subject matter championed by her husband and the Camden Town Group artists in the same period. This, and the group’s gender exclusivity, later gave rise to the accusation that Karłowska was a follower. Unlike Bevan and his peers, who were committed to making art based on candid observation, Karłowska often used social reportage as a pretext to explore more pressing issues and personal experiences. In the Fried Fish Shop [Fig. 13, Tate], she used a common urban subject, i.e. shops selling fish and chips – popular among the Edwardian working-class – to explore shifting attitudes to the role of women in public spheres.
Even though the painting’s title indicates a fish and chips shop as its primary subject, Karłowska focused on figures rather than the shop itself; she intentionally gave particular importance to the figure of a woman looking in through the shop window from the street. The woman epitomises the flâneuse, a female counterpart of a city observer known as a flaneur. Such representation was relatively new and forward-looking, as women had started participating in public life not long before this painting was made . This representation may therefore indicate Karłowska’s approval of an emancipated lifestyle, enabling women to leave the confinement of domestic interiors and traverse the streets unchaperoned. Another sign of these sentiments may be a bag the figure holds, an accessory associated with modern women, that allowed them to travel freely around the city.
The art critic Frank Rutter would later write a review of the Fried Fish Shop for the Sunday Times:
Lower in tone than anything on this wall ‘The Fried Fish Shop,’ by S. de Karłowska (Mrs. R.P. Bevan), is a delightful and wholly personal rendering of a common Whistler subject transfigured by a vibrating luminism that was unknown to Whistler.4
It was not the only time Karłowska depicted a woman in this specific manner. A few years after painting the Fried Fish Shop, the artist created the Swiss Cottage [Fig. 14, Tate]. As with the Fried Fish Shop, the focus lies here on the figure of a woman in the foreground, carrying probably a satchel in one hand and holding the hand of a young girl in the other. This recurring motive may represent Karłowska herself, pondering over her place in a busy, foreign city. Furthermore, the artist seems to refer to Bevan’s earlier work, The Gate of Szeliwy 1901 (Private Collection), depicting Karłowska and her young daughter, Halina, leaving the gate at her family estate in Poland [Fig.15]. Interestingly, in both paintings, the figure of a girl holds a particular object – a hoop, indicating, therefore, that Swiss Cottage may be the artist’s response to her husband’s piece and an attempt to engage with him in artistic dialogue.
Swiss Cottage evidenced the artist’s shifting attitude towards colours and a significant change in style. The painting symbolically marked Karłowska’s transition to a more experimental period, manifested by flat perspective, elongated figures, and patches of intense colours that corresponded somehow with the Polish folk art [Fig. 16]. The artist’s native region, situated in central Poland, has been famous for its rich folk traditions and craftsmanship, most notably colourful cut-outs, decorative mobiles – ‘pająki’, and folk costumes. She captured this spirit in the Polish Interior 1909 (Southampton City Art Gallery), not only in form but also in substance, choosing an interior of a traditional peasant cottage as the subject matter. The fascination with vernacular craftsmanship and culture invites comparisons with fellow modern artists such as Zofia Stryjeńska and Stanisław Wyspiański.
Karłowska did not forget her origins, and when moving to England she brought with her ‘a piece of homeland’. In her drawing room, she hung a makata buczacka, a silk jacquard tapestry from the Potocki factory in Buczacz (present-day Ukraine) decorated with other Polish memorabilia: two crossed karabelas – a Polish type of sabres, an engraved portrait of the national hero, Tadeusz Kościuszko by Antoni Oleszczyński, and an effigy of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. She also held a collection of Polish books and personal photos of her family.5
Frequent visits to Poland had a profound impact also on Bevan, who developed a habit of spending the summer period in Karłowska’s family estate at Szeliwy. He painted many works inspired by the Polish landscape and countryside, such as the Polish Landscape c.1901 (Leicester Museum and Art Gallery) and Morning over the Ploughed Fields c. 1904 (Tate Britain).
The Bevans’s house in Hampstead was often called ‘the Polish House’, and the couple frequently hosted Karłowska’s compatriots, many of whom escaped Poland due to political persecution. The couple played an active role in organising support for the Poles in need that sometimes led to friendships, most notably with the vorticist painter and sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and his partner Sophie Brzeska, whom Karłowska would tend to after Henri’s premature death in WWI in 1915.
This mindset may have stemmed from Karłowska’s patriotic upbringing. Born to a noble family with patriotic traditions, she personally experienced the Polish struggle for independence. Her father, Aleksander Prawdzic Karłowski, [Fig. 17] fought under General Bem in Hungarian wars against the Austrian Empire in the late 1840s. He also participated in the January Uprising in 1863, which caused the family substantial financial losses. To commemorate the victims of the revolt, teenage Karłowska would later pose in a portrait photo wearing a mourning brooch pinned to her collar. [Fig. 18] Many similar patriotic memorabilia were inherited by her descendants. [Fig. 19]
In 1924, Karłowska’s oil painting titled Flowers was exhibited as part of the British Pavilion at the 14th Venice Biennale. She exhibited alongside 126 other British artists, including her husband, Robert Bevan, Bloomsbury Group artist Duncan Grant, and fellow Pole Leopold Pilichowski.6
Throughout her long career, the artist explored urban and industrial themes, i.e. a series of London’s cityscapes, such as Berkeley Square c.1935 (Tate Britain), or Soho Square (Private Collection) [Fig. 20], rural landscapes [Fig. 21], still lifes, [Fig.22] and occasionally portraits. [Fig. 23] Her style became more synthetic as she drifted towards geometry and linearity. Apart from oil painting, Karłowska experimented with other techniques, such as printmaking [Fig. 24, 25, 26] and watercolour. [Fig. 27, 28] For many years she exhibited with the Society of Wood Engravers. In 1935, ten years after Robert Bevan’s death, Karłowska held her first solo exhibition at the Adams Gallery, selling six paintings. The catalogue entry, written by a former Camden Town Group member and then Tate Britain director, James Bolivar Manson, praised her work for its sincerity and individuality, and described it as ‘modern in feeling’ and owing ‘nothing to any school’. After gathering positive reviews from art critics, her Berkley Square entered Tate Britain’s permanent collection [Fig. 29, Tate].7
Except for the WWII period, captured by Karłowska in the Barrage Ballons of 1939 (Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne), the artist lived and worked in London for the rest of her life. She died in the aftermath of the Great Smog in London in 1952.
Her prolific body of work, which includes over two hundred oil paintings, prints, drawings, and watercolours, has become part of many public and private collections in the UK, Europe, and Australia. For many years, Karłowska and her female contemporaries ‘occupied an ambivalent place in the metropolitan avant-garde’8—neither fully inside nor outside of mainstream art historical discourse. However, due to recent studies and evolving perspectives on female painters, she is regaining recognition as a forward-thinking, talented artist with an aptitude for combining her experiences and conveying them convincingly in her art.
Special thanks to Mr Patrick Baty for generously sharing images from his archive.
12. Stanislawa de Karlowska by Robert Polhill Bevan, Oil on Canvas, 1920
13. Fried Fish Shop, Stanisława de Karłowska, c.1907, Photo © Tate Britain, London
14. Swiss Cottage, Stanisława de Karłowska, c.1914, Photo © Tate, London
15. Gate at Szeliwy, by Robert Polhill Bevan, c. 1901, Private Collection, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
16. Still life, Date Unknown, Private Collection, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
17. Aleksander Prawdzic Karłowski in a uniform, date unknown, courtesy of Patrick Baty
18. Stanisława de Karłowska as a Girl, c. 1890, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
19. Polish ring from the January Uprising, c. 1863, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
20. Soho Square, 1930s, Private Collection, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
21. Saint Nicolas du Pélem, Date Unknown, Private Collection, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
22. Still life, Date Unknown, Private Collection, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
23. Portrait of Miss Lucy Baty, c. 1937, Private Collection, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
24. The Light House, Woodcut, Date Unknown, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
25. Flower Girls, Woodcut, Date Unknown, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
26. The Old Cottage, woodcut, Date Unknown, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
27. The River, Watercolour and ink, Date Unknown, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
28. The Sea Side, Watercolour, Date Unknown, Courtesy of Patrick Baty
1. C. Fehrer, ‘Women at the Académie Julian in Paris’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 136, No. 1100, November1994, pp. 752-757.
2. M. Clarke, ‘Sex and the City’, D. Longworth, ‘The Urban Observer’, in The Camden Town Group in Context, H. Bonett, Y. Holt, J. Mundy (eds.), (Tate Research Publication, May 2012), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/deborah-longworth-the-urban-observer-r1105660, [accessed 04 August 2018].
3. R. A. Bevan, Robert Bevan, 1865-1925: A Memoir by His Son, (London: Studio Vista, 1965) p.18.
4. F. Rutter, ‘Round the Galleries’, Sunday Times, 19 March 1911, p.5.
5. W. Jaworska, ‘Love Story sir Roberta Bevana w powiecie łowickim’, Mazowieckie Studia Humanistyczne, No. 1, 1997, p. 60.
6. La Biennale di Venezia, ‘Arti Visive’, (n.d.), https://asac.labiennale.org/attivita/arti-visive/165583, [accessed 1 September 2024].
7. James Bolivar Manson, ‘Preface’, in Paintings by S. de Karłowska, exhibition catalogue, Adams Gallery, London 1935. Copy in the collection of the Tate Archive TGA 9216/109.
8. J. Wallace and Bridget Elliot, Woman Artists and Writers: Modernist (im)Positionings (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 165.
Natalia Puchalska is an art historian specialising in Central and Eastern European art from the 20th century and beyond. She earned her MA in Art History from the University of Sussex and her BA from the University of Gdańsk, Poland. Throughout her career, Puchalska has worked with some of Britain’s leading art and academic institutions, contributing her expertise to various exhibitions and scholarly projects.
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Primary Sources:
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Note: This article was amended on 1 September 2024 to include updated information.
