page_title: Rafał Malczewski
section_title: Travels
hierarchical_section_title: Rafał Malczewski / Travels
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of Rafał Malczewski, taken in Ottawa.
context_page_description: Rafał Marceli Ludwik Fortunat Józef Malczewski was a Polish landscape and portrait painter, draughtsman, author and columnist. He was a noted Tatra mountaineer, skier and populariser of the Tatra Mountains.
context_section_description: In 1939 after the outbreak of World War II, having already abandoned his wife and children, he escaped over the Slovak border, with his partner Zofia Mikucka, and via Budapest and Venice made his way to Paris. There he fell on the generosity of the Polish embassy to help him out of another financial difficulty. In 1940 they travelled on to Spain and Portugal, where they stayed for four months. At the beginning of 1941 they moved to Brazil. At first they stayed in Rio de Janeiro where he was able to sell some of his paintings which consisted of water colour landscapes of Rio, Curitiba and of Parana.
  In 1942 they moved to Curitiba to stay with his cousin, Maria Bochdan-Niedenthal. Shortly after, he succeeded in obtaining Canadian visas for himself and his girlfriend, Zofia, to travel to Ottawa. By December 1942 he held his first Canadian exhibition in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He managed to persuade the Canadian railways to sponsor him and Zofia to travel across Canada and the United States in search of artistic subjects in exchange for publicity scenery. He spent the winter of 1943 in the Rocky Mountains, which led to a series of canvases that kept him supplied for many exhibitions until 1949. A stay in New York in 1950 was fruitful enough for further sales of his work.
  Despite developing problems with his sight, like his father before him, the ensuing years saw a great flowering of his painting and writing. After his wife, Bronislawa died in Warsaw in 1953, he finally married Zofia Mikucka. A stroke in 1957 led to a partial paralysis which obliged him to give up painting in oils, but he was able to continue with water colours. He managed to obtain sponsorship from the CIA-controlled Radio Free Europe and from Quebec City. In 1959 the daughter of Zofia Malczewska-Kondracka invited him to visit Poland. Despite great nostalgia for the south of the country, he  resolved to remain in Canada, but his journey was described in his memoir, Wspomnieniach z Polski and serialised in the London émigré paper, Wiadomości. From 1961 he was kept by his daughter, Zofia, and three years later, in 1964 his last exhibition took place in Montreal. He died and was buried there in 1965.
caption: Rafał Malczewski in Ottawa. He settled in Canada in 1942
exif: {}