page_title: Maria Dulębianka
section_title: Painting
hierarchical_section_title: Maria Dulębianka / Career / Painting
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Uczony z księgą
context_page_description: Maria Dulębianka was a Polish artist and activist. Born into a family of landed gentry, she attended finishing school in Kraków and then studied art in Warsaw, Vienna and Paris. Her work was recognized in the 1900 Paris Exposition and her Studium dziewczyny was purchased by the National Museum in Kraków. After 1889, the majority of her paintings were of her companion Maria Konopnicka.
  Dulębianka was active in the women's movement pressing for women to be admitted to the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts and for the establishment of a gymnasium in Lviv for girls to gain access to higher education. She published articles and gave lectures on women's issues. Active in the fight for women's suffrage, she ran as a candidate in the 1908 election for the Parliament of Galicia, but was rejected because she was a woman. Undiscouraged, she continued to strive for social equality, Polish independence, and cooperation between Poles and Ukrainians.
  Dulębianka founded the Women's Electoral Committee to press for women's inclusion in the Lviv City Council, the Union of Women's Rights, the Men's League for the Defense of Women's Rights and the Women's Civic Work Committee.
context_section_description: In 1887, Dulębianka returned to Warsaw intent upon opening an art school for women. A supporter of women's suffrage, she advocated for women to be admitted to the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts as early as 1885.  In 1889, she met Maria Konopnicka, a mother of eight children and a writer, who was living independently and separated from her husband, Jarosław Konopnicki. Dulębianka was almost 30 at the time, and Konopnicka was 19 years her senior. The two became inseparable and from the time of their meeting, Konopnicka became the main subject of Dulębianka's paintings. The nature of their relationship has not been conclusively settled by academics, in part because after their deaths letters were burned by family members, but also because Konopnicka was aware official censors might read her correspondence and rarely wrote about family matters even in her published works. Krzysztof Tomasik, who wrote about Dulębianka in Homobiografie (2008), confirmed that she had had other relationships with women and that the couple had friends who were known lesbians, though the term was not in use at the time.
  Konopnicka became a strong influence on Dulębianka, who increasingly became involved in social welfare projects and activism for women's rights. In 1890, the couple left Warsaw and began traveling. They visited Germany, Italy, France, and health resorts in Austria and the Czech regions of Austria-Hungary, rarely returning to Poland. They traveled by bicycle and Dulębianka attracted attention for her manner of dressing. She shunned women's attire, instead wearing trousers or a long, straight skirt; cuffed-shirts and ties; a frock coat; and flat-heeled shoes. She also cut her hair short and always wore a monocle or pince-nez glasses. Konopnicka called Dulębianka Piotrek or Pietrek and wrote to her children of their adventures, always referring to things "we" did, rather than "I" did.
  Wherever they were living, Konopnicka made sure that Dulębianka had a studio to enable her to continue painting. She presented her works at exhibitions and participated in events in Dresden, Kiev, London, Lviv, Munich, Paris and Prague. In 1900, at the Paris Exposition, two of her paintings — Na pokucie (On Penance) and Sieroca dola (The Orphan's Fate) — were honored with distinction and a third, Studium dziewczyny (Girls' Studio) was purchased, while still on display, by the National Museum in Kraków.
caption: Uczony z księgą (Scholar and a Book) by Maria Dulębianka
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