page_title: Michał Kulesza
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Michał Kulesza / Biography
caption_attribution_description: Беларуская (тарашкевіца)‎: Гасьцявы палац Браніцкіх у Беластоку. Esperanto: Porgasta palaceto de la familio Branicki en Bjalistoko. Polski: Pałacyk gościnny Branickich w Białymstoku
context_page_description: The Romantic painter Michał Kulesza was among the first lithographers in the area of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, ruled by Russia for almost all of his life. His frequent theme, sites linked to the Grand Duchy's history, reflected the growing Lithuanian and Polish ethnic activism in the area. He lived and worked in today's southern Lithuania, south-eastern Belarus, and north-eastern Poland, and traveled around in search of new subjects for his oil paintings and lithographs. A leading landscape painter of his period, Kulesza created images that are now among the sparse visual records of the region in the first half of the 19th century.
context_section_description: Michał Kulesza was born in Vilnius, then the capital of Russia's Vilna Governorate. Two encyclopedic sources give the year of his birth as 1799, a few authors list 1800 without the month or day. He lived and worked in a multi-ethnic area, although he called himself a "Polish painter" when he published his work in France, he referred to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and from his last name Kulesza, it can not be judged on his ethnicity, as it may be both Polish, as well as old Lithuanian spelling. It is not known how many languages, and how often, he spoke. He attended the notable Cistercian grade school in Troškūnai, his artistic training started in preparatory middle-and-high school (gymnasium) back in his birth place when he took classes with the neoclassicist painter Jonas Damelis. He then continued at the Imperial University of Vilnius, where Jan Rustem began to teach lithography in 1819, from which he received a PhD in art in 1829.
  He joined the anti-Russian organization Philomaths while in college and was arrested in that connection in 1823, like his younger fellow student and future writer Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, who later helped publicize Kulesza's paintings, but unlike his other subsequently famous fellow student and co-conspirator Adam Mickiewicz, who was deported to Siberia.
  Once on the job market, Kulesza spent about a decade as a freelance artist and private tutor in painting, and worked for the lithographic shop opened by Józef Oziębłowski in Vilnius in 1835, which became a hub for several talented artists. He traveled in the Crimea and, according to one source, stayed at a residence for artists in Minsk for a time in the 1830s.
   He left Vilnius to take a teaching position at Kražiai Gymnasium in 1837. While plans were being drawn up to close the venerable school, he was transferred to teach painting at a high school in Hrodna two years later. In 1844 he took a position at the Institute for Noble Maidens recently opened in Białystok where he remained for the rest of his life.
caption: Tsar's palace turned to noble girls' school
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