Aleksander Lesser Art for Sale and Sold Prices

Painter, Illustrator

Aleksander Lesser (13 May 1814 – 13 March 1884) was a Polish painter, illustrator, sketch artist, art critic, and amateur researcher of antiquities who was of Jewish descent.[1] Lesser holds a place in Polish art history "as an outstanding representative of his country’s historical school."[1] He specialized in Polish historical and contemporary themes, and he was known and respected in artistic and scholarly circles.[1] He was a member of Kraków's Academy of Learning and co-founder of Warsaw's Zacheta, the Society for Encouragement of the Fine Arts.

Aleksander Lesser was born in Warsaw in 1814 to Levy Lesser (1791–1870), a famous trader and banker, and Roza Loewenstein (1790–1840).[1][3] Lesser's formal study of painting began in the Warsaw Lyceum under Aleksander Kokular before continuing at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Royal University of Warsaw in 1830–1831 under Antoni Brodowski, the Polish romantic painter.[1] This university was closed by the imperial Russian authorities after the Polish uprising of 1831; thus, between 1832 and 1835, Lesser continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, where he studied with Moritz Retzsch and Karl Christian Vogel.[1] Between 1836 and 1846, Lesser studied in Munich under Peter Cornelius, Heinrich Hess, and Julius Schnorr von Carosfeld; these individuals were prominent representatives of German romanticism who called themselves Nazarenes.[1] In 1843, Lesser became friends with a prominent Polish poet named Cyprian Kamil Norwid (Norwid later emigrated).