Lot 26: Leonard Ludwik Straszynski (Polish 1828-1889)

Her ladyship's slippers
signed and inscribed 'L.Straszynski/Roma' (lower right)
oil on canvas
72 x 138 cm. (28 1/4 x 54 1/4 in.)

Puttnam Priory, Surrey

In the general movement towards naturalism which overtook the art academies in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth-century, an ultimate attempt was made to regain a past not yet transfigured by myth: aristocratic life under the Old Regime. In a tendency soon becoming one of the multiple facets of nineteenth-century painting, Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891) in France together with Adolf von Menzel (1815-1905) in Germany became, together, the initiators and leaders of this new formula for genre painting. The success was preponderant among the rising bourgeoisie across Europe, eager perhaps to visualise the elegance and good taste of a condemned nobility. The most fashionable subjects of the genre tended to represent rich and seductive young women lingering in mirrored vestibules or spending their afternoons in ornate salons, playing respectable games in the company of costumed suitors or cardinals dressed in ceremonial robes. The present work, executed by the Polish artist Leonard Straszynski, offers a fine testimony of the far-reaching boundaries which this fashion for genre painting had reached within Central Europe by the middle of the nineteenth-century.