(Double) portrait of Józef Czechowicz

Jan Wydra, a painter, graphic artist, member of the St Luke Brotherhood artistic group, was born in Ciecierzyna near Lubartów, but has lived in Lublin since his childhood. He was associated with the local artistic and literary community, especially with the poets of the Reflektor group. Due to the difficult financial situation of his family, he took up a job already at the age of seventeen. In 1923, he abandoned his gainful employment and began studying at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts under Tadeusz Pruszkowski. He wrote: "Following the voice of my conscience and proper vocation, I devoted myself to the study of painting - taking Great, Beautiful and Immortal Art as the only goal in my future life".

Czechowicz's friendship with Wydra started already in his early youth, which is evidenced by a fragment of the poem autoportret [self-portrait] from the collection w błyskawicy [in a lightning] (1934). The poet also dedicated the poem świat [world] to the artist from the volume dzień jak co dzień [everyday life] (1930). Moreover, in the 1930s, he popularised his friend's painting works by publishing reproductions of his paintings in Warsaw magazines, mainly in "Pion". Wydra, in turn, immortalized the poet in an oil portrait which, unfortunately, has not survived. However, two drawing portraits from 1923, made on a single sheet, have survived and are kept in the Józef Czechowicz Museum.

Unfortunately, the correspondence between the friends did not survive. It is a great pity, because - as we learn from the memoirs of Konrad Bielski, who saw some of Wydra's letters to Czechowicz - they were "written in small handwriting on sheets glued together from a notebook. Each of them was at least four metres long". It is worth mentioning, however, that references to Jan Wydra, testifying to their friendship and great sympathy, can be found in Czechowicz's letters to other people. On 10 July 1924, the poet informs Wacław Gralewski: "I have not yet talked to Jasio. He is strange: more and more "Yurodivian" and more and more cordial". Czechowicz painfully experienced the death of the artist, who died of tuberculosis when he was only thirty-five. He mentions this in a letter to Stanisław Czernik sent on 20 April 1937: "The loneliness I feel, being the last of my line of Czechowicz, has been increased by the fact that my childhood companion and warmest friend, Jan Wydra, a painter from the Brotherhood of St. Luke, died on the leading Sunday. And it seemed to me that I no longer had anyone to lose with my mother gone".