Angels

Józef Mehoffer studied law at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and at the same time was educated at the Academy of Fine Arts. He also studied at the Vienna Academy and in Paris. In 1901 he became a docent in the department of decorative and religious painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. The artist working in the secession movement did not limit himself to one field. He created easel paintings, polychromies, stained glass projects, crayon portraits, workshop and utility graphics. He became famous for his designs of stained glass windows for the Gothic St. Nicholas Cathedral in Fribourg, Switzerland. He was the author of numerous projects of monumental painting.

The last polychromy, completed by the artist before his death, is in the village church in Lubień dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary Queen of Poland. It is an illustration of the invocations to the Litany of Loreto, with a choir of angels. The artist expressed his joy at the possibility of spreading art in his homeland, so that it would be accessible to the inhabitants of the village: "I feel happy that I could once again decorate a village church. May as many works of art as possible spread over the wide expanses of our homeland, multiply and germinate like the seeds that a benevolent wind carries to the fate of an accident. The high culture of the country will make our descendants feel that they live in a country which is not behind others and that they themselves are not inferior to other, richer, happier nations".

Mehoffer's watercolour is a sketch for a polychrome painted in 1942 in the presbytery with the motif of a dozen or so of the same angels adoring Mary. It is a sketch faithfully reproduced on the walls of the church.

Klara Sadkowska