Feliks Topolski RA (1907-1989) Modern Polish draughtsman
Feliks Topolski RA (1907-1989) Modern Polish draughtsman
Feliks Topolski RA (1907-1989) Modern Polish draughtsman 'Gare du Nord' Feliks Topolski RA (1907-1989) Modern Polish draughtsman 'Gare du Nord' framed
About Feliks Topolski RA (1907-1989)

Topolski was born in Warsaw where he studied at the Academy of Art while also serving as a cadet at the Artillery Officers' School from 1927 to 1932. He spent time studying on his own in France and Italy before being sent to England in 1935 to record George V's Silver Jubilee for a Polish magazine. He stayed in London permanently, frequenting a literary group at the Café Royal that included Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, J B Priestley and Anthony Powell. They began to commission illustration for magazines and plays, including Bernard Shaw who used him on three works including an edition of Pygmalion. On the outbreak of war in 1939 Topolski began working as honorary official artist to the Polish forces in Britain before being employed by the War Artists Advisory Committee from 1940 as an official war artist for the British. Given Stalin’s reluctance to allow photographic illustrations of conditions in Russia following the Nazi invasion in the summer of 1941, the British assigned Topolski to accompany the first Allied aid convoy to the Soviet Union. From then he travelled frenetically across all theatres of operations throughout the war, sketching the common soldier and the general staff alike, in Egypt, East Africa, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, India, the Burma Front, China, France and Germany. He was commissioned to record the London Blitz in 1940 and was wounded while sketching. He followed the Polish 2nd Corps in Italy in the fiercest of fighting and was at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the weeks after its liberation. One of his final official commissions involved visually recording the proceedings at the Nuremburg Trials. He became a naturalised British citizen in 1947.

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Gare du Nord

£2,750
  • Size unframed: H13 x W11 ins (33 x 28 cms)
  • Size framed: H18 x W16 ins (46 x 41 cms)
  • Pen & Ink on Paper
  • Framed

I don’t think there has been a time when we haven’t had at least one Topolski in the gallery. A giant of twentieth century western illustration and drawing, he recorded every significant historical in twentieth century history from the 1930s until his death. This ink drawing is part of a body of work executed in Paris in 1938, they were finally exhibited in 1973, alongside an illustrated volume, as the ‘Paris Lost’ series. ‘Lost’ was not merely a wistful nostalgia but a fact. Originally intended for publication in 1939 the drawings were trapped in Poland where eventually they were purloined by the Gestapo. At the end of the war they surfaced in Berlin in the hands of a liberating Russian soldier and were purchased by the film maker Hans Curlis. Nearly twenty years later a Curator at the Berlin Museum recognised them as by Topolski and they were returned to him. A miraculous journey and tantalising to think whose hands these have been through.

About Feliks Topolski RA (1907-1989)

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