In the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, there is a modestly sized (36.5 x 48.9 cm) canvas by Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski, a popular nineteenth-century Polish painter active in Munich. It is catalogued under the title In a Polish Village, with the date of its production unknown. The museum’s records state that by 1903 the painting had been a part of the collection of a Boston entrepreneur Eben Dyer Jordan Jr. (1857–1916), and two decades later was gifted to the city’s museum by the owner’s son. In a Polish Village depicts an innocent genre scene from the Polish countryside, framed in a winter setting and is strikingly faithful to the painter’s characteristic style. Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski was born in 1849 in Suwałki, a remote town located at the northernmost tip of the Congress Kingdom of Poland. He initially trained in Warsaw, before relocating to Munich in 1874, where his winter canvases—characteristically filled with Polish countrymen, snow sleighs, and grey wolves—granted him public acclaim and economic success. Wierusz-Kowalski remained a prominent figure in the Bavarian art market until his death in 1915, and today his extensive legacy is spread across public and private art collections in Europe and the USA. The case of In a Polish Village presents an intriguing question: why did a nineteenth-century North American entrepreneur and businessman purchase this inconspicuous painting of a snowy, Eastern European village in the first place? Using this inquiry as a point of departure, my paper examines and presents the intricate features of the nineteenth-century Munich art market, by then already largely globalised and influenced by rapidly developing means of transportation and communication, that guided Wierusz-Kowalski’s canvas across the Atlantic Ocean. As the world seemingly ‘shrank’ throughout the nineteenth century—on more than just a geographical level— I will explore how artistic tastes, and the economic realities of the global art trade interacted and fused with each other, leading up to the turn of the century.
