Stanisław Szygell

A small display of landscapes by Stanisław Szygell, a Polish painter of the Jan Stanisławski school whose name you are more likely to meet in an auction catalogue than on a museum wall. It is one instalment in the National Museum in Lublin’s year-long series of gifts marking its 120th anniversary, and it runs at Lublin Castle from 4 September to 1 November 2026. The museum publishes the series in Polish only, so the quotation below is our translation.

National Museum in Lublin on the exhibition:

In 1952 the widow of Stanisław Szygell handed over some dozen works by her late husband. Almost all of the paintings take landscape as their subject. The display presents part of this collection.

What to expect

This is not a separate exhibition in a room of its own. It is a display set inside the castle’s permanent Gallery of Polish Painting of the 19th and 20th Centuries. The museum does not say how many paintings are on show. The gift numbered a dozen or so works and only part of it is hung, so expect a handful of pictures rather than a retrospective. Nearly all of them are landscapes.

If you were in Lublin in spring, you may have seen Szygell already. From 28 March to 31 May 2026 his paintings hung in the same gallery beside landscapes by Zbigniew Gostwicki, Adam Bunsch and Wojciech Weiss. That display set four painters side by side; this one gives the wall to one. The jubilee series as a whole honours the donors who built the collection, and here the donor is the artist’s widow, who gave the paintings eleven years after his death.

The gallery has a fixed hearing loop, according to the museum’s accessibility page. You see the display on your way round the rest of the gallery. The same gallery holds Jan Matejko’s “Union of Lublin”, his painting of the 1569 union of Poland and Lithuania, concluded at a parliament held in this castle.

Context

Stanisław Szygell (1881-1941) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków from 1902 to 1909 under Florian Cynk, Leon Wyczółkowski and Jan Stanisławski. Stanisławski, a leading figure of Polish modernism, painted nothing but small-format landscapes and made open-air painting trips compulsory for his students. Szygell, too, painted mostly landscapes, in a bright palette that auction houses describe as “impressionistic”, and settled in Warsaw after his studies.

He showed with the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts (Zachęta) from 1916 and had a solo exhibition there in 1917. He belonged to the Warsaw painters’ association Pro Arte and exhibited with Grupa IV in 1924. A lesser-known chapter is 1916-1922, when he produced satirical paintings and drawings of town and village life.

What reaches the art market today is mostly small oils on cardboard and plywood: summer villages, the Dunajec river, sandbanks near Warsaw. In December 2024 the Warsaw auction house DESA Unicum included him in a sale titled “Jan Stanisławski and his pupils”, which tells you where the market places him.

Tickets and time

There is no separate ticket for this display. The museum’s price list does not name it, and it hangs in a gallery that belongs to the permanent exhibitions, so the permanent-exhibitions ticket covers it: 20 PLN standard, 15 PLN reduced. A combined ticket for the permanent exhibitions, the chapel and the tower costs 40 PLN (30 PLN reduced), or 80 PLN (60 PLN) with the temporary exhibitions. Combined tickets are sold only at the museum’s ticket desk. Children under seven go free.

Free days are announced month by month on the museum’s visit page (in Polish, under “Dni bezpłatnego wstępu”). There is no fixed free weekday. Free entry covers the permanent exhibitions, and so the gallery where this display hangs.

The gallery closes an hour earlier from October. Until 30 September the permanent exhibitions open Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday 9:00-18:00, Friday and Saturday 9:00-19:00. From 1 October the hours are 9:00-17:00 and 9:00-18:00. The permanent exhibitions are closed on Mondays. On 6 October the Gallery of Polish Painting closes at 16:00 (4 PM).

Do not leave it to the final day. 1 November 2026 is a Sunday and also All Saints’ Day, a public holiday in Poland, and the museum has not said whether it will open.

The display itself takes about 15 minutes. It is not worth a trip up the castle hill on its own. Plan it as a stop in the Gallery of Polish Painting and allow about 45 minutes for the gallery. Who it is for: anyone who enjoys early-20th-century Polish landscape painting, collectors who know the name from auction sales and want to see several pictures together, and anyone visiting the permanent exhibitions anyway. Who can skip it: visitors who come only for the chapel and the tower; this display is no reason to add the permanent-exhibitions ticket.

English on site: the museum’s English website does not list the jubilee displays, and it says nothing about English captions for this one. Treat the paintings as the content and do not count on translated labels.

See also

• National Museum in Lublin (Lublin Castle) - nine permanent exhibitions, the Gothic chapel with its frescoes and the keep; how to fit the display into a visit to the whole hill.
• Tamara Lempicka - Beyond Borders - a very different face of interwar Polish painting in the same castle, on a separate ticket (40 PLN, 20 PLN reduced).
• Figurative works from the Zamek Group circle - another display in the same series of gifts, also open until 1 November 2026: early, still figurative paintings by Lublin’s post-war avant-garde.
• Zachęta - National Gallery of Art - the Warsaw gallery where Szygell had his solo exhibition in 1917.

The display text and the full series schedule are on the museum’s page (Polish only), prices on its ticket page , and opening hours and free days on its visit page .

Museum profile: National Museum in Lublin (Lublin Castle) .