Józef Pankiewicz (1866–1940) was born on 29 November 1866 in Lublin. He began his art education in 1884 in the Warsaw Drawing Class under Wojciech Gerson and Aleksander Kamiński. In 1889 he went to Paris for the first time, where he came into contact with Impressionism, and he won a silver medal at the World’s Fair there for his painting The Vegetable Market. He is regarded as one of the first Impressionists in Polish painting, and his Flower Market in front of the Church of the Madeleine in Paris (1890) is considered the first Impressionist picture in Polish art.
He soon moved beyond Impressionism, turning to night landscapes in subdued, almost monochrome colour, and later to a richer, more colourist palette. He spent much of his life abroad, mainly in France, but he was also a leading teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. In 1923 he founded the Paris Committee, which helped his students go to France to study, and from 1925 he directed the Academy’s branch in Paris. His pupils became known as the Kapists, or Colourists.
In 1936 the National Museum in Kraków celebrated his seventieth birthday with a major exhibition. He died on 4 July 1940 in La Ciotat, in the south of France, where he had painted views of the town many times.