Alfred Swieykowski

Alfred Swieykowski was born in Paris in 1869 to a father of Polish-Russian origin and a Belgian mother. He trained in Paris under Fernand Cormon and Paulin Bertrand and exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français from the end of the nineteenth century onwards; he sat on the jury of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1927 and won a silver medal at the Exposition Internationale of 1937.

He painted the Seine in Paris and at Chatou, the villages of Normandy around La Ferrière-sur-Risle where he lived, the mountains of Haute-Savoie and the harbours of the coasts, in a vigorous post-Impressionist manner with a loaded brush and a bright, cool palette.

The Centre Pompidou holds his ‘Soleil couchant à Saint-Paul’, and the museum of Chatou and the Musée du Rouloir at Conches-en-Ouche have devoted exhibitions to him; an association of his friends, founded in 2004, has located some six hundred of his paintings. He died in Paris in 1953.