St James’s gallery Stern Pissarro’s latest catalogue focuses on Eastern European art of the 19th-20th centuries. It features artists including Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay and Martin Jablonski as well as many others working in painting and sculpture.
This watercolour, Petit Patre/ Nodolie, 12 x 8in (29 x 20cm), is signed and dated Franciszek Tepa 1873 to the lower left. Tepa (1829-89) was a Polish painter who specialised in portraits and Orientalist themes. In 1852 he toured Greece, Egypt and Palestine, which inspired many of his paintings.
He later refused a professorship at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts in order to work on his vernacular portraits, folk scenes and landscapes. Many of his works remained in present-day Lviv when the area passed to Ukrainian control after the Second World War.