Main Building of the Museum in Grudziądz

Welcome to the Rev. Dr Władysław Łęga Museum in Grudziądz, one of the most noble cultural institutions in the Kujawsko-Pomorskie Voivodeship. The Museum in Grudziądz has a tradition of almost 140 years, rich collections, exceptional artefacts, collections and people who have shaped the history of the town, our region and country over the centuries. The museum was founded in 1884 and has been operating continuously in the Baroque buildings of a former Benedictine nunnery and in the granaries, former granaries of Gothic origin.
We are looking forward to spending some time with you, walking through the halls of the Museum, immersing ourselves in the past world of history, traditions and beliefs, marked by the creations of human hands, which you will find in abundance in our museum, as the Grudziądz Museum contains almost 35,000 exhibits from various fields: history, archaeology, art, ethnography and numismatics. It takes about three hours to see all the exhibits - but don't worry, the pace of the tour is entirely up to you. Start in the small entrance hall, where two stately sculptures have been placed.
The late Baroque sculptures that greet visitors to our institution - St John and St Mary Magdalene - come from the church of the Reformati Fathers in Grudziądz and were originally placed in the main altar of the church. The Reformati Monastery and the Church of the Holy Cross were built in the Fijewo district in the mid-18th century and remained in the possession of the Order for only half a century, as the first partition of Poland resulted in the dissolution of the Congregation. The monastery buildings housed the prison, which still exists today, while the church was turned into a prison chapel. After the Second World War, the historic furnishings of the church were dismantled and, unfortunately, most of them were destroyed. Today, the sculptures welcome visitors and remind them of the religious past of the interior.

Other sculptures from the Church of the Reformed Fathers can be seen in the permanent historical exhibition in Spichrz /Granary/ No. 9.
To the right of Mary Magdalene there is a plaque dedicated to our patron saint. In 2005, on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of the Grudziądz Museum, the institution was named after Father Władysław Łęga at the request of the management and staff. Łęga was the chaplain and parish priest of the Garrison Church in Grudziądz, and in 1922-39 he was the honorary curator of the then City Museum. He went down in history as a tireless archaeologist and ethnographer, a meritorious researcher of Pomeranian culture. He published about 150 scientific works, including the most important ones on the ethnography of the Chełmno region, thanks to which we know how people in our small homeland celebrated, believed and ate. Today we are continuing his mission and we are proud that such an eminent scientist is supporting our efforts to preserve the heritage of our region.
Now walk between the statues and turn right. Stop at the seating area.
There is an interesting engraving in a richly gilded frame, the author of which is Wilhelm Burza, an art teacher at the gymnasium in Grudziądz, who documented the town in charming watercolours, drawings and oil paintings for almost forty years. This pencil drawing, made at the beginning of the 20th century, depicts the courtyard of the museum, just behind the wall. Later on in the tour, you will also find yourself where monastic life was concentrated a few centuries ago. Here you will also find a 19th-century Neo-Renaissance wardrobe, which stands out for its rich woodcarving and unusual silhouette - the wardrobe itself is supported by slender, carved columns. Among the elaborate decorations are fantastic sphinxes and playful children, called putti, grouped around vases of flowers, as well as full-figured personifications of the three virtues: Faith, Hope and Love. A relaxation area has been created around these stylish exhibits. After visiting the exhibitions in the main building, you can relax here and explore the mysteries of the past by browsing through our museum publications, which you can easily purchase at the museum's ticket office.

Proceed now to the spacious lobby. Here we will briefly introduce you to the history of the museum.
The Baroque building we are in is the former convent of the Benedictine nuns, which served various functions after the dissolution of the order in 1836. It housed a Teachers' Seminary, a Pedagogical Centre or a warehouse for school equipment. It was built on the site of earlier monastery buildings in the first half of the 18th century near the former city walls, between the Water Gate and the now defunct Toruńska Gate. During World War II, the building suffered significantly and fell into disrepair. It was rebuilt in the 1950s for museum purposes. However, the history of the Grudziądz museum goes much deeper. At the end of the 19th century, on 16 June 1884 to be exact, the Municipal Museum of Antiquities was opened in Grudziądz. The origins of its collections were several private collections donated to the institution. For years, the newly established museum did not have its own seat - the collections were moved several times from one building to another and presented, among others, in the town hall. It was not until 1912 that the artefacts were placed in a purpose-built neo-Baroque building at 28 Legionów Street, which still exists today. Thanks to the graciousness of donors and ongoing research, the museum's collection has grown steadily.
It soon became apparent that the building could not accommodate all the collections. In addition to the museum, the building housed a library and an archive. It was then decided that the former monastery would become the new home of the institution. The adaptation work was completed in 1956.

Since then, the museum has exhibited its collections in the buildings of the former monastery. Subsequently, the historic granaries and the former monastery gatehouse, the so-called Abbesses' Palace, were allocated to the institution. The museum also owns the Water Gate, the only surviving medieval town gate, which connects the monastery building with a row of brick granaries. Our museum also administers the Klimek Tower on Castle Hill, where the remains of the Teutonic Knights' castle are exposed in the form of a so-called permanent ruin. Be sure to take a walk there. The view from the tower will delight even the most demanding lovers of picturesque landscapes. The history of the site and the cultural heritage of many generations set us on a mission: With Benedictine diligence and patience, we cherish the memory of what has passed and, thanks to us, may it always remain.
Let's now take a look at the hall furnishings. Approach the furniture set up under the window.
The spacious main hall is often the venue for various celebrations, and it is often here that exhibition openings are held. The representative character of the interior is emphasised by the staircase located in the centre of the room, the wall and ceiling decorations and the furnishings: paintings by old masters and antique furniture. On the entrance wall hangs two paintings by Gustaw Breuning, a painter of German origin, an acknowledged authority in landscape, portrait and religious painting. He was associated with Grudziądz from around 1860. Here, at 4 Klasztorna Street, he ran his own atelier and a shop selling painting accessories and wallpaper. Gustav Breuning's paintings, are part of the current of neo-romantic tendencies of the time and have an extremely important documentary significance for Grudziądz today. "View of Grudziądz from the South" from 1895, on the right-hand side of the passage, depicts a genre scene against the city skyline.

It shows a picturesque open-air scene along the Vistula River with a man and a woman. A lying dog is depicted in the foreground. It is most likely that the painting is a self-portrait of the painter with his wife and four-legged friend, known from other works as well as from an archival photograph of the artist. Other walls are decorated with examples of 18th- and 19th-century paintings from the museum's former collection. From the gilded frames, aged, serious men look on. One of them is Prince Danilo, ruler of Montenegro from 1697 to 1735. On the wall between the windows, a very interesting piece of furniture is set up, whose purpose may seem unclear at first glance. It is an elaborately inlaid secretary, which takes its name from the Latin "secretum" meaning - secret. It is a type of furniture for writing, storing correspondence and handy trinkets. The art of writing - which only a few people possessed centuries ago - required an adequate setting. This ladies' desk on cabriole legs, impresses with its rich marquetry. Marquetry is a decorative technique involving the creation of an image by lining the surface of wooden objects with other types of wood, sometimes coloured, stained or flamed. The inlays are placed in the place of removed fragments. The marquetry on the cabinet depicts images of birds, butterflies and flowered plant tendrils. The central part of the piece of furniture is a slanted lid that serves as a writing top. Secretaires were originally a luxury item present in the courts, but gradually became more widespread and found their way into the parlours of the bourgeoisie.
Above the furniture there is a painting by Jacek Malczewski, one of the most eminent Polish painters and a leading representative of Symbolism. The atmospheric work, depicting a woman against a garden background, is not dated. However, we can assume that the painting was created in the last quarter of the 19th century, when Malczewski was in Munich - an important centre of artistic life. This may be confirmed by the painting's mood, or so-called 'stimmung', and the distinctive colour scheme readily used by artists of that milieu - browns and greys, which are described as 'Munich sauces'. It is possible that the exhibited painting is a painterly sketch of another - now unknown work.
We will now head to the first floor, so go up the stairs.
As you head up to the floor look out for an Elblag type corner cabinet from the second half of the 18th century, this is another interesting piece of furniture in our collection. Angle cabinets also called corner cabinets, corner cabinets or corner cabinets came into use in the middle of the 18th century and were particularly popular during the late Rococo period. Our cabinet is decorated with ribbon ornament and an interesting wind rose motif. The finial is decorated with initials - probably those of the first owner of the cupboard , for whom the piece of furniture was made.
Behind the door on the right is the Documentation Department with the Library and the Education and Promotion Department. The museum's book collection contains more than 7,000 volumes - mainly publications on art history, history and archaeology.
Go up the stairs and turn left. Stop in front of the door to the Director's office.
Before you enter the Director's Office, take a look at the painting of the Vistula bank in Grudziądz by the German painter Oswald Gette, a graduate of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, a renowned landscape painter whose works decorated the interiors of the Berlin town halls - in the districts of Schöneberg and Wilmersdorf - and the local parliament. The painting is impressive in its format, but also in its monumental representation: in the painter's view, the riverbank becomes a majestic, rocky fjord. This poetic landscape is the quintessence of the Neo-Romantic aesthetic. The natural, austere landscape and the ruins of a medieval castle were elements that appeared frequently in paintings of the period.

Now we are in front of the museum director's office. Unfortunately, you cannot enter it without an appointment. Nevertheless, we will show you the interior without opening the door. This room is filled with many exceptional artefacts. The eclectic character of the study is created by a set of furniture in the "Hamburg" Biedermeier style, English 18th century chests of drawers with wavy fronts and interesting marquetry, a corner cupboard from Elbląg dating from 1791 with ribbon and floral ornamentation, and a 19th century Danzig cupboard nearly three metres high which impresses with its size and the craftsmanship of its woodcarving ornamentation. This piece of furniture comes from the cabinet of August Ventzi, founder of the now defunct agricultural tool factory. The rich finial of the wardrobe features a personification of the rule of law - a beautiful naked woman holding a column in her hands symbolising strength, permanence and social order.
Now go through the arcade entrance to the blue room
The permanent exhibition presented in the Museum's Main Building is the Gallery of Contemporary Pomeranian Painting. Due to the various exhibition plans, as well as the number of paintings included in the collection, this exhibition is only a small part of a larger whole. The Gallery presents paintings by artists connected with Pomerania since 1945. The actual core of the collection consists of paintings by renowned painters-professors, founders of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń: Bronisław Jamontt, Tymon Niesiołowski and Stanisław Borysowski. There are also paintings by their students and graduates of subsequent years, so that one can see the permeation of certain motifs and mutual inspirations. The Gallery also contains paintings by contemporary artists from Gdańsk, Bydgoszcz and Grudziądz.

The development of the collection took place in the early 1960s, due to the initiative of Zbigniew Czerski who was a director of the museum that time. Thus, the only permanent gallery of Pomeranian painters in the Bydgoszcz Province was established. The idea was enthusiastically received by the artistic community and soon numerous donations and deposits began to arrive at the museum. Purchases were also made. The selection of works was overseen by a selection committee chaired by the Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Nicolaus Copernicus University, Professor Stanisław Borysowski, who actually decided on the Gallery's original form. At the time of its opening, on 7 May 1961, the Gallery of Contemporary Pomeranian Painting included 139 works by 46 authors living in the Bydgoszcz Province at the time. Today, after nearly 60 years, the Gallery numbers just under 500 paintings by more than 100 artists who have devoted their personal and professional lives to Pomerania. The first room exhibits still lifes and landscapes. Look out for the works of Bronisław Jamont. This outstanding painter, initially associated with the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius, was the first dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the newly established University of Toruń. Jamontt's urban landscapes are saturated with a sense of transience and anxiety, characteristic of the catastrophism of the early 20th century. In Jamontt's art, nature - agitated, restless and at the same time majestic - refers to the aesthetics of Romanticism, thus emphasizing the metaphysical nature of the natural world.
Go to the red room.
In this room, pay attention to the paintings of Tymon Niesiołowski, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, a student of eminent masters: Józef Mehoffer, Teodor Axentowicz and Stanisław Wyspiański. A characteristic feature of the artist's post-war work is Reliefism -na theory developed by the painter in the early 1950s. Synthetic shapes based on strong colour contrasts are surrounded by a thick line, which emphasises the schematic and stencilled nature of the depicted elements. This treatment brings Tymon Niesiołowski's work closer to Paul Gaugin, a French painter working in the spirit of Post-Impressionism. Similar to Gaugin's works, in Tymon's paintings the object becomes a specific sign rather than a representation of reality, expressing a certain idea and by definition being very decorative.
Move on to the next room where the grand piano is exposed.
The room we are in is called the concert hall. Lectures and promotional meetings, as well as concerts of chamber music are held there. A permanent fixture is a noble grand piano made by the renowned German company Bechstein. The instrument with serial number 122471 was built in 1921. Despite its serious age, it still impresses with its excellent sound. It is no wonder that Claude Debussy, the French composer, was to say that "piano music should only be written for C. Bechstein". The company where the instrument was made has been in business for just under 170 years and now is the largest piano and grand piano manufacturer in Europe. This room also contains works from the Gallery of Contemporary Pomeranian Painting - mainly paintings maintained in the spirit of abstraction. Look out for paintings by Stanisław Borysowski, an outstanding painter and graphic artist, for many years the head of the Department of Decorative Painting at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Borysowski studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in the atelier of Władysław Jarocki, Ignacy Pieńkowski and Teodor Axentowicz. During his stay in Paris he apprenticed under the tutelage of Józef Pankiewicz. He was one of the founders of the "Toruń Group". - an informal society of artists-artists gathered around the Toruń Faculty of Fine Arts.
In the interwar period, Borys - as his friends used to say about him - painted colourful landscapes, still lives, sometimes portraits. His post-war work, on the other hand, is characterised by post-cubic stylisation, expressed in synthetic, compact planes. From around 1960 onwards, the artist worked in the abstract trend, using both the colour spot and geometric forms.

Move on to the next room.
In the Gallery of Contemporary Pomeranian Painting, you will find works of multiple values and different artistic tendencies - from figural or object art, which draws on the artistic achievements of the turn of the century, to various varieties of abstract, avant-garde and modern art. The gallery has stood the test of time admirably. To this day, paintings are lent by other museums and galleries. Credit is due to the cross-sectional nature of the collection, which illustrates the most important trends in Polish painting of the second half of the 20th century.
Approach the Lounge arranged by the staircase.
By the staircase, the interior of a bourgeois drawing room from the turn of the 20th century has been arranged; its greatest decoration is the piano – the center of the social life of the time. This instrument became immensely popular in the second half of the 19th century, when it began to replace the grand piano in bourgeois homes - due to its lower price and smaller size. The piano of the famous Julius Bluthner company was donated to our museum in 2017 by Katharina Karow from Grudziądz. Passed down from generation to generation for more than a century, the piano has witnessed many events: with its sound it has pleased name-day guests and encouraged joyful carol singing. It was the piano at which the ladies of the Polish Sokol Gymnastic Association met in the inter-war period, and to its accompaniment they sang the "Rota" and other patriotic songs. The piano luckily survived both wars - hidden in the attic from unauthorized hands. The instrument was manufactured in 1894 by the renowned Julius Blüthner company in Leipzig, which supplied pianos and grand pianos to the courts of Queen Victoria, the German Emperor, the Sultan of Turkey or the Tsar of Russia, among others.
A set of Empire furniture, dating from the early 20th century and characterized by minimalism and functionality, was also placed here. A bronze sculpture by Herman Joachim Pagels was located on a console against the wall. The artist studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century, and from 1906 made study trips to France and Italy, spending eighteen months in Florence. It is from this period that the sculpture on display comes from - this is indicated by the inscription Firenze, placed just behind the figure's foot. The art of Herman Joachim Pagels was held in high esteem, as it corresponded to the realist ideas of the period and the bourgeois tastes of the public.
The patriotic character of the lounge is also emphasised by a painting depicting the demonstration at Castle Square in Warsaw in 1861. The painting is a copy of a work by Tony Robret-Fleury from 1866. The work depicts the massacre carried out by the Russian army on the participants of a demonstration by the people of Warsaw in 1861. The episode reverberated throughout the world of the time and was one of the events that contributed to the outbreak of the January Uprising two years later.
To the left are the temporary exhibition rooms. You can get familiar with the current exhibition and then go back to the ground floor. Remember to turn right when you come down the stairs.
In this part of the Main Hall, you will also find the temporary exhibition rooms, take a look at our current offer. On the wall by the lift shaft, there is a plaque dedicated to the donors of our institution who have enriched the collection with their generous gifts over the years. One of the most important donations is that of Donatella Episcopo-Lipinsky, who donated the youthful works of her grandfather Sigmund Lipinski, an artist born in Grudziądz in 1873. These are mainly drawings and sketches created between 1890 and 1900 during his studies at the Royal Academic School of Art in Berlin. Lipinsky spent almost his entire life in Rome, where he gained a prominent position in the local artistic community - both as an artist, but also as the founder and teacher of a highly regarded school of painting, drawing and printmaking, located near the famous Spanish Steps at Via Margutta 33. It is worth mentioning that the Grudziądz Museum has the largest collection of works by this renowned artist in Poland. Further down the corridor there is another temporary exhibition room. There you will also find another instrument. It is a piano by the Sommerfeld company from Bydgoszcz, accompanied by a very interesting set of furniture inspired by Chinese art.
Once you have seen our temporary exhibitions on the ground floor of the Main Hall, the museum staff will show you the rest of the tour.