Portrait of the Artist as a Young Celebrity: Ignacy Jan Paderewski by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Abstract

The paper discusses and analyses the remarkable portrait of the pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski by the British-Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, currently in the National Museum in Warsaw. It suggests that the painting is a quintessential celebrity portrait in that it creates at once a sense of proximity and distance, of intimacy and unreachability. It is an image that speaks of Paderewski’s interaction with other celebrities – specifically Alma-Tadema himself, who was a star in his own right and whose atelier, as everyone knew, was a gathering place for the rich, the powerful, and the famous. It also is an image, that gains its strength as a celebrity image from interfacing with numerous other images of Paderewski that were in circulation in London at the time – photographs, caricatures, sculptures, and paintings.