The lost painting
In 1853 Bolesław Rusiecki produced Neris and Nemunas, a large allegorical composition connected with his attempt to secure academic recognition at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. The work personified Lithuania’s two great rivers and was one of the most ambitious paintings of his early career. The finished canvas has since disappeared from the public record.
A surviving preparatory drawing preserves part of the composition, but the original painting itself remains untraced.
The Abromiškės lead
One provenance lead connects the painting with Abromiškės Manor. If the work remained there into the twentieth century, its later history may have followed either the Broel-Plater family, who owned the estate, or Mykolas Žilinskas, who acquired Abromiškės in the 1930s and later became an important Lithuanian collector and patron.
The connection is still a research lead rather than a proven object-by-object provenance. Estate inventories, photographs, family papers, transport records and collection lists may be decisive in establishing what happened to the painting.
Comments & research notes
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If you recognise this composition, know of Abromiškės records or have information about the painting’s later history, you are welcome to leave a research note.
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