With Heart and Eyes – Vilnius Picture Gallery presents the romanticism of the mundane by Wincenty Sleńdziński
Exhibition opening at 5.30 pm Tuesday, 3 March, 2026
Vilnius Picture Gallery of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art (LNMA) opens an exhibition With Heart and Eyes. Wincenty Sleńdziński (1838–1909). It is the first in Lithuania solo exhibition by the painter known for celebrating the mundane, composed to present his multifaceted art and his person.
“Wincenty Sleńdziński is well familiar to art-loving audience in Lithuania, yet his art and biography still contain some unread pages –we open some of them at the exhibition. The artist who lived during troubled times and experienced exile, was gifted with the ability to see light shining in the eyes of the common people and to render it in his works. We feel a person of integrity behind the corpus of his artwork, while his stance and his artistic legacy have remained an inspiration into the present day,” claims Dr Arūnas Gelūnas, director general of the LNMA.
Wincenty Sleńdziński – an artist who weathered the storms of fate, tendering his creative light through exile and the hardships of the mundane
“At the heart of the exhibition is a creator who was destined to suffer all conceivable challenges of his time. His talent awoke early, leaving to us the unforgettable composition Old Woman Threading a Needle, however, was doomed, due to political circumstance, to smoulder in exile for long years. But even then, it took only short blasts of the wind of freedom to rekindle that creative fire so it blazed with the light brighter than before. It is a sad paradox, that once the artist gained his personal freedom he had longed for, the moirai spinning the thread of his life, tied another knot of a hard everyday life, which hampered his creative inspirations by the obligation to put bread on the table for his big family. Therefore, a life story told by his drawings and written words, by the violin strings strikes as unexceptional from the first glance only. But a viewer travelling from one room to another, starts feeling a rising tension generated by the hard and inevitable choices of a man pursuing his artistic calling. This exhibition therefore is an opportunity to discover another life story behind the Lithuanian art Golden Fund,” Aistė Bimbirytė, director of the Vilnius Picture Gallery of the LNMA places the event into context inviting to see the exhibition.
The exhibition curator Dr Jomanta Širkaitė presents Wincenty Sleńdziński as “[A]n artist of complicated fate, who dedicated his entire life to his multifaceted artistic practice. In the early 20th century already, the painter was noted as one of the art idealists: he always showed a subtle certainty with his medium, but was never after new trends, remaining loyal to realistic representation. He handled his brush with a virtuoso skill and tried it in a variety of genres, but his most powerful pieces tell stories of the everyday, reflecting its quiet beauty. The eyes of the destitute portrayed by him show his ability to see the inner person, as he looked at life with the eyes of the soul. He truly won the name of a poet of the mundane.”
The Sleńdziński dynasty who once worked in Vilnius – hundreds of paintings and the grand homecoming
Wincenty Sleńdziński’s talents exceeded these of his first art teacher – his father Aleksander. Later he studied under Kanutas Ruseckas, while during his studies in Moscow, he received the foundations of academic painting. As a young man he was part of the cultural milieu of Vilnius, where he created his finest work. He also learned music under Stanisław Moniuszko – the first violin of his own, the one that accompanied him during his life time, is also on display at the exhibition. Though his involvement in the uprising of 1863 – 1864 was minor, he was sent to an exile of nearly two decades, first in Nizhny Novgorod, later, in Kharkiv Governorate. A brief respite was his stay in Kraków and Dresden, where his romantic ideas of the past were put into the sketches and poetry of the longing for his motherland. There, too, was painted the sole extant work on the theme, the Priestess, the canvas that has already won the hearts of the gallery’s visitors.
In 1883, Sleńdziński was allowed to return to his motherland. He settled in Vilnius and got married already in his fifties. Since then, the artist worked flat out to provide for the family, producing, in the following several decades, hundreds of paintings, from portraits to history and religious scenes. He established himself in Vilnius as one of the most desirable masters, especially lionised as a portrait painter who captured the inner essence of his sitters, producing their heartfelt likenesses.
The archive of the family and a part of Wincenty’s legacy was preserved by his son Ludomir Sleńdziński (1889 – 1980), who continued the Sleńdziński artistic dynasty. The artistic atmosphere at home was a formative force to Ludomir, as was his father Aleksander to Wincenty. During the inter-war period, Ludomir Sleńdziński emerged as one of the key representatives of Neo-Classicism, and his work is included into the show alongside with his father’s. The entire display features over 120 art pieces. After the KGB and soviet repressions, Ludomir moved to Poland, where he linked the family story with Białystok, now home to the Sleńdziński Gallery.
The exhibition put together by the Vilnius Picture Gallery becomes an act of a symbolical homecoming, the first comprehensive presentation of the legacy by the dynasty who lived and created in Lithuania. The biggest part of the exhibition is dedicated to the period of exile and to the artist’s key genres – portraits, landscapes and religious paintings. Many of Wincenty Sleńdziński’s paintings will be presented to the viewers in Lithuania for the first time.
The exhibition is supplemented by a broad educational programme – public lectures, film screenings, concerts, exhibition tours and creative workshops. The first events are already scheduled in March: on the 17th March at 5.30 pm, exhibition curator Dr Jolanta Širkaitė will give a tour of the exhibition; an educational activity Find and finish the picture is scheduled on the 28th March at 1 pm; a public lecture by the curator on the 31st March will extend the narrative beyond the scope of the exhibition. For more information, please visit the website of the Vilnius Picture Gallery of the LNMA, and social media.
The exhibition With Heart and Eyes. Wincenty Sleńdziński (1838–1909) will be on until the 25th October 2026.
Organiser Vilnius Picture Gallery of the LNMA
Curator Jolanta Širkaitė
Coordinators: Aistė Bimbirytė, Gabija Kasparavičiutė-Kaminskienė, Joana Vitkutė
Architect Artūras Čertovas
Designer Marija Jablonskytė
Editor Ilona Čiužauskaitė
Translator Raminta Bumbulytė
Conservators: Arūnas Baublys, Janina Bilotienė, Jūratė Derkintienė, Lina Jurnienė, Žymantė Kasperavičienė, Linas Lukoševičius, Silvija Lukošienė, Inga Petkutytė, Daiva Petrauskaitė, Algimantas Vaineikis, Paulius Zovė
4 Didžioji st, Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 261 1685
vpg@lndm.lt
