Where to see flower paintings in Warsaw

A painting with flowers looks completely different on a wall than on a screen: a monitor loses the texture, flattens the layers and misreports the colour. Anyone planning to buy painting, or simply curious how it really works, should first look at a few pictures close up. In Warsaw that can be done in a day, and largely for nothing.

Where do flower paintings hang permanently in Warsaw?

At the National Museum, in the Gallery of Nineteenth-Century Art, which the museum reopened on 9 December 2021 and where it shows some three hundred objects. The oldest bouquet hanging there is „Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase” by Henryka Beyer, 1827, in room 109. Room 114 holds „Flowers – Anemones” by Olga Boznanska, 1901, and room 119 her „Poppies”, after 1920. The main building stands at Aleje Jerozolimskie 3; the museum states that it is closed on Mondays and that on Tuesdays entry to the permanent displays is free.

Did any Warsaw painter paint a Warsaw garden?

Several did, and the same one. Artur Grottger painted „In the Saxon Garden” in 1863 — the picture hangs in room 104. Thirty years later the same park returned in Jozef Pankiewicz's „Nocturne – Swans in the Saxon Garden in Warsaw at Night”, 1893–1894, in room 114. A private garden is the subject of „Children in the Garden” by Wladyslaw Podkowinski, 1892, oil on canvas, 47 by 62 centimetres, in room 117; the museum catalogue gives his dates as 1866–1895, so he painted it three years before his death. It is worth seeing the three one after another: they show greenery ceasing to be a background and becoming the subject.

And where can contemporary painting with plants be seen?

At the House of the Visual Artist of the Warsaw District of the Polish Artists Union, at Mazowiecka 11A. Several exhibition rooms are housed there, among them the Lufcik Gallery, and the shows change every few weeks. The district states that the galleries are open Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00 and that the building is closed on Mondays. Entry to the exhibitions is free, which makes it the cheapest way to see what painters in Warsaw are doing now. I showed „Light-state” in the Lufcik Gallery myself; all my exhibitions, in Warsaw and abroad, are listed on the about me page.

Are there exhibitions of botanical painting itself?

There are, though rarely and usually outside art museums. The Botanic Garden of the University of Warsaw at Aleje Ujazdowskie 4 announced for autumn 2026 the first solo exhibition in Poland of Barbara Oozeerally — forty original paintings of plants through the seasons. The garden itself opens seasonally: from May to August until eight in the evening, while from November to February only the glasshouses are accessible.

Where can you see plants painted without paint?

In Wilanow. The ceilings of the royal apartments carry plafonds of the four seasons by the court painter Jerzy Eleuter Szymonowicz-Siemiginowski — the Queen's Bedroom has „Spring”. On the upper terrace of the garden grow species typical of the baroque: peonies, pasque flowers, narcissi, tulips, bellflowers, asters, lilies and larkspurs, with citrus trees and exotic plants in pots brought out for the summer. It is a rare chance to see painting and a living garden arranged to one idea.

And where can you see my own pictures?

In the studio on Sasiedzka street in Warsaw, by prior arrangement over the telephone — the terms are set out in the piece on buying a work. It is worth coming, because oil paintings have a texture no photograph shows, and watercolours change with their mount. The plants all of it starts from grow a few hundred metres away: I wrote separately about where wild meadows bloom in Warsaw, and showed them in the photography gallery.