Stepan Vladislavovich Bakalowicz

Bakalowicz was born on 17 October 1857 in Warsaw, then part of the Kingdom of Poland within the Russian Empire, the son of the Polish painter Władysław Bakałowicz and, by most accounts, the Warsaw actress Viktoryna Szymanowska. He trained first at the Warsaw Drawing School from 1874 to 1876 under Wojciech Gerson and Aleksander Kaminski, then entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, where he studied from 1876 to 1881. He rose steadily through the Academy's medal system, culminating in 1881 with the large gold medal and the title of class artist of the 1st degree, which came with a multi-year travel pension abroad.

As an Academy pensioner, he spent 1882 and 1883 moving between Paris, Algiers, and Rome, and Rome became his primary base for most of the rest of his life. He continued to exhibit at the Imperial Academy through the 1880s and 1890s, at the Moscow Society of Art Lovers, and at the St. Petersburg Society of Artists, of which he became a member in 1900, and he showed internationally at exhibitions in Berlin in 1886 and 1891 and in Munich in 1892. In 1886 the Imperial Academy named him an academician of historical painting for a group of genre-historical works. He remained in Italy after the 1917 Russian Revolution and, from 1936, served on the governing body of the Polish Association of Artists known as The Capitol, based in Rome. He died on 2 May 1947 in his apartment on the Via del Babuino in Rome.

Bakalowicz is remembered chiefly through institutional description rather than a body of contemporary press criticism. The State Russian Museum catalogues him as a painter and master of genre pictures on antique subjects, a description that matches the consistent focus of his output on staged domestic and social scenes set in ancient Rome. Russian art-market references describe him as one of the more significant academic painters working in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, a judgment reflected in his steady progression through the Imperial Academy's medal system and his 1886 academician title. No verbatim, attributable critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed in the available sources, so none is reproduced here.

Bakalowicz's market is thin and largely confined to the secondary auction circuit rather than any gallery program. The best-documented result is Feeding the Doves, which sold for GBP 96,500 at Sotheby's London in a Russian Art and Paintings sale on 27 November 2007, a figure one specialist art-market database identifies as his highest recorded auction price. Most other results are far smaller. In April 2026, At Her Toilet, a 1924 Roman-period painting signed and dated in the artist's characteristic Latin studio inscription, sold at Doyle in New York for a total price of USD 7,680 against an estimate of USD 6,000 to 8,000. No gallery or estate currently represents the artist; works surface through auction houses and secondary dealers.

There is no catalogue raisonne and no dedicated gallery or estate managing the artist's market, so due diligence rests on museum provenance, documented exhibition history, and the artist's typical studio inscriptions. Auction volume is low and prices vary widely by subject and quality, from a few thousand dollars for smaller or later works to the GBP 96,500 high recorded in 2007, so any single sale should be read in the context of that thin trading history rather than as a stable benchmark. Bakalowicz is also sometimes confused with his father, the Paris-based genre and portrait painter Władysław (Ladislas) Bakałowicz; the two are distinct artists and should not be conflated in provenance research.