Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 41 × 33 cm, 43 × 62 cm (with frame)
Signed and dated in the lower right corner: “W. Terlikowski 19”.
Provenance:
Former collection of Mr. Alain de la Horbe
Subsequently passed down by inheritance to the current owner
Private collection, Paris
The child depicted is the painter Alain de la Horbe, who knew Terlikowski well.
Alain de la Horbe dedicated one of the chapters to Terlikowski and described the creation of his portrait in the book *Mémoires d’Outres-Tubes*, Éditions Mont Pagnote, 1978.
“Before I painted his portrait, he had painted mine in 1919.
I wasn’t tall. He called me Ali-Baba—a name more familiar to this Parisian Pole than Alain. Before settling in Paris, where my parents met him in 1913 at a charity event, he had traveled the world. It was said that at the age of 14, he ran away from home with a few sailors from the Vistula River, on whose banks he lived with his parents and numerous siblings. Brought back to his family, he did it again a few years later. This time, for good.
He was a great joker, and in his stories it was hard to tell truth from fiction. He claimed that he had traveled—often on foot—across Europe, spending the night in brothels, where he found shelter, food, and everything else, paying for his stay with portraits of the women there.
After settling in Paris, he lived in a small, run-down apartment on rue de la Grande Chaumière, married to a Polish woman who claimed to be Jewish, though she didn’t look the part; he was the father of two boys: Włodek (1907) and Tika (1909). After 1914, he had a studio on the rue des Petits-Champs. In 1918, within a few days, he lost his eldest son to the Spanish flu and was inconsolable in his grief.
In the years that followed, around 1921, he fell in love at first sight with Jeanne, the daughter of politician Georges Leygues, who was married to an American. They both got divorced so they could marry each other.
I remember meeting him in 1927 by the roadside while he was painting; we were riding bicycles with a few school friends and my mother in the vicinity of Nice. I met him again in Paris in 1931, when I was in the première class at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.”
Excerpt, pp. 67–68.
