Background
Zygmunt Ajdukiewicz was born in Witkowice near Tarnobrzeg in south-eastern Poland.
Zygmunt Ajdukiewicz was born in Witkowice near Tarnobrzeg in south-eastern Poland.
He studied painting at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts originally. From 1880 to 1882, he studied at the Academy of Vienna and, from 1883 at the Munich Academy under Johann Herterich, associated with the Munich School of naturalism.
Ajdukiewicz, born and raised in the Austrian sector of Partitioned Poland, settled in the imperial capital upon the completion of his studies, but maintained a close connection with his homeland. While in Vienna, he illustrated the epic novel The Deluge (Potop) by Polish Nobel Prize-winning novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz. He settled permanently in Vienna in 1885 as popular painter of the Austrian court where he was also referred to as Zygismund or Sigismund von Ajdukiewicz.
In 1893 he went to Paris.
lieutenant was a major publishing project printed in German and Hungarian between 1886–1902 under the title Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture. Subsequent volumes were published long after Rudolf"s death which took place in January 1889.
Ajdukiewicz painted panels for the encyclopedia depicting various nationalities, ethnic groups and minorities represented in Austria-Hungary. He also produced a series of 12 paintings about the life of Tadeusz Kościuszko published in 1892 as an art-album by F. Bondy.
He made a life-size standing portrait of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as a hunter (1913).
Recognition
Zygmunt Ajdukiewicz exhibited in Krakow, Warsaw, Lwów, Vienna, Berlin, Munich and Prague. Zygmunt Ajdukiewicz was the first cousin of Polish finance de siècle painter Tadeusz Ajdukiewicz who was nine years older than him. He died in Vienna in 1917.