Aniela Pawlikowska was born into a wealthy Polish family in Lwów (Lemberg), Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine) in 1901. She studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1920s, and arrived in London as an exile in 1946. Pawlikowska was a renowned society portraitist in England, frequently painting children of the aristocracy and royal family.
Artist, illustrator and society portrait, painter Aniela Pawlikowska was born into a rich literary and scientific Polish family in Lwów (lemberg) Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine) on 11 July 1901. Her mother was the Polish poet, Maryla Wolska, daughter of Wanda Młodnicka, née Monné, muse and fiancée of the painter Artur Grottger, and herself a writer and translator. Her father was an engineer and inventor, Wacław Wolski, who wrote on mathematical logic, linguistics, and was an early pioneer of the Polish petroleum industry. The youngest of five children, Pawlikowska, then Wolska, was home-schooled and, after her talents were noticed by her tutor Władysław Witwicki, she held her first solo exhibition at the age of nine. In 1924 she married writer and publisher Michał Gwalbert Pawlikowski, with whom she had three daughters, and after joining him at the family seat of Medyka (which she often painted in watercolour), she studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts with Wojciech Weiss and Kazimierz Sichulski in the late 1920s. Pawlikowska’s career began to flourish in the 1930s, with her paintings being exhibited widely in Lwów, Kraków, Warsaw and Zakopane, as well as abroad in Italy, until the outbreak of war interrupted her success. Fortunately, Pawlikowska and her family were able to escape to Rome in 1940, during the time of Soviet deportations of Poles to Siberia, and there she painted portraits of Italian aristocrats and diplomats to earn a living. The family lived in Italy for six years, during which time one of her daughters died of leukaemia. Unable to settle permanently in Italy, Pawlikowska and her family moved to London as Polish exiles in late 1946, their home city now part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Soviet Republic, after the postwar re-organisation of central and Eastern Europe. Her son, Kasper's role in the Polish II Corps, enabled his parents to have the right to enter the UK.
In England Pawlikowska continued her artistic career. A deeply religious individual, she created several important religious works after the war, including Saint Stanislaus the Martyr for the altar of the Marian Fathers’ chapel at Fawley Court, Buckinghamshire in 1947. She also took on commercial commissions, producing many colourful Christmas postcards over several decades (this practice had begun in Poland and continued in England), with both decorative and religious images. The postwar period established her more visible legacy as a society portraitist. Becoming one of the most sought-after and prolific portrait painters in the country during the 1950s, in 1955 Pawlikowska held a solo exhibition at London’s Parsons Gallery where she showcased a selection of her extensive oeuvre (by the end of her life she had produced over 800 works). Lacking her own studio, she took the decision to paint these portraits in the homes of her wealthy clients, many of whom were children. Sitters included Princess Alexandra of Kent; the daughters of the King of Spain; British Special Operations Executive Krystyna Skarbek and, on several occasions, the young Diana Spencer, the future Princess of Wales.
In the late 1950s Pawlikowska lost her vision in one eye due to the intensity of her work, and missing her homeland, she returned to Poland with her family many times. Her husband was killed in a motor accident in London in 1970. Ten years later, Aniela Pawlikowska died in London, England on 23 December 1980, now living in a home for elderly Poles, and having painted right until the end of her life. Holding few exhibitions in her lifetime, she only began receiving critical attention posthumously after her son, Kaspar Pawlikowski, donated most of her works to the National Museum in Kraków in 1997 and an important monograph was published in her native Poland in 2021. Her paintings are not currently held in any UK public collections.