Stanislawa de Karlowska was born to Polish parents on 8 May 1876, at Szeliwy, near Lowicz in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire (now Poland). She studied painting in Warsaw, Cracow and at the Académie Julian in Paris between 1896–97. Moving to England in 1898 after marriage to painter, Robert Bevan, Karlowska had a successful career as a painter, was closely affiliated with the Camden Town Group and exhibited regularly with the Allied Artists' Association and The London Group.
Painter Stanislawa de Karlowska was born to Polish patriots Aleksander de Karlowski and Paulina z Tucholkow on 8 May 1876, at the family estate at Szeliwy, near the town of Lowicz in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire (now Poland). She studied in Warsaw, Cracow and at the Académie Julian, Paris between 1896–97. In the summer of 1897, Karlowska met British painter Robert Bevan at the wedding of a mutual friend in Jersey, and they married in Warsaw in December of the same year. Moving to England in 1898, and despite Karlowska being unfamiliar with the English language, the couple initially lived at Horsgate House, Cuckfield, Sussex, with Bevan’s family and then at 3 Buxton Road in Brighton for two years. It was there that Karlowska gave birth to their daughter, Edith Halina, in 1898. In 1900, the family moved to 14 Adamson Road in Swiss Cottage, London, NW3, where Karlowska gave birth to their son, Robert Alexander, in 1901, and where they would live as a family for the rest of Bevan’s life. The Swiss Cottage neighbourhood would itself provide much inspiration for Karlowska's paintings.
Karlowska began exhibiting soon after arriving in London. In 1900, she showed her paintings with the Women’s International Art Club (WIAC) at the Grafton Galleries, where in a 1910 exhibition her still life paintings were praised for their ‘pure and harmonious colour’; condensed in ‘the broadest, simplest, and most convincing terms’ (Carter, 1910). Karlowska’s involvement with the first Allied Artists’ Association (AAA) show at the Royal Albert Hall in 1908, along with Bevan, acquainted her with painters, Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore. Only Bevan, however, was invited to Gilman and Gore’s 19 Fitzroy Street exhibiting group; as a woman Karlowska was ineligible for membership of both the Fitzroy Street and Camden Town Groups. The AAA connection nonetheless resulted in her many friendships with British post-impressionists, and she went on to exhibit with The London Group for many decades after her election in January 1914. However, Karlowska, among the group’s many female founder members, while included, ‘received less press attention or were favorably reviewed only in contrast to the modernist tendencies of their male contemporaries’ (MacDougall and Dickson, 2013). The influence of the Camden Town artists, in particular their pursuit of deliberate naivety in depictions of the modern city, is evident in Karlowska’s painting Swiss Cottage, which was exhibited at the AAA’s exhibition at Holland Park Hall in 1914 (and shown in Ben Uri's exhibition marking the first 50 years of The London Group, and held a century later).
Karlowska would often look after the children and the house while Bevan worked in the countryside, putting her own work as ‘secondary to her husband’s, at her own choosing’ (Bonett, 2012). After Bevan’s death in 1925, however, Karlowska created many paintings and prints in her purpose-built studio at Adamson Road, and she exhibited with the Society of Wood Engravers around this time. Painting mostly townscapes, still-life and interiors, she held her first solo exhibition at the Adams Gallery in 1935, where she sold six paintings. Director of the Tate Gallery, James Bolivar Manson, observed of the show that Karlowska ‘finds beauty in the most ordinary scenes’ (Manson, 1935). Having remained friends with Camden Town and Cumberland Market Group colleagues, such as Malcolm Drummond and Walter Sickert, Karlowska moved to a flat at 46 Russell Square, Bloomsbury in 1936. Her son lived at number 41, and both hosted ‘At Homes’ to which their artist friends were invited. When the Second World War broke out, Karlowska moved north to Chester to live with her daughter at 15 Abbey Street, where she painted the wartime scene, Barrage Balloons in 1939. Returning to London after the war, Karlowska moved to a nursing home in Cadogan Place, Belgravia in 1952.
Stanislawa de Karlowska died in London, England on 9 December 1952 and is buried in the Bevan family grave at Cuckfield, Sussex. After her death, Karlowska’s paintings were exhibited at a memorial exhibition at the Adams Gallery in 1954, where she had held her first solo show. Since then, she has featured in many exhibitions about the Camden Town Group, including at Tate Britain (2008) and the National Portrait Gallery (2010-2011), particularly as the contribution of women painters to British modernism is reassessed. Her works are held in several UK public collections, including Tate, Fitzwilliam Museum, Towner Eastbourne, and the Ashmolean Museum. In 2013-14 her work was included in Ben Uri's survey exhibition 'Uproar!': The First 50 Years of The London Group .