Jan Kossakowski (1900-1979)

He was born in Warsaw, spent his childhood in the family palace of Korwin-Kossakowski in Kaunas Lithuania, in Vaitkuškis. He was a soldier in the Polish-Soviet war in 1920. In the interwar period, he graduated from medical studies and took up medical practice as well as scientific work. During II World War, he was twice imprisoned – in a prison camp in Małszewicze and in the Pawiak Prison in Warsaw. He survived the Warsaw Uprising in a hospital on Śliska Street coming in aid of adults and children. After the war, he took up the mission of creating Polish children’s cardiac surgery. He was well-known to thousands of Polish children who crossed his operating room on Litewska Street.

At the same time, already in the 50s, he started a conscious artistic activity as a sculptor and painter. At first he used to sculpt in stone using a sharp surgeon knife. In the 60s, he started carving in wood. Madonna was constantly his main topic – there were polychrome, gilded and polished representations. However, only the period of illness which completely cut him off the medical service let him develop his talent and focus solely on a special kind of painting performed in his own technique – with use of paints obtained from coloured pencils carand'ache, put on photographic paper and then varnished. Amazing technique, colouring and lines of those masterpieces charm with their fairy-tale visions, their sense of humour in genre scenes, and pensiveness, as well as unconditioned confidence in the religious convention.

He went down in people’s memory as a wonderful person, extraordinary doctor and exceptional artist. In 1992, his students and his successors, doctors of open-heart surgery brought to being the order of medal named after Professor Kossakowski with the motto: "What one sows, one reaps". Jan Eustachy Kossakowski Foundation, called "Kossakowski Foundation", was founded in 2008 by Zofia Kossakowska-Szanajca, his daughter, with a view to future generations of Europeans inhabiting the vast Fatherland between Vilnius and Warsaw.