Anna - MEMENTO Tote

This made-to-order high quality, reversible and oversized tote bag features a heavy weight 100% cotton organic canvas with distressed and frayed seams, printed with three striking artworks and one self-portrait of 19th-20th century Polish artist, Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz.

Included is a matching oversized drawstring pouch for your umbrella, sunglasses, phone (or whatever you so desire!), as well as two fabric bookmarks and two slow-fashion advocacy patches to showcase your support of independent slow fashion. These items are made from the fabric offcuts and are included with the purchase of the tote ☺️

The MEMENTO collection is dedicated to remembering the remarkable women artists that history has overlooked.

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Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz (1854–1893): Artistic greatness gone too soon.

Anna Bilińska was born in 1854 in Złotopol, in what is now Ukraine. Her family relocated after the Polish uprising of 1863, and as a young woman in Warsaw she defied her parents' wishes by renting her own studio and funding it through portrait sales. In 1882, she travelled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where she studied under Tony Robert-Fleury — the same master who had taught Maria Wiik just years earlier.

Anna quickly distinguished herself. In 1887, her extraordinary self-portrait — showing herself before a canvas, brush in hand, meeting the viewer's gaze with calm professional authority — won a medal at the Paris Salon. Two years later, the same painting earned a silver medal at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, granting her the rare honour of exhibiting out of competition at future editions. In 1891, she won a gold medal at the Berlin International Exhibition. She was, by any measure, one of the most acclaimed painters of her generation.

In 1892, Anna married Dr. Antoni Bohdanowicz and returned to Warsaw with a dream: to open a painting school for women, modelled on the Parisian ateliers that had shaped her own career. She wanted to give Polish women what she had been forced to travel halfway across Europe to find — proper artistic training, taken seriously.

Just one year later, Anna died of heart disease. She was thirty-eight years old. The school was never built and her legacy never fulfilled.

I hope that in wearing her image and her beautiful artworks, you too will say "I see you, Anna".

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Designed and made by Meg in The Patch, Australia.  All megsmithmakes garments are Ethical Clothing Australia accredited and megsmithmakes is a proud member of Seamless Australia.