Olga - 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, Olga Boznańska.

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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Olga Boznańska (1865–1940): The painter of souls.

Olga Boznańska was born in Kraków in 1865 to a Polish father and French mother. Because women were barred from the Academy of Fine Arts, she studied privately before moving to Munich at twenty-one, where she again sought private instruction — because again, the Academy would not admit her. None of this stopped her. By 1895, Berlin's Bazaar magazine listed her among the top twelve women painters in Europe.

Olga settled permanently in Paris in 1898, where her studio became a gathering place for artists and intellectuals. She was known for painting portraits of extraordinary psychological depth — sitting for hours with her subjects, studying their faces until she could capture something words could not. The Polish press called her "malarka dusz" — the painter of souls. Her most celebrated work, Girl with Chrysanthemums (1894), hangs in the National Museum in Kraków and remains one of the most recognisable paintings in Polish art.

She received the French Legion of Honour. She won the Grand Prix at the 1937 Paris World Exhibition. When offered a professorship at Kraków's Academy of Fine Arts — the very institution that had once refused to admit her as a student — she declined, choosing to remain in Paris on her own terms.

Olga Boznańska died on 26 October 1940, in a Paris under Nazi occupation. Her final years were marked by isolation, her stepsister's suicide, and diminishing commissions as the world turned away from the quiet, luminous portraits she had devoted her life to creating. In Poland, she is revered. Internationally, she is barely known.

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

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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.