Antoni Uniechowski (1898-1978), Unicorns from the series "There Was a Palace"

Ink, paper, 28 x 21 cm passe - partout, framed 45 x 35 cm. Original illustration for Krystyna Uniechowska's book "Był Pałac",PIW 2008; p.213Krystyna Uniechowska (1929 - 2011) - daughter of Antoni UniechowskiBył Pałac is a story of a twelve-year-old girl about a truly terrible time and a fairy-tale world of imagination. The last months of the war. The palace is teeming with life. People who found asylum within its walls, in spite of reality, play, feast, seek escape in games of love and death. Something like a ball on a sinking ship is taking place, as if time has stopped, life is taking place on the borderline between reality and dreams. There Was a Palace is an unusual novel in which truth crossed swords with fiction, a drop of fantasy in the stream of History. The whole book is decorated with drawings by Antoni Uniechowski. When they were created, the book did not even exist in concept, one could say that it is the novel that illustrates the drawings. Krystyna Uniechowska-Dembinskaya is the author of a book about her father, Antoni Uniechowski, memoir books: Apocrypha of Venice and Gold 9. Palladium Cinema, together with Franciszek Starowieyski she wrote Tales of the End of the World.