Feliks Topolski (1907-1989)

An artist and writer, Feliks Topolski was born in Poland. He studied at the Warsaw Academy of Art, then travelled to Italy and France in the late 1930s. He later settled in England and became a British citizen in 1947.

Topolski was the official Polish war artist during World War ll. From 1953 to 1979, he produced a fortnightly chronicle, Topolski's Chronicle , in which he used his rapid and unerring line to capture and play on the people and occasions that caught his eye. He produced his chronicle without advertisements or subsidies, and since his death in 1989 Topolski's Chronicle has gained great respect as a pictorial and political record spanning nearly thirty years of world history.

He produced portraits of people such as Martin Luther King, Churchill, Graham Green, George Wells, and T S Elliot, and is touted as an artist who was concerned with public rather than private life.

Feliks Topolski by Russell Westwood, 1950s, © Estate of Russell Westwood / National Portrait Gallery, London