Jan Kanty Gumowski was a painter, graphic artist, and draughtsman whose name has largely been forgotten. Born in 1883, he studied at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts as well as in Florence, Munich, and Paris. After the outbreak of the First World War, he joined Józef Piłsudski’s Polish Legions. Many years later, after leaving the military, he settled down with his family in Krakow. He continued with his creative work until his death in 1943. In general, his works can be grouped around two major themes. The first includes portraits of the legionaries of the First Brigade, genre scenes, and battlefield landscapes; the other consists of impressions of Poland’s historic architecture. He produced whole series of drawings and watercolors depicting ruined towns and castles, the unhealed wounds of the 17th-century Swedish wars, as well as a few lithographic cycles, which were published under the general title "Motifs of Polish Architecture". The haunting beauty of Poland’s wooden architecture and of the nooks and alleys of its old towns is the subject of his lithographs. It is Gumowski’s distinctive brand of realism coupled with an individual sensitivity free from schematism and open to the appeal of historic architecture that determines the artistic excellence of his compositions. Gumowski worked on the Jasna Góra collection in 1925-1926, published as the fourth installment of the Motifs of Polish Architecture. It consists of 14 colored and black-and-white lithographic plates showing a panorama of the Jasna Góra Hill and a series of close-ups of the fortifications, courtyards, church interiors, the chapel of the BVM, and the Holy Icon itself. His selection of pictures and their arrangement indicates that he wanted to follow the path of all the pilgrims that come to Poland’s Holiest Shrine of the Virgin Mary. The illustrations from the Jasna Góra collection are noteworthy both for their graphic expression and the faithful rendering of individual details. Consequently, they can be regarded as either art or valuable iconographic material of Jasna Góra in the interwar period.