Topolski simultaneously studied at the Warsaw Academy of Art and the Officers’ School of the Artillery Reserve. Later he went to Italy and Paris, where he became a self-taught artist. In 1935 he came to England to record the Silver Jubilee of King George V for a Polish magazine, but was enchanted by British traditions and eccentricities, and by the countryside as well as the Georgian houses of London. George Bernard Shaw was one of his admirers. He became a war artist, a draughtsman, for the British as well as for the Polish government. Wounded in the Blitz, he travelled on duty to the Arctic, served with the Polish 2nd Army Corps in Italy, went to Burma, entered Germany with the Allied troops, saw Bergen-Belsen and the Nuremberg trials. He recorded world history in India and Burma, Malaya and Indochina, produced a mural for the Festival of Britain and another one for Buckingham Palace (1959). Two of his works are in the National Portrait Gallery, London.