Winter landscape with huts and a man brushing off the snow

The painting from the collection of the Potocki family, former owners of Łańcut Castle, depicts an evening rural landscape in the wintertime. The colours are light and silvery. In the foreground, there is a man clearing snow off the road leading to the cottages visible in the background. The man is accompanied by a small black dog. The whole of the landscape covered in snow. The scene is lit by the moon, looking out from behind the clouds. The sky lights up with a pink glow on the upper right. In the lower right corner the signature of the painter “Louis Douzette”. Louis Douzette (born September 1834 in Tribsees, died February 1912 in Barth) was a German painter who was fascinated by the moonlight, creating landscapes and genre scenes by its light. He also created a small number of portraits. At the age of fourteen he began to study painting with his father, who had studied at the Belin Academy of Art. When he turned 21, he went to Berlin, where he became a pupil of the Berlin painter Herman Eschke. In 1878, he went to Paris to study painting at the Barbizon School. In 1896, he became a professor at the Berlin Academy of Art. From 1895 on, he settled in Barth, where he remained until his death. He was most acclaimed for his romantic nocturnal landscapes and was called “Moonshine Douzette”. The painting in question is set in a double frame: an internal narrow, profiled, gilded frame decorated with leaf ornaments (clover leaves alternating with acanthus leaves) and an external wide, profiled black frame. It is displayed in the Northern Corridor of the second floor of Łańcut Castle.