Portrait of Janklowa

Jan Gotard, the co-founder of "St. Luke Brotherhood", Tadeusz Pruszkowski's pupil, Antoni Michalak's friend, perpetuated the unique legend of Kazimierz on the Vistula river as an artistic colony. However, this artist, a master of mood, created mainly portraits of its inhabitants, creating a non-idealised, unsophisticated gallery of characters. Gotard painted sharply and precisely. Using expressive drawing, sharp lines, he recreated the figures of drunks, women, healers, grandfathers of Kazimierz, who posed for him for a small fee. These veristic and prosaic scenes, by referring to the patterns of old art, contained drama at the same time. When creating a portrait of the Kazimierz community, Gotard used careful drawing, deep chiaroscuro, and accentuated the expression of gestures. Contemporary figures were painted with visual associations with old Dutch and Netherlandish painting.

The focus on detail and a kind of naturalism individualised the figures, at the same time separating them from their spatial context. The artist showed them focused on simple activities, and at the same time unreal, spectral, shown in the metaphysical timelessness. Apart from old painting techniques, based on thorough academic education and knowledge of old technologies, Gotard used graphic techniques. In lithography, he made a portrait of Jankielowa, the wife of Jankiel who rented rooms for summer visitors. The work comes from a slightly later period of his work, characterised by the abandonment of sharp contours and expressive drawing of the figure. Gotard showed the woman's face through delicate modelling, brought out by a soft arrangement of shadow and light. At the same time, the lithograph was treated with unusual care, suggestively presenting the image of an elderly woman with marked wrinkles indicating the hardships of life. At the same time, this psychological portrait has been depicted with tenderness, the veristically rendered face of the old woman radiates luminosity, concentration and seriousness. Jankielowa's portrait seems to emerge from the background as a blunt way of expressing the presence of another person.