Landscape with a small church

Adam Wiktor Malinowski, born in Lublin, was a stage designer and decorator. He cooperated with theatres in Vienna, Warsaw and Lublin. He painted theatre curtains and created decorations for performances. He also created oil paintings, shown, among others, at the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts, taking up landscape and genre themes. In his painting studies he referred to the tradition of pastoral scenes by Claude Lorraine, and Dutch realistic landscape representations.

The idyllic Pejzaż z kościołem [The Landscape with a Church], creating an open, vast space with a genre scene in the foreground, showing the everyday activities of a rural community, i.e. laundry, grazing cattle, resting; in the centre of the composition there is a rider on horseback. The varied activities undertaken by the figures scattered in the landscape reflect a constant rhythm, complementing the luminous landscape which is the main subject of the canvas. Reproducing details of nature, boughs, branches, grasses, and finally rural buildings, Malinowski creates an atmospheric representation expressing the harmonious co-presence of groups of figures with the overwhelming rhythm of nature. The intensity of light diffused in the open landscape, reflected in the current of the river, bringing out the brown ground, exposing the green of the branches, gives the painting an expression of mystical unity. In the far background, the silhouette of the church closes the composition, giving the painting a religious message, binding the fragile everyday life with transcendence.

Marcin Lachowski