Landscape

Jacek Malczewski interrupted his secondary school education in 1873 and enrolled at the School of Fine Arts. Initially he studied under Władysław Łuszczkiewicz, and later under Jan Matejko. At that time, he took part in the World Exhibition in Vienna. In 1876, he went to Paris and began studying in the class of Charles Ernest Lehmann at the School of Fine Arts there. In 1877, due to a lack of funds, he was forced to return to Poland, where, after a summer of plein-air painting, he enrolled in Matejko's class. In 1878, he left the studio of his former master, expressing his disagreement with his vision of art as he was not keen on patriotic painting in a historicizing style.The painter described his understanding of Polishness, and consequently of patriotism, against the background of Wyspiański's work: I wanted to express the national element of my art differently. It was always the strongest stimulus for me to work. Believe me... if I were not a Pole, I would not be an artist. On the other hand, I have never confined the Polish character of my art to some narrow, predetermined framework. Wyspiański, for example, limited the concept of Polishness to one place. He often took me to Wawel Castle and said: This is Poland. Meanwhile, I always explained to him that Poland is these fields, baulks, roadside willows, the atmosphere of the countryside at sunset, this moment like this - all this is more Polish than Wawel, this is what an artist-Pole should express himself above all (J. Brzękowski, Jacek Malczewski about himself, Wiadomości Literackie 1925, no. 30, quoted after K. Wyka, op. cit., p. 163). The desire to depict Polishness by searching for its specific appearance and attempting to convey it can be seen in landscapes from the Szczecin collection. Widok z okna [A View from the Window] (1906) is a quite untypical canvas in the artist's oeuvre, as he rarely painted pure landscapes; most often, they constituted only the background for other scenes in the centre. The view shows behind a meadow, in the foreground two groups of trees, on the left a hill with a bright patch of sand, and on the right a dark-blue plane of water. White and lilac clouds float in a light turquoise sky. The cool green of scrubland is painted in the foreground. On the left, under the forest, there is a small silhouette of a female figure in a long dress.

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