Head of girl

Stanisław Wyspiański, a playwright, painter, designer of applied forms, recognised during his lifetime as the fourth bard, inheriting the legacy of the great poets-prophets (Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński), was born at the home of the sculptor Franciszek Wyspiański. His mother, Maria née Rogowska, orphaned her seven-year-old son, who passed into the care of his uncles, Kazimierz and Joanna (Janina) Stankiewicz. At the bilingual Polish-German St. Anne's Gymnasium in Kraków, young Stanisław became interested in history, art, theatre, and Greco-Roman antiquity. Even before receiving his maturity certificate, he enrolled as an extraordinary student in the local School of Fine Arts. After passing his maturity exam (1887), he started to study at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University, continuing the practical study of painting. That is how he came under the wing of Jan Matejko, renowned as the greatest national artist since Romanticism, the first to succeed in shifting popular interest from Polish literature to the visual arts. Wyspiański combined these two fields, developing in the first decade of the 20th century a Kraków variant of the total work of art (German: Gesamtkunstwerk). He completed his painting studies at the Parisian Académie Colarossi (1891-1894). Parallel to large forms such as dramatic texts, wall paintings, architectural and stage designs, and furnishings for public interiors, he worked all his life on chamber works, namely, lyricism, applied graphics, and especially portraiture. In the latter field, he became a virtuoso of the pastel technique and an inquisitive documentalist of the model's image and psyche. It was usually made possible by his free, independent selection of his portrayed subjects from among his closest acquaintances, i.e. the bohemia of the time, his schoolmates, his friends, and his children. An early work from the Szczecin collection belongs to this group, created five years before Wyspiański's marriage to Teodora Teofila Pytko, in the year of the birth of their first daughter Helena.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak