On a pasture

Stanislaw Masłowski enjoyed the acclaim of critics already during his lifetime, as evidenced by a review by Henryk Piątkowski Stanislaw Masłowski. The Profile of the Artist published in “Tygodnik Ilustrowany” in 1909 (No. 49): “Among the generation of artists to which he belonged, he stands in the foreground, he does not disappear, like so many others, in the shadow of Chełmoński, but he expands his own path of creativity more and more”. Art can show the viewer beauty in what is every day and ordinary. Landscape painting, which became the main part of Masłowski's work, is exactly like that.

The artist was a child of the Lublin region, born in Włodawa, a town near the border with Ukraine. He studied at the Warsaw Drawing Class, in the studio of Wojciech Gerson and Aleksander Kamiński. Between 1875 and 1886, he took part in annual plein-air painting workshops in Ukraine. He was a member of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts and became a member of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts in 1921.

The watercolour explores the theme of life in the countryside, with three figures in the foreground, cantered as part of a vast landscape. A clearly defined horizon line separates the vast pasture from the sky. The motif of a village was popular in the paintings of the second half of the 19th century; it included such artists as Józef Chełmoński and Włodzimierz Tetmajer. Art began to focus on themes taken from the everyday life of peasants, which creates a contrast with momentous history painting. The work of simple people found a place in the art of painting.

Klara Sadkowska