Still life with flowers and figure of dancer

Władysław Ślewiński was born into a landed gentry family who sent him to study agriculture in 1875. During that period, he briefly attended the W. Gerson Drawing School in Warsaw. The painter took over the management of the inherited Pilaszkowice estate but failed. As a result, he went bankrupt and, in 1888, escaped from the sequester of the Financial Office to Paris, where he lived with the painter Zygmunt Andrychiewicz. He took up painting at the Académie Julian in the French capital and then studied at the Académie Colarossi for almost two years.Ślewiński's painting Martwa natura z kwiatami i figurą tancerki [Still Life with Flowers and a Figure of a Dancer], dating from 1907 and held in the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin since 1950, shows flowers in a clay vase with indistinct decoration. The artist often took up the motif. A female figure is shown next to the vase, and behind it, there are vessels with fruit; these elements of still life are also presented in a blurred way (we are dealing with blurred shapes and lesser lighting). In the latter, the most important role is played by sunflowers, which at the end of the 19th century became a popular flower used for decoration and, consequently, often depicted by painters. The most famous sunflowers in paintings are those by Vincent van Gogh, who admired them while studying the works of Flemish baroque masters in Antwerp. The Dutch artist painted his first pictures with sunflowers in the late summer of 1887 while he was living in Paris. He wrote about two of them (Dwa ścięte słoneczniki [Two Truncated Sunflowers] (II) and (III)) in 1889 in a letter to his brother referring to his abrupt parting with Gauguin, a friend of him. Although we have no confirmation that Ślewiński saw van Gogh's canvases, looking at the Szczecin painting and taking into account the coincidence of dates and the connection with a common master-friend, we may think that yellow flowers in a vase were created as a result of inspiration from van Gogh's canvases.

Beata Małgorzata Wolska