A tale of gender, crowd and urban everyday life

The painting ' Swiss Cottage' (c. 1914) appears at first glance to be a rather innocuous street scene. It shows a section of a red bus, a fruit stall, a group of passers-by wearing hats, the calm, brooding light of day. But beneath this surface lies a dense tale of gender, society and urban everyday life, which the Polish émigré writes into the then modern, modernist approach . She does not show a panorama of the city, but a shot from the pavement. One even gets the impression that she herself is standing in the crowd. There is no grand narrative, as it is replaced by everyday life, a juxtaposition of ordinary yet meaningful gestures.

In the painting, on the left, a woman pushes a huge black cart - an almost monolithic, heavy lump that seems to move slowly on thin wheels. On the other side, in the foreground, a girl in a yellow coat appears in contrast. She is holding a hoop, a sign of childish play and freedom, but also of training and discipline. These two figures form two poles and at the same time divert attention from the male silhouettes in the centre , which, although present, remain devoid of energy. Faces are impassive, gazes pass one another. The crowd is a swarm of parallel trajectories.

"Swiss Cottage" and female trajectories

Despite the coherence of the composition, the city depicted does not unite, but disperses . This is where the perspective of the flâneuse (wandering woman) reveals itself . Rather than repeating the modernist scheme of the male observer, Karłowska reverses the vector of the gaze and gives voice to women. The cart and the hoop become tools of presence. One symbolises the burden of care, the other movement and initiation into the urban rhythm.

The women are not background decorations but navigators. They are the ones who guide the viewer's eyes through the painting. The girl stops her step and looks straight ahead, forcing eye contact with the viewer. It is a subtle gesture of emancipation and, at the same time, a record of the experience of everyday life, where causality is revealed in the logistics of the day rather than in grand gestures. Karlowska's heroines, not only in this painting, are masters of transitions, for whom the city is a space of constant mini-rituals: buying, caring, playing, looking.

Colour in "Swiss Cottage"

In "Swiss Cottage", the arrangement of colours is based on contrasts that balance the image like a chessboard of spots. On the left, the broad yellow plane of the wall dominates, echoed in the dress of the girl on the right. The yellow is broken, falling into an orcha. This symmetry ties the composition together. The purple street provides a neutral backdrop against which the dark oval of the trolley and the block of green and dark blue silhouettes in the centre create a weight that contrasts with the explosion of colour of the stall. Colour here does not so much describe the world realistically as organise the scene in a rhythm of balances and tensions.

The painting betrays a French influence. Not surprisingly, after all, Karlowska was educated at the Académie Julian in Paris . From these lessons , her flat patches, certainty of drawing and awareness of the plane remain . Perhaps from the tradition of the Nabists (a group of French artists from the 1890s) she took over the primacy of colour over light , a closeness to Pierre Bonnard ( 1867-1947 ) and Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) in treating everyday life as a field of painterly play. From the circle of Paul Gauguin ( 1848-1903) , at least indirectly, perhaps also through her husband Robert Bevan (1865-1925) , she took the belief that colour speaks emotion and contour organises space . From Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) she took the construction of solids and architectural rhythms , which here order the arrangement of figures in urban space.

A Pole in the London art world

Who was the artist whose name still functions mainly in the circle of art scholars and enthusiasts? Stanisława de Karłowska (1876-1952) was a painter of Polish origin. She was born in Szeliwy near Łowicz. She studied in Warsaw, Krakow and at the Académie Julian in Paris , one of the first and most important art schools open to women. In 1897, she married the English painter Robert Bevan and settled in London.

Although she had a close relationship with the Camden Town Group of British Post-Impressionist painters, she could not formally become a member. By definition, the group consisted of sixteen men and did not admit women to its membership. Nevertheless, several female artists, including Karłowska, maintained close social and artistic contacts with the Camden Town Group. It was not until 1914 that the painter became a full member of The London Group, formed as a continuation and development of the ideas of the Camden Town Group. Although her work was usually well appreciated, Karlowska remained in the shadow of her husband.

Stanisława de Karłowska did not lose contact with Poland, although she spent most of her life in England . She and her husband Robert Bevan visited the artist's family estate in Szeliwych (Wszeliwych) in the Mazovian region several times, where Bevan painted landscapes inspired by the Polish landscape. They also visited Mydłowie, near Sandomierz, from where some of the artist's works depicting rural scenes and folklore motifs originated.

As art historian Władysława Jaworska notes in the catalogue of the Bevan couple's posthumous exhibition, both were involved in Polish affairs during the First World War, maintaining contacts with the émigré community and supporting the idea of independence. Their London home was sometimes referred to as The Polish House.

Stanisława de Karłowska - between Polish tradition and European modernity

Although it is difficult to identify direct influences of Polish painting in her oeuvre, it is impossible to ignore the context in which her visual sensibility was formed. It seems unlikely that she was not influenced by Polish art at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially the folk tradition and colouristic expression typical of the artists of the Krakow modernist circle. It is from this source that the artist's inclination towards a saturated range of colours and the emotional tone of her paintings may have originated. Of course, it was not the only impulse. However, it is risky to look for unambiguous inspirations in Karłowska's work. The artist processed influences from many backgrounds of French Post-Impressionism, English Realism and familial memory, creating her own language.

She painted landscapes, urban scenes and still lifes. She left behind more than two hundred works. Today, her paintings can be found in the Tate Britain, the National Museum of Wales, the Manchester Art Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Southampton City Art Gallery, among others, as well as in numerous private collections. Stanislawa de Karlowska died in London in 1952 and is laid to rest in the Bevan family tomb in Cuckfield, County Sussex.

"Swiss Cottage" - gender and the city

Why is Karlowska's art relevant today? First of all, she exemplifies the female experience in modernist art; at the same time, her paintings are brilliantly constructed. The flattened perspective, elongated silhouettes and contrasting coloured patches create a tension between realism and sign. They open up British art of the time to a new view, to the avant-garde. In paintings - such as 'Swiss Cottage' - he shows the city through the eyes of a woman who is not only "in the frame", but also looks, chooses and organises the space of the painting herself. She unmasks the modernist myth of the equal street. It shows a city that gives women visibility. At the same time, it imposes conventions that structure their movement, emotions and social role. Karlowska shows this without moralising. She observes, synthesises, condenses gestures.

Karlowska's work is an early and consistent female voice in British art , the voice of a Polish woman who brought with her the experience of decorum and French education, and translated it in London into a sociology of colour and crowd choreography. As a result, her work becomes more than an artistic document. It constitutes a kind of visual essay on modernity.

"Swiss Cottage" does not so much record reality as it teaches us to look, and not at figures but at trajectories, not at backgrounds but at counterpoints and counterbalances. It shows the presence of women who guide the viewer's gaze and give rhythm to the whole composition. In this sense, Karlowska's painting is still relevant today, when we ask about gendered maps of the city and how art can tell the everyday from a perspective that has long remained invisible.