Three reproductions of paintings by Witold Pruszkowski located in Lviv's Picture Gallery, included as illustrations of Aleksandra Majerska's article, 'The Art of Pruszkowski 1846-1896'. "Witold Pruszkowski 1846-1896" published in the journal "Sztuki Piękne",1934, no. 3, pp. 1-101 (public domain, reprinted from the Library of the University of Silesia, Katowice).

A modernised reading of the text

Witold Pruszkowski.

One of Poland's most reclusive painters, an artist whose level of talent was on a European scale, was by a strange coincidence almost forgotten. Among the numerous assessments appearing in our literature, there is so far no monograph devoted to the work of Witold Pruszkowski. The artist's oeuvre has not yet been collected as a whole; my search to find his diary, which was supposedly left in a hospital in Budapest, where the artist died in 1896, has been unsuccessful. This is why my research is not aimed at presenting the entirety of Pruszkowski's oeuvre, which the framework of this publication would not allow. Rather, it should be regarded as a kind of aesthetic-psychological study, based on the knowledge of Pruszkowski's best works, mostly found in Lviv's collections.

This allows me to fully characterise the artist's visual type, the type of his creative imagination and the momentous significance of his art. Pruszkowski's life falls within a period when three major currents were intersecting throughout Europe. The great representatives of Romanticism in painting were still active, and alongside them Naturalism, aiming at an objective representation of the seen world, or the generally known Realist trend, was winning a place for itself. Realism, after all, was the child of that epoch which heard Comte's positivist philosophy proclaimed. Its followers were positivist, sober, epic rather than lyrical. Taine and Zola - the chief codifier of naturalism - from beyond the wall of objectivity rarely allowed for introspection.

Their aim was a sober representation of modern life as human documents. Human beings were merely the same product as any other thing. In painting, this had its salutary effects in the break with eclectic themes, with the traditional schemes of idealist-classical forms. The subjects began to be drawn not only, as in Romanticism, from the life of the people, but also from the life of the working class, the proletariat. The painter's aim, going parallel with the current of the time, was solely to depict life with external truth, reality without embellishment - as it is. However, it was soon noticed that the whole effort to approach the truth of nature went only in the direction of composition and form, while the concept of colour was further stuck in traditionalism.

The colour of the main representative of realism in France - Courbet - was at first kept in the so-called gallery tone, i.e. applied on a toning base of brownish-green. That is, the colour did not exist as an end in itself, but only depending on the objects depicted. It was memorial in nature, as things were painted in the colours remembered and permanently vested in those objects. The revolutionary step was to break with the memory colour, to detach it from its material base and to give it a phenomenal character. It was a matter of depicting the world in the moment the painter saw it, and in the light and colours that were present at the time. Thus, no longer the world in its constant being, in its permanence, but the world in its constant changeability, dependent on the atmosphere, the lighting, the sun and its reflections.

The creed of the artists of the time, moreover, coincided completely with Zola's position, demanding in his "Experimental Romance" the strict application of the observational, or visual-experimental method in the novel, and his demand to render

"la vie dans les mille reflets toujours changeantes, toujours mouvantes",

can be considered as if it were a stated goal for the visual arts. As soon as artists set themselves the goal of projecting life in its variation of colours and lighting, the scales of objectivity tipped towards extreme subjectivity. Objects and colours, having lost their permanence, became relative, dependent on atmospheric influences and light, while how one saw them was within the individual psycho-physiological properties of a given individual. Impressionism was born, a period of the most painterly representation of the world that had ever existed in art, basing its creative endeavours on sensory impressions that were as pure as possible.

This is briefly the spirit of the epoch in which Pruszkowski's talent expressed itself, and the transformations of painting in France, where it is mainly necessary to look for genetic relations to explain his art. There was no major artistic focus in Poland in the mid-19th century. Great talents, mainly concentrated in two cities, Warsaw and Krakow, had to be drawn to the large artistic circles of Paris and Munich. Above all, Munich became an outstanding artistic centre where young Polish painters flocked. Almost all of the artists of this generation, with only a few exceptions, spent several years studying in Munich. The Polish colony was particularly strongly represented there.

The realistic art of Brandt and Wierusz-Kowalski grew out of the Munich ground; the Gierymski brothers belonged to this group. The characteristic traits of the Munich school of the second half of the 19th century are also expressed in the earlier works of Chełmoński, Wyczółkowski, Masłowski, Kędzierski and Malczewski. Separated from France, the legislator of artistic forms in the 19th century, by a large area of Central Europe, we initially received all currents indirectly, through Germany, more precisely via Munich, often in an altered form and with considerable delay. This can be seen in the works of the artists listed. Maximilian Gierymski, an outstanding landscape painter, refers to the Barbizon school; a strong French influence in the study of the phenomena of light can be seen in Alexander Gierymski's last Parisian period.

The same is true of Józef Chełmoński, where the influence of Paris in his approach to landscape divided his work into two major periods. The situation was different with Witold Pruszkowski. The artistic path followed by most Polish painters went in the opposite direction for him. He started by studying in Paris with the good portraitist from Piła, Tadeusz Górecki, then studied at the Munich school, and finally, as a mature artist, under Matejko's tutelage in Krakow. He also did not lose contact with Paris and after settling permanently in Poland. Therefore, the influence of French painting is present in him in an indirect form from the beginning of his painting activity and can be traced in a number of portraits from the first one from 1875 to the last self-portrait, painted in the last years of the artist's life.

It is not clear to me whether Jan Krywult's portrait from 1875 was painted during his stay at the Matejko school, which lasted from 1872 to 1875, or after he left it. In any case, it does not have the slightest characteristics of the Matejko school. It is actually the result of an encounter with French art, and has an eminently painterly texture, a free brushstroke and an active rendering of boyish charm. Two years later, his Portrait of a Wife in Bust (1877), painted against a dark underpainted background, wearing a black dress and a black hat with a veil shading the face, delighted the French at an exhibition in Paris, according to oral tradition.

The critics gave praise to the perfect projection, the masterful reproduction of the lightness and transparency of the veil shading the face. It was exhibited together with a portrait of his wife's sister Mrs Fedorowicz (1879). In this painting, the sitter is seated in a patterned upholstered armchair with a cinnabar-coloured shawl with a border on the left armrest. The background is wallpaper with an ornamental pattern. The steel-grey dress is decorated with a lace jabot with an intricate pattern of openwork and a bouquet of violets pinned to the chest. Perfectly rendered and drawn, the portrait has a truly French finesse of technique. The range of Manet's influence can be alluded to in Portrait of the Same Person, framed in an oval. There is some parallel with Manet as to the stylistic transformations that took place in the evolution of Pruszkowski's work.

Manet's initial drawing on the models of retrospective painting, more specifically Velasquez, Goya and 16th century Italian painting, followed by a transition through naturalism to impressionism, is generally well known. Pruszkowski was also a constant seeker of new technical ways and means of artistic expression. On the model of old portraits, there is a likeness of an old woman, Mrs Malińska, wearing a bonnet decorated with a grosgrain, tied at the neck with a dark cherry-coloured ribbon. The painting is kept in a very dark tone, now heavily cracked. Associated with it is a stylish portrait of his wife, in which the artist let his imagination run wild, depicting her as she would look in her old age. An equally dark Portrait of the Artist's Sister (1875) belongs to this group. The need to experiment in different directions resulted in a substantial painting with a dark brown gallery tone, depicting an Italian boy.

A considerable number of portrait sketches have survived, cast from hand on paper. In these one can trace attempts at various technical effects. For example, watercolour portraits in light tones were shaded by the artist with a feather or an imitation feather with a thin brush, creating a grid-like background with dark brown or black watercolour paint. Matejko's influence is clearly evident once in the portrait of the artist's son with a dog on a leash (1880). On a large cherry-coloured carpet littering the floor, enlivened by an ornament of geometric arabesques, stands a little boy in a long white T-shirt, decorated at the neck and sleeves with embroideries of etui peoples. A cinnabar-coloured ribbon, variegated with a patterned design, is tied at the waist. The composition of the interior with the doorway open inwards, the positioning of the child with the dog in the middle and the expressive plasticity of the figures have an air of monumentality akin to that of Matejko.

On the other hand, Portrait Sketch of a Man (City Gallery, Lviv), although compact in outline, announces with its texture an imminent change in style. The dark colours of the portrait are dull because the artist did not use varnish to smooth out the surface of the painting, which shows the roughness of the oil lumps. After 1890, Pruszkowski became familiar with pastel. The portrait of the artist's brother, Władysław (1891), executed in black crayon, has a clear characterisation of type, still rendered from a rather objective observation of the model. Among his portrait pastels, the portraits of Bałucki, Mickiewicz, Meissner and Miss Zawieyska are more widely known. The Portrait of the Sculptor Jarzmowski (National Museum in Krakow), which gives the impression of monochromatic vibrancy, is maintained in a strong, typically impressionistic technique of applying small, dark lumps of paint. The last portrait work, which shows us the artist as an already undoubted impressionist, focused on pure colour impressions, is Self-Portrait in a Lamb's Cap and Zakopane Serdak.

The background is restless in impastos of all colours, applied mosaically, in loose projections of thick blobs. Only the face is finished; the hand remains sketchily marked in general outlines. The self-portrait is important not only for its technicality, but also as Pruszkowski's only likeness. The artist did not allow himself to be photographed, and apart from this self-portrait, he made only one other likeness of himself in pencil in 1883, intended for an album given to Matejko by his students. Pruszkowski as a portraitist is just one branch of his rich and varied oeuvre.

The other is made up of paintings with content taken from folk tales, fables and beliefs, as well as images taken straight from the life and customs of the people. The sheer range of themes celebrating the fantasy of folk beliefs classifies Pruszkowski's creative imagination as specifically Romantic. At this point it is necessary to clarify the very notion of Romanticism. Numerous attempts have been made in the vast professional literature to formulate a uniform definition of it, but due to the multifaceted nature of this cultural phenomenon, these efforts have not yielded a definitive result. For the purposes of the present discussion, it will suffice to limit ourselves to those manifestations of Romanticism that are linked to the features present in Witold Pruszkowski's work.

In the visual arts, the concept of Romanticism refers primarily to a type of creative imagination and not to a specific plastic form. Romanticism, originating in opposition to the culture of the Enlightenment, rejected belief in the exclusive power of reason and brought feeling to the fore, leading to religious mysticism, exuberant individualism and conflict between the individual and the surrounding world. The desire to escape from everyday reality found expression in literature strongly imbued with dream-like elements, as well as in a turn to the Middle Ages and folk poetry. At the same time, Romanticism sought to unite the various fields of art, seeing in them a unity of sensual and spiritual experience.

The visual arts of the 19th century were dominated by so-called 'literary thinking', which meant that painters - figuratively speaking - looked at the world through the eyes of poets. In terms of the psychology of creativity, this can be described as the predominance of the so-called imaginative type, in which the artist influences not only the form, but also the narrative, idea or symbolic content of the work. This type of creativity involves a free combination of real and unreal elements, a visionary fantasy that often prompts the viewer to make his or her own associative additions. This mode of artistic thinking, which was present in various eras, achieved a clear dominance in the 19th century - and particularly in Romanticism.

Romanticism in the plastic arts did not produce a uniform formal style. Unlike classicism, it was more 'painterly' in the sense of striving for painterly freedom, but this did not mean uniformity of means. For example, French Romanticism as represented by Delacroix differed fundamentally from narrative German Romanticism (Schwind, Richter, Spitzweg). Similarly, in Poland, the art of Grottger, one of the most prominent representatives of the trend, used an idealist-classical form. The conclusion from these observations is unambiguous: Romanticism in the visual arts expresses above all a certain spiritual attitude and type of imagination, which can take on realistic or idealistic, painterly or linear forms.

In Witold Pruszkowski's work, the manifestations of this Romantic attitude are particularly clear. As in his portrait work, an evolution can also be discerned in his paintings of folk and fairy-tale themes - from realism towards an increasingly painterly and impressionistic treatment of form. His way of realistically depicting scenes of folk life and legends may be related to his experiences from his contacts with Munich painting, although direct influences from specific artists such as Defregger or Schwind cannot be identified.

Pruszkowski thus remains an example of an artist for whom Romanticism is not a matter of external style, but a manifestation of imagination and a spiritual attitude to the world - expressed both in the choice of subjects and in the evolution of artistic means. From 1869, Pruszkowski studied at the Munich Academy under Professors Strichull and Anschütz. A male nude is known from this time, and his first studies are said to have been types of Bavarian soldiers. Under Matejko's tutelage, Pruszkowski began to paint the large-scale painting "The Offering of the Piasts and the Royal Crown", which he completed in 1875. Pruszkowski's strong individuality was not subject to the supremacy of the great master of history painting. With the very choice of subject, which actually belonged to fairy tales and fables, he charted his further artistic path. He never returned to recreating legendary history, but instead entered the world of the naive faith of the people and scenes from their lives.

The year 1876, when he and his friend Piecard painted frescoes on the walls of one of the chapels in the Cistercian monastery in Mogiła, is the date when he first came into closer contact with the people. It was there that he produced a small-scale painting entitled 'Kiedy ranne wstają zorze', depicting village shepherds kneeling on a hill and singing amidst the morning mist. Dating from 1880 is the 'Idyll' (National Museum in Kraków) with a boy playing a pipe and a girl listening to him play. Above them, the sky is a shade of violet, with the far-rising sickle of the moon peeking through the thin branches of the trees.

A heavily browned image, treated realistically. Other peasant genre subjects, such as 'Umizgi' (1883), 'Niedziela kwietna', 'Matka Boska Zielna', are in the same vein, breathing the truth of reality without any tendency to poeticise. Although, from the point of view of a modern view, this type of Pruszkowski's paintings does not arouse deeper feelings, historically speaking, one has to admit that neither Kotsis nor Lipiński, Pruszkowski's predecessors in scenes of peasant life, achieved such individual expression in this type of painting. It follows that Pruszkowski must be considered the first outstanding representative of folk painting.

The element of romantic fantasy, which is the dominant feature of Pruszkowski's psyche, was immediately apparent in the first picture painted under Matejko and has been constantly manifested in further works ever since. "Rusałki" (1877 - National Museum in Kraków), grassing among the rushes in the moonlight and attracting young men, are depicted as fat, healthy girls in low-cut clothes, with garlands in their hair, while the element of fantasy has been clothed in very real shapes.

The Madej of 1879 (Warsaw, Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych), a legendary figure who appears in the tales of the Polish people, has features of real reality. The terrible robber Madej, moved to repentance, submits to penance. We see him amidst the thicket of the forest, moldering, withered and grown into a penitential tree. An old priest sits by his side and listens to his confession, while doves hover above the tree, symbolising the souls of the people murdered by Madej, who - according to legend - had to wait for the robber's absolution to be able to fly to heaven.

"The Wawel Dragon" (1884), much weaker in expression than "Madej", in the form of a winged green lizard, crawls out of a dark opening of a cave. The girl, destined as a sacrifice to be devoured, dressed in flowers and ribbons, awaits her fate with her eyes closed, leaning against a rock.

The very large painting Spring (1887) can be considered a personification of this season as perceived by the people. A naked young girl with flowing, golden-red hair holds in one hand a bunch of spring violet pansies, lilac lilies and yellow flowers, while with the other she leans towards herself a branch of an apple tree, sprinkled with pale pink buds. Above it, the blue of the sky spreads, and at the bottom, amidst the winter landscape, a dead snowman of winter is outlined, as if made of snow, melting under the rays of the sun and sinking into the now animated currents of the stream. The tone of the painting is brighter than in previous paintings; a ray of sunlight peeping through the branches comes in a bright stream, but the colours, though more vivid, are always still local, connected to the objects.

In this first period of his oeuvre, folk beliefs were recreated with all the realism, fine descriptive detail and even ethnic features, as in 'Rusalki'. Pruszkowski first painted nude female bodies in 1884, when he also produced a large-scale painting entitled. 'The Falling Star'. A limp female figure half emerges from the bluish grey of the sky. She has a perfectly beautiful face, upon which a bright ray falls in a line, as if snapped from its source. Flying with her head down, suspended, she cuts through space with her white arms thrown out beyond her head, and a trail of golden fire follows her track through the sky.

Above her forehead golden hair unfurls, in her hands a torn string of pearls, individual ones of which, scattered around, sparkle like lights. The painterly concept itself can also be explained from the position of empathising with the naive faith of the people, who anthropomorphise all atmospheric and natural phenomena and imagine them as human beings. As for the artistic solution, it must be acknowledged that the figure itself, captivating with great charm, was drawn in bold abbreviation, and the problem of a body falling with speed was convincingly carried out. From the time of 'Falling Star' onwards, there is a fundamental change of style in Pruszkowski's work, which gradually transforms him from a realist into an artist who brings out the painterly qualities with which he eventually becomes the exponent of nature's most elusive moods.

In a further two paintings, such as Dream on Flowers, where the artist was concerned with harmonising a woman's delicate body with a mass of rose petals, and in The Bacchantes (1885), he returns yet again to the same artistic issue. On a magnificent bed, strewn with flowers, amid silky shimmering draperies, lies the Bacchantes, drawn in by the soft, close line of the body that peeps through the flaccid gauze. It is a painterly treatment of the whole, giving a harmony of golden and blue-greenish sheen. The face is almost invisible, only the chin has been delicately modelled with lighter colour reflections.

There is a painting in Pruszkowski's work entitled 'The Planetary Man', depicting an old man with a grey beard and long hair emerging from the nebulae and falling to earth with a bolt of lightning, as evidenced by the line of lightning diagonally bisecting the painting. The people of Krakow call him the punishing spirit, because, according to beliefs, he attracts rain clouds, and if he gets angry with one of the people, he floods whole fields with rain and hits them with hail.

The triptych All Souls' Day embodies the folk belief that the souls of the dead leave their graves on All Souls' Day to visit their loved ones. The cycle of themes drawn from the world of folk beliefs is gradually supplemented by such motifs as the werewolf - a man transformed into a wolf by witchcraft, throwing himself at people and sucking their blood. He was placed by the artist against a perfect winter landscape. Also illustrated is the folk tale 'The Devil in Love with a Dry Willow', according to which the Devil's favourite abode is an old, decayed willow tree. The grey twilight drowns the landscape, full of fantastic charm, and in the middle of the canvas, there is a dry willow tree, to which the legendary devil is cuddled, barely marked by a vague greyish-blue outline of shapes.

We are already in a period when Pruszkowski's fantasy, having freed itself from the realist bonds that fetter it, reaches an increasingly unlimited mode of expression. "Świtezianka", i.e. a water nymph or prowess in the imaginations of the Polish people, a beautiful and young woman with fiery eyes and loose hair, in the painting the night has shrouded everything in darkness; the moon shining in the dark greenish sky casts a misty glow, and among it the airy like mist, unreal shapes of Świtezianka, presumably hovering somewhere by a lake or river, obscured by the darker contours of bushes, turn grey.

After 1890, Pruszkowski switched to the pastel technique and, combining it with the colouristic advances introduced by Impressionism, achieved the highest perfection in this field. The custom, still extant in Kraków today, that on St John's Eve, girls throw garlands into the water, which serves them as an omen, inspired the painting 'Wianki'. The dark sapphire of the evening sky saturates the entire landscape, streaking the water, dissolving at the river's edge in delicate, bluish lunas that shroud the reeds. Among them, light mists of grey vapour float, forming the airy outlines of barely discernible contours of nymphs or goddesses gliding over the water. Burning with an intense yellow glow, the lights on the garlands flowing along the river are colour equivalents to the dark blue harmony of the whole.

A folk custom, which would seem rather suited to highlighting ethnographic features, has been transposed by the artist's imagination into the most lyrical mood of nature, brought out by the bizarre subtlety of the qualities of pure colour. Related in mood and general tone is 'Night', in which sapphire gloom, pretending to be the dark firmament of the sky, has obscured the entire landscape. The world of spirits is awakened again; they float up from the ground, trickling, swirling and swirling with vapours and mists. The painting was in the collection of Mr and Mrs Kruszyński in Kyiv, and was known to me from my school lessons, still evoking a strong impression today. It is the same approach to nature as in "Garlands", where it is not about recreating the visual side, but the opposite - "Night" evoked a special spiritual state in the artist, the reflection of which became his artistic need.

The painting has the elusive mood of the mysterious enchantment of the night, when man, having ceased to perceive clearly the surrounding things and phenomena, suddenly felt their presence everywhere, as if they were living beings. Then, as a result of the lost connection with the material world, the consciousness of the personality disappears and dissolves into the cosmos. "Night" is populated by a whole world of spirits; they crash before us at every rustle of the wind, rustle of the leaves, we see them in the mist over the wetlands, in the shadows rising before us, and we feel them as the embodiment of the forces dormant in nature.

There are only a few landscape studies in Pruszkowski's oeuvre that are devoid of associative content. These include: "Fruit Garden in Winter", "Willows" and "Orchard. Fruit Garden in Winter' from 1891 (owned by Count Raczyński in Rogalin), which is a subtle harmony of golden-red tones of the setting sun, among which the trees in the orchard, the snow and the village building lose their physical features. "Willow" (a.k.a. "After Sunset") glows with the heat and red colours of the west, which gradually mellow in harmonic scales to golden tones. This landscape was found in the collection of the Lviv City Gallery from the legacy of the late painter Benedyktovich, Pruszkowski's colleague from his Munich years.

According to an oral account, Benedyktowicz almost violently took the painting away from Pruszkowski, who considered it a poor work and was said to have thrown it into the attic. There is a second variant of this motif, in the same tonality but with a slightly different gradation of nuance. Both landscapes have a centrifugal composition of colours, exploding with the strongest tones in the centre of the painting and weakening towards the edges. They are true masterpieces of studying the range of nuances, in which the purple of the west passes from the purest, intense tones of red, fading to delicate pink and gold on the distant horizon.

Pruszkowski's attempts to depict nature and objects from a purely impressionistic stance are not lacking. Such is the pastel 'Orchard' in an olive-green tone. The massively treated trees give the impression from afar of a thicket, among which, under an apple tree, a boy in a long shirt and grey serdak is picking ripe apples from the tree. In the undersized pastel sketch 'Christ in the Tomb', impressionism has been taken to the extreme of blurring all shapes, which can barely be felt among the qualities of the colours. White light, broken by a ring of lemon yellow, falls into a vaulted niche and is reflected in a semicircle with all the essential colours of the prism. Carmine streaks trickle down Christ's face in the coils of the white shroud.

On the basis of the images discussed, which belong to the range of folk beliefs and customs, it becomes clear that Pruszkowski's imagination was essentially poetic and represented an imaginative creative type, expressing itself with an eminently Romantic content. The scarcity of landscapes, devoid of associative content, testifies to the fact that the artist himself understood his artistic task primarily in conveying this content, while the landscape itself weighed with him only in the kind of "Willows". This is consistent with the news reported by Mier in his short memoirs about Pruszkowski. Namely, he declares that "Pruszkowski always used to say that he could never render images of his thoughts in his works. In moments of discouragement and doubt, when it seemed to him that he was not succeeding in closely combining idea and execution, he would rip up, erase, and carry off to the attic hundreds of sketches and canvases that might have established the fame of ten other painters."

The turn to the fabulous past and its traces in the lineal tradition, as a slogan of Pruszkowski's Romanticism, is also a property of our Romantic literature of the pre-Rising period. It flowed from a universal drive to understand and explore the national spirit. Pruszkowski became the sole representative of these same aspirations in painting, since his predecessor Gterdzicjcwski, modelled in form on Grenihtn and Schwinda, cannot be taken into account. These features, which occurred in Pruszkowski's work of the early Polish Romantic era, combine the fantastic element with realistic observation and the concrete terrain of his own land, and make up the stylistic features of his earlier period.

Pruszkowski's style gradually transforms as changes are made in Europe's artistic outlook towards the generalisation of impressions and the abridgement of their notation. Fantasy creations become volatile, immaterial, three-dimensional, transporting the viewer into a world of imagination and dreams. The deepest chord in the aesthetic expression of Polish Romanticism in Pruszkowski's work are works inspired by the poetry of Słowacki and Krasiński. This is particularly evident in his paintings inspired by Słowacki's poem 'Anhelli', in which the fate of the emigrant generation is depicted with deep, unabashed pessimism.

The first painting, created in 1879, is 'The Death of Anhelli' (owned by A. Mostowski in Kraków), known from an oleo-print reproduction attached to 'Kłosy'. Pruszkowski transfers the words of the poem to the canvas: "Anhelli was dead, in the darkness that was the field, a great aurora and a fire of clouds unfolded.... In the boundless snowy desert, under a sky of leaden light, illuminated by the bloody glow of the northern aurora, lies the corpse of an exile. His face, pale and illuminated by red glares, and his body, brilliantly sprawled on the snow, are depicted at inert rest. A white angel, sad and melancholic, born of the spirit of Christ's sacrifice, hovers over the corpse, covering his eyes with a hand raised to his forehead, and a pale star shines on his forehead. Snow, two figures and a sky suffused with ruby glows form the entire formal content of the painting.

The second painting, 'Eloe among the Graves', illustrates a section of the poem as the Shaman and Anhelli approach the graveyard. Anhelli hears the moaning of the complaining graves, and the angel Eloe, with white wings and a star in her hair, silences the moaning. The painting, done in pastels, exudes a bizarre harmony of blue tones, illuminated by the moonlight. The misty, ethereal figure of an angel, hovers and unravels in a subtle glow, its shadow gliding across the snow. Słowacki's mystical vision is repeated in the painting, transformed by Pruszkowski into denatured shapes, with unusual subtlety of colour and a bizarre plasticity of forms.

The third painting, Death of Ellenai (1892), also in pastel, shows Ellenai lying in the red light of the aurora borealis coming through the window, shrouded in purple hues. In this work, Pruszkowski shows his genius as a recreation of Słowacki's conception: he sees Siberia painterly, in imaginary rather than real forms. These works, like the poem, show a new, spiritual world, located in undefined spaces, possessing an entity in its own right, but at the same time clearly expressing emotional content and a shocking, visionary atmosphere.

Technically, Pruszkowski has relied exclusively on colour values in his recent work, harmonising tones. His paintings oscillate between two basic tonalities: cool, blue nocturnal moods and warm, red-pink after sunset. Although at first glance it may appear that the artist avoided strong colour contrasts, he actually used them consciously, but in a harmonious manner. He applied the colours thinly, directly into the canvas or pastel, which weakened their physical effect and increased their atmospheric value.

This gives his colours a lyrical tenderness, heightening emotional and affective impressions. Bright accents - such as the yellow cadmium in 'Garlands' (candlelight) or in 'Eloe' (the star above the forehead) - have a psychological function, emphasising the depth of the painting. Uniformly exposed planes of blue create an immaterial space in which the phantoms take on an unusual, subtle plasticity.

Such qualities of individual colour composition make Pruszkowski a painter whose subtlety of colour and lyricism are unrivalled in Poland, and among the most outstanding on the European scale.Pruszkowski's colour vision of Siberia was also captured by "Pochód na Sybir", a magnificent pastel owned by Prince Sapieha in Krasiczyn. He repeated the same concept in oil, less colourful, but with content and poetry equally deep in the soul. The grey winter sky, dimly lit with a pinkish-red glow, hangs over the immensity of the steppe and seems to flow with it into a single grey-white mass of snow.

In the foreground, near the shore, a border post with a double-headed eagle, a little further away a small hill, like a grave. In the background, three distinguishable silhouettes of Russian soldiers with rifles enclose a long, winding, dark, thickening streak, which gets lost in a dense cloud of dust. Behind the cloud - crosses, speaking of the resting place of those who did not endure the martyr's ordeal - and died on the way. The image could be a more succinct abbreviation of the content expressed, and yet more eloquent! The image, full of a mood of sadness and gloom, was brought out by means of a reduction of forms, taken to the last limits.

The work inspired by Słowacki's poetry is linked to 'Vision' (oil, by Dr Jakubowski), with the deepest content, executed using a purely impressionistic technique. Against a background of dark ultramarine, a procession of Polish spirits moves, led by the Queen of the Polish Crown. Pruszkowski was inspired by the 'Vision' from Krasiński's 'Przedświt', a work which was the clearest formulation of messianic hopes. The poet had a vision on an Alpine lake amidst a moonlit night. The passage, beginning with the words:

"Wired... slowly, sacredly, through this sound flare, they go - they go... all the dreams...",

can serve as a description of a painting. By purely impressionistic means, blurring concrete reality, the content of the painting is brought out.

Among the mass of streaks of colour, two heads wearing royal crowns and the silhouette of a knight in armour stand out; the rest lack any real shapes, which can only be supplemented by thought, as above the crowd there are fluttering pennants, banners, crosses, glittering swords - on which the light flickers. The towering and hovering phantom of the misty figure of the Queen of the Polish Crown is shrouded as if by a hot luna of fire, a large halo of orangish colour. The carmine of the robe and the green of the flowing mantle are muted in colourful tension. The masterpiece of the vision is heightened by the illusory play of colours, whose mirage appears reflected a second time, as if in water.

Only the yellow colour, concentrated in the centre of the painting and leading the viewer's eye diagonally to the phenomenal figure of Mary, the culminating point, given in hot red, burns with colourful power and tension. Again, colour in Pruszkowski's work has not only a colouristic, but also a symbolic and emotional meaning. The visual means used are aimed solely at evoking the deep accents of our messianic poetry. The large plane of ultramarine, not located in any spatial event, is a factor that emphasises the reality of the painting. It is evident that the artist's aim was to move into the unearthly regions of high feelings, into the abstract expanse of upper thoughts.

We are faced with eloquent proof of how technique alone cannot create style. For could the assumptions of French Impressionism, based on purely sensual, sensory visual impressions, aiming to capture fleeting changes of light and colour, and therefore to capture life in a sensualistic way, contain deep metaphysical content? Nevertheless, the very technique of impressionistic expression and the importance of colour as an intrinsic compositional factor are undoubted properties of Pruszkowski's painting style. In short, the achievements of French Impressionism have been transformed and applied to our artist's own purposes.

As he applied them fully in his works with mystical and romantic content, which begin with the painting "Death of Anhelli" as early as 1879, Pruszkowski is, next to Adam Chmielowski, the first Polish Impressionist. It is an impressionism here flowing from the psyche of an artist with a modern capacity for responding to artistic phenomena, but at the same time an artist with a distinctly national, Polish sensibility. The core of his mental structure is, as shown above, thoroughly Romantic. And the Romanticism of the émigré era achieved the most powerful expression of its national consciousness, against which the Romanticism of Europe pales, because its depth is created by Promethean messianism. Messianism was not just a worldview of the epoch, but was born to faith and religion, and was a factor that became an essential component of the Polish psyche.

The strongest expression of this faith found a place in the paintings of Witold Pruszkowski, the greatest representative of Romanticism in our painting. Contrary to the realism which dominated art in Poland and demanded that paintings depict a world which was accessible to the senses, existent and close to everyone, even to philistines, Pruszkowski created his life's excesses, his irrational, asympathetic world. Thus, he is an exponent of the return wave of Romanticism, known as Pre-Romanticism, in painting. At the same time, Pruszkowski's works, like those of his friend Słowacki in terms of creative imagination, contain traces of the modernism that was emerging at the time, based on psychological mood, which in Pruszkowski's case can be seen in the atmospheric power of his works.