Landscape: ‘Lake in the Forest. Golden Autumn (Navy-blue Water)’ [1912, oil on canvas, 116.5 x 142.5 cm, signed lower right: S. Žukovskij 1912 (inscribed in Cyrillic in Russian), Kharkiv Art Museum, Zh-ru 330, Kharkiv, Ukraine]
Stanisław Żukowski’s Impressionist experience enabled him, in 1912, to create one of the finest works in this movement, entitled ‘Lake in the Forest. Golden Autumn (Navy-blue Water)’. The painting was the result of the artist’s tireless work in the open air. It was precisely this experience that led him to a deep understanding of the role of light in creating a truly visible image of the world and to a thorough study of its significance in nature. The inseparable optical unity of light and colour, and the rendering on canvas of the colour contrasts and colourful reflections found in nature, simultaneously became the fundamental principle of his colour scheme.
Zhukovsky maintained a certain distance from direct perception and the simple reproduction in painting of the light-induced transformation of colours in nature. He planned the colour scheme of the canvas, avoided excessive fragmentation and the variegated nature of reflections, and strove to create well-considered and balanced primary colour fields. A novelty in this landscape is the concept of colour harmony. The canvas depicts the edge of a forest on the shore of a lake on a sunny day. The choice of colours should be regarded as deliberate and sensibly restrained. The colour scheme of the painting is dominated by several deliberately chosen colour combinations. The blue of the water and sky, the ochre-brown warmth of the shores and the gold of the leaves are clearly visible, close to pure and free-flowing colour.
The juxtaposition of warm and cool colours and shades becomes the guiding principle of the painting’s colour scheme. Warm and cool colours intertwine across all planes. Warm brown, yellow and reddish-brown colours are woven into the cool, light-blue hue of the water in its reflections and ripples with short, energetic brushstrokes. In contrast, the intense blue sky is warmed by white clouds, with bright shades of gold and ochre. A section of the sky features a whole range of clouds in shades of light violet and violet.
Beneath the olive-brown layer of paint on the shore, an ochre-coloured undercoat is visible. The shadows cast by the group of trees on the shore lack cool undertones; they are warm and rich in dark brown tones, and only beneath the blue and green firs do they take on a softened olive hue. The leaves of the trees are saturated with golden, yellow and ochre colours from the autumn palette. A stretch of coastline in the background, with bands of pale yellow and pale pink vegetation, complements the colour scheme of the painting’s foreground. In Żukowski’s work, colours can form an almost patterned grid, in which red, orange and brown patches appear against the intense blue of the water. The artist freely transforms nature: he enlarges the leaves, creating almost mosaic-like arrangements of patches in the pond, or, conversely, blends them into a dense mass of yellow.
This free, creative transformation of a true depiction of nature, combined with the degree to which the colours have been reworked, suggests that Zhukovsky created a logically organised colour structure within his landscapes. The critic W. Łobanow, in analysing the artist’s work, drew a conclusion that accurately assessed the innovative nature of his works during this period:
“In his finest works [...] he boldly and decisively utilised all colours, ethereal atmospheric light and the spatial innovations of the new European painting. Zhukovsky’s landscapes were always sharply rendered, thoroughly thought out and beautifully composed. The high artistic merit of his paintings determined their success at exhibitions and ensured their enduring place in art” [translated from Russian].
Zhukovsky immortalised these innovative achievements in a whole series of landscapes featuring lakes and rivers. The painting ‘River’ (1904) from the Odessa Art Museum is considered the jewel in the crown of his collection.
His first encounter with nature and the observation of it were of great importance to the artist. For him, this was the most crucial part of the creative process. This is confirmed by the memoirs of J. Sawicki:
“When he was painting outdoors, he didn’t speak (S. Zhukovsky – I.S.); he was constantly observing intently what he saw before him.”
Zhukovsky developed his own colour scheme for each season and set of weather conditions.
The landscape ‘River’ depicts a gloomy, rainy day, combining the colours blue, green and grey. The neutral grey of the sky correlates with the green area in the background and the grey-blue hue of the water running parallel to it. These three colours form a single mass of cool tones. In turn, grey and blue are present in all the colour zones, creating a sense of interconnection between them. This distribution of tones brings the pictorial surface of the painting to life and makes it varied. The expressiveness arises from the contrast between the different characteristics of each colour – blue, dark blue and the entire range of greens. These are open, local colours, rendered with varying depths of tone and speckled with grey (at times verging on white). The strong and distinctive outline of the leaves is rendered in a darker, subdued and complex colour, combining many warm and cool shades of green—olive, blue-green and grey-blue. The layer of paint has been applied dynamically in a complex rhythm of brushstrokes, which captures the movement of the air, the sensation of gusts of wind in the treetops, the rhythm of drifting clouds, water and shifting shadows interwoven with occasional flashes of sunlight and reflections. The colour scheme is constructed as a harmony of closely related cool colours. Owing to the similarity of these three colours, which lie next to one another on the colour wheel, there is no contrast between them. In his subsequent works, Żukowski actively employed this method of colour composition in landscape paintings featuring watery motifs.