Description:
Stefan Filipkiewicz (1879-1944) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, among others, under Jan Stanislawski, whom he was a successor to. He exhibited his paintings throughout Europe and received numerous awards. He mainly dealt with landscape painting, in which winter views of the Tatra Mountains and Podhale predominated.

Description of the painting:
Painted with an extraordinary sensitivity, the landscape from the vicinity of Radziszów near Kraków is the quintessence of spring in full bloom. The painting radiates warmth, a cheerful and carefree atmosphere that can only be felt on a spring day in a meadow full of flowers. The artist fills the canvas with a wide range of greens, from bright, almost yellow, illuminated by the sun, to delicate, subdued, shaded in the shade, to cold, dirty green trees in the distance. The foreground is filled with a herbarium full of wildflowers in shades of pink, yellow, red, blue and broken white. The meadow spreading into the depths of the landscape blurs the details of the plants and thus creates a colorful, soft carpet. The landscape is diversified by heterogeneous silhouettes of trees with grey-green crowns and young, small trees with bright green leaves. In the distance, the blurred landscape shows gentle, bright hills surrounded by a wreath of dark trees. On a small fragment of the sky, gentle clouds are drawn against a delicate, blurred blue sky.

Without a doubt, Filipkiewicz was not alone in his choice of landscape theme. Many artists at that time, especially Jan Stanislawski’s students, painted landscapes, often choosing the area around Krakow characterized by hilly terrain. What distinguishes Filipkiewicz, however, is his enormous artistic maturity, which can be seen in the presented painting, which despite its beauty and lightness treats the subject seriously. Both the foreground flowers and each tree and each element of the landscape are observed and presented as a separate phenomenon, each equally important. It can be ventured to say that this is a kind of landscape study, which under the pleasant to the eye layer hides a great deal of work of a young artist who was then still a student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow.