Description:
Leon Wyczółkowski (1852–1936) studied at the Warsaw Drawing Class, the Munich Academy, and the Krakow SSP. He spent nearly ten years in Ukraine, where famous paintings depicting the local village, field work, and steppe landscape emerged. In 1895 he became a professor of painting at Krakow. At that time he often traveled to the Tatras, where he painted mountain landscapes. In 1934 he took over the Graphic Department at the Warsaw ASP.
Description of the painting:
In the evening, over a peaceful, snow–covered Zakopane, a strong wind rose, tearing at the bare, emaciated trees. Small wooden houses sharply contrasting with the whiteness, stand still, unperturbed by the next gusts of wind. In the background, the fog almost swallowed the sky and regle, with a dynamic, swirling grayness, from which only a small patch of white ridge is visible, surrounded by tree tops.
“The painting “From the Shoulder“ is one of many images of the Tatra Mountains created in 1904 and 1905 as part of the “Tatra Legends“ series. Wyczółkowski probably started going to the Tatras in 1896, a year after he became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. He often took his students to the village, where he himself loved to spend time creating. He was not interested in city landscapes, parks and gardens, even the Krakow planty painted by many artists.
He developed a fondness for landscapes during his long stay in Ukraine, where he painted vast steppes, fieldwork and village life. There his creativity underwent a transformation. His training followed in succession under the eye of Wojciech Gerson in the Warsaw Drawing Class, in the Munich Academy in A. Wagner‘s studio and with Jan Matejko, with whom he lived in a boarding house during his studies in Krakow. He seemed to be an ideal candidate to continue the historicism, but the Barbizon and Impressionists, whom he had seen during his visits to Paris, fascinated him more. Artist from these groups, being among the first to go out to paint in the open air. Impressionists lightened the palette, their paintings were incredibly bright and colorful. Thanks to this inspiration combined with the beauty of Ukrainian nature, his palette brightened, saturated and acquired sketchiness, impressiveness.
Living in Krakow, he replaced the Ukrainian steppes with the views of the Tatras, which amazed him and absorbed him. In a letter to Felix Jasienski he wrote: “I‘ve been sitting in Zakopane for a week; I‘m painting so fiercely that I‘ve lost weight.” He drew with pastels, which allowed him to quickly respond to the capricious mountain weather and the changing landscape. Taking pastels and cardboard on mountain hikes was certainly easier than equipment for painting with oil paints. The courses at the Krakow Academy conducted by Wyczolkowski were very popular. He had no gift of eloquence, like Matejko, his corrections were often incomprehensible to the students, but like the master himself, he was an inspiration in himself as an artist. Among his students, Hoffman, Kamocki, Pautsch, Pronaszka, Czyzewski, Wojtkiewicz, Weiss, Skoczylas and Sichulski should be mentioned. In the painting “From Nosal“, as in other works of the artist from the Tatras, one admired the interesting frame and the impressive image. Wyczolkowski often chose a small, surprising fragment of the landscape, capturing it from constantly new perspectives, in different weather, at different times of the year. In this way, many interesting “portraits“ of the Tatras were created. Tadeusz Jaroszynski wrote in 1904 about Wyczolkowski‘s works in the Tatras: “The astonishing simplicity of means, and at the same time the power of expression (…) What was it done with? A dozen strokes of gray, black and green chalk, and already (…) Despite these careless, seemingly random touches, what a perfect sense of form and drawing.”