Salvete Omnes,
Peace in Ukraine- may health and joy return. Mariupol after more than a month of urban combat is but a skeletal remainder of the vibrant pre-24th of Feburary 2022 city. Pacem Eaternam to all who have fallen in this invasion.
***
Good Saturday or Easter Eve is a good day to bring back the other painting by Jozef Chelmonski - Four in Hand or Czworka from Warsaw's National Museum. Very similar to or different in some details from the one from Krakow National Museum, it is another magnificent canvass by the master of horse foreshortening, furious action, landscape and joy of life
In 1874 Jozef Chelmonski made a trip to or escaped from the Munich art world to the limitless skies of Ukraine. By what his contemporaries and he considered Ukraine should be explained first. For the XIX century Polish world Ukraine* constituted lands beyond Pinsk Marshes, Podolia and Volhynia, those rich soil steppes and rivers and expanses around the ancient Kijow (Kiiv/Kiev) and beyond the great river Dniepr into the expanses of the Pontic Steppes. According to many contemporary sources and his own letters to friends and associates Jozef Chelmonski loved his trips to the Ukrainian lands, for he loved the light there, and painting people and landscapes of the distant Ukraine gave him pleasure and enjoyment. Tadeusz Matuszczak, author of the 2003 monograph about Chelmonski, wrote that Chelmonski had an exceptional visual memory and ability to record images and action in his mind. Antoni Piotrowski, Polish painter who knew well pan Jozef , studied together under master teacher Wojciech Gerson in Warsaw, and consequently wrote his recollections about Chelmonski in 1918, stated that Chelmonski possessed extraordinary ability to record visual images and could 'arrest' images in his mind, so when he returned from his trip in Ukraine he painted various canvasses recreating impressions recorded in his mind. Hence, his galloping horses and flying horse teams and other spirited riders and mundane cavalry columns.
Nota bene famous Polish and American actress Helena Modrzejewska was very friendly with Wojciech Gerson's atelier, knew and enjoyed Jozef Chelmonski's brushworks and when she left for USA she took with her one of his paintings - Return from a ball or night sleigh ride (1873).
***
enjoy your Pisanki painting day, I am about to paint some today.
Valete
This is really good art. I can hardly draw a horse from the side, not to mention from the front, and with a sense of motion!
ReplyDelete