Author: Jacek Malczewski
Title: Children in a Landscape - Portrait of Julia and Rafał (1914)
Technique: oil, cardboard
Dimensions: 40 x 47.5 cm
Dimensions with frame: 55 x 64 cm
Signed and dated l.d.: "J. Malczewski | 1914"
Artwork description:
The compositional scheme of the presented portrait consists of elements characteristic of Jacek Malczewski's work. The composition of the work is symmetrical and has been built with the help of a centrally placed tree trunk, dividing the whole pictorial field into two parts. On its sides are two figures. The painting depicts two children, who can be identified as Jacek Malczewski's daughter and son - Julia and Raphael.
Other characteristic features of the artist's painting are also clearly discernible in the painting, such as the dynamization of the balanced color range through the use of intense color accents and the very depiction of the children's figures, which in most of the master's works had a symbolic meaning related to reflection on transience.
The featured painting was created in 1914, when Jacek Malczewski's children were already grown up, but the artist probably created this composition based on earlier sketches and photographs, which enabled him to create a painting that was an intimate return to the past. In this sense, the work becomes a visualization of a memory.
Noteworthy is Raphael's clothing - a cobalt-colored outfit with a cape and a bright hat with a large brim. This type of clothing repeatedly recurred in depictions of his son in a garden setting created around 1900. It is a fact that with the departure of the son to study in Vienna in 1910, the contact between Jacek Malczewski and Rafal weakened, but after the outbreak of World War I, father and son were together in the Austrian capital - perhaps it was there that the presented painting was painted.
The work, despite its sketchy nature, has great decorative qualities and very aptly conveys the mood of a wild garden or a lush orchard, against the background of which the thoughtful silhouettes of the children are shown. The whole is filled with a mood of melancholy, so characteristic of Jacek Malczewski's symbolist paintings.
It is worth noting that although numerous single portraits of the artist's children are known, compositions like this one, i.e. showing two figures, are unique and a rarity on the auction market.
The biography of Jacek Malczewski is available on the Krakow Auction House website [SEE].
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