Wacław TARANCZEWSKI (1903-1987), Little painter

oil, canvas, 200 x 200 cm;
Signed l. d.: T.

Lit. (selection): "Waclaw Taranczewski", collective work edited by Pawel Taranczewski, Cracow 2008, series "Little Painter", pp. 94-101.

"This subject - of undoubtedly Rembrandtian inspiration - lived in the Father's work since the 1920s. The idea for the canvas was born in Rudki, when he and Piotr Potworowski were looking at a reproduction of a Rembrandt painting depicting the painter in front of a nude posing on a small podium. In Poznan, Father told this story to Zdzislaw Kepinski. It's a pity that the latter didn't write down which Rembrandt painting he was referring to - in Cracow, he repeated it to me years later.
I came across the second possible source of Rembrandt inspiration while looking at a booklet on Rembrandt by Belgian poet Verhaeren with black-and-white reproductions of paintings and drawings. My father has always had it. I think - of course this is a hypothesis - that the drawing depicting the interior of the studio with the painter sitting at the easel, the model posing and probably the figure of the master doing the correction, inspired the creation of the first canvas, which, together with the paintings that followed, form the series called The Little Painter."
[quoted by Pawel Taranczewski, "Waclaw Taranczewski's Ways," in Aesthetics and Criticism 6 (1/2004), p. 2].