Landscape by Polish Painters from the Collection of the Lviv Art Gallery
15 October – 7 November 2004
Matejko, Fałat, Siemiradzki… every Pole knows these names. Already today, the walls of the Regional Museum in Stalowa Wola are hosting the works of a pleiad of the most outstanding Polish landscape painters.
The exhibition is a cross-sectional one, as it presents the changing tendencies in Polish landscape painting from the late 18th century to the 1930s. Among the works on view are paintings by Bernard Bellotto, known as Canaletto, who painted views of Warsaw at the time of Stanisław August Poniatowski.
There is no shortage of nineteenth-century painting celebrities, such as Julian Fałat, the great reformer of higher artistic education in Krakow, and Jan Stanisławski, the founder of the school of Polish landscape painting, who was one of the first to introduce the method of painting outdoors. Also represented in the exhibition are painters fascinated by the culture of the Hutsul region: Władysław Jarocki, Fryderyk Pautsch, Kazimierz Sichulski. Another group are the colourists, members of the so-called Paris Committee: Jan Cybis, Zygmunt Waliszewski. These are names which have become a permanent part of the history of Polish painting, not only landscape painting.
Among the highlights of this exhibition is a painting by Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski, writer, author of historical novels on which generations of Poles have been raised. This time it will be possible to discover his talent as a painter. Jan Matejko will also show his unusual side. He was not interested in landscapes. Only once did the master of historical scenes capture the landscape itself on canvas. And it is this view that will be featured in the exhibition. There is also a regional accent in the form of Stanisław Kamocki’s painting Kłosy [Ears], depicting a Sandomierz hill from the side of the Pieprzowe Mountains.
This is another exhibition from the Lviv Art Gallery’s collection. Stalowa Wola was on the route of its exhibition in Poland. Last year, ‘Masterpieces of Polish Painting in the Collection of the Lviv Art Gallery’ was presented here, to great interest. This year’s exhibition shows further outstanding works by the greatest masters.
