Food for the Soul: Józef Chełmoński – Bard of Eastern Lands
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout
Jozef Chełmoński (1874-1914; his last name is pronounced Hew-mon-ski) is a painter whose position in Polish art history is the equivalent of Monet’s fame in France, that is, an artist whose works can be found on everything from merchandise to school textbooks and whose iconic canvases are likely to be familiar to most people. Chełmoński’s wistful image of storks departing a village for a winter trek south is as well known in Poland as van Gogh’s sunflowers are in the Netherlands. Three city branches of the Polish National Museum have pooled resources to mount a retrospective of Chełmoński’s work—the first in 40 years—assembling almost 120 canvases and dozens of drawings.
Even though the artist spent years studying in Munich and Paris, he remained quite resistant to Impressionist and post-Impressionist influences.
His aesthetic preferences remained firmly in the realistic style, often imbued with Romanticism. He loved to show dramatic horse gallops, lyrical panoramas of vast riverbends, and the steppes of Ukraine or carry out detailed studies of wild fowl—partridges, geese, cranes, and swans. Naturalism was his preferred style when for many decades he would try to capture the beauty of meadows and forests in the remote eastern provinces.
Well-traveled and successful in both Paris and New York in his mid-career, the artist would nevertheless periodically return to the wilderness of the Eastern Borderlands of Poland to paint not only delicate landscapes but also engaging genre scenes that would combine an anecdotal narrative with bold composition.
A perfect example of such a painting is Matter Before the Bailiff—a genre scene worthy of the best Dutch Baroque paintings but created in the much more open, modern style of the late 19th century. A busy gathering is taking place in front of the village bailiff’s house: the official himself is dressed in green and wears a gold chain as a sign of his function. There is a county clerk standing just behind him, dressed in city clothes. The representatives of the quarreling parties bow in front of the bailiff, while a crowd of other peasants witnesses the scene. There is even the owner of the village pub—a Jewish man in a small sleigh—perhaps having been a witness to the brawl that is the source of conflict. The crowd of people, some dressed in vivid colors like the woman in red garments, contrasts with the blinding whiteness of the mid-winter snow, which covers deeply all the roofs and the road and is impassable to anything but sleighs.
Chełmoński’s trademark imagery is that of the horses that he loved to portray in action—galloping through the snow, prancing at a horse fair, or at least posing in the background of a military scene. His most famous, iconic painting is named Four-in-Hand, a description of a foursome of fast horses pulling a cart across a steppe. He painted two main versions of that image, and each of them is famous in Poland. Schoolchildren on field trips are often brought over to stand in front of these large-scale canvases; there, they discover that the artist’s mastery means that no matter where in the room you stand, you have the feeling that the horses are galloping straight at you. Chełmoński specialized in those “runaway horses galloping” scenes; in a world before moving pictures, these wild action scenes were the best visual adventures you could get.
The exhibition curators have managed to assemble a large collection of these horse scenes, as well as variations on scenes of village life and many sketches and drawings held in archives. Collecting and documenting all these works could not have been an easy task because, over the last 100 years, Chełmoński’s canvases have been dispersed across several continents. There are even a couple of pictures the exhibitors had to borrow from California—one genre scene from the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and a great Village Cart painting loaned through the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. For those who prefer less showy and more lyrical imagery, there is still plenty to see—charming pictures of wild water birds, landscapes of foggy river banks, and genre scenes of the kind of village life that disappeared a long time ago.
The exhibition is currently at the National Museum in Warsaw (Sept. 27, 2024 – Jan. 26, 2025), to be followed by the National Museum in Kraków (Mar. 6 – June 25, 2025) and the National Museum in Poznań (Aug. 8 – Nov. 30 , 2025).