Henryk Siemiradzki, NAMOWA

18.60 x 15.50 cm - oil, canvas
oil, canvas pasted on mahogany board
Signed l.d.: H. Siemiradzki
On the reverse, number (in pencil): N3519; in addition, a piece of paper glued on 4 corners with a handwritten certificate, issued by Dr. Kazimierz Buczkowski in April 1951, confirming the authenticity of the painting.
This small, idyllic antique scene shows a itinerant peddler offering some small object to the women he meets. The artist placed the figures by a low wall just off the road, which the man walks from town to town. He is accompanied by a donkey, which waits patiently at his side. The background is a vast, mountainous landscape bathed in midday sun.
The featured painting is a reference to The Wandering Briber (see opposite), and is one of those picturesque serene scenes against a lovely landscape that come out from under his brush with such charm and color effect. This is what a reviewer contemporary to Siemiradzki wrote, lamenting the lack of the artist's works in national exhibitions.
In the foreground, on the left, we see a donkey laden with bundles. The animal stands quietly and waits patiently while its owner, a man with a breakfast complexion and a thick, dark beard, turns toward the two women. The man leans his left elbow against an undersized wall and raises his hand toward the woman sitting on it. Both women, dressed in chitons have their hair classically pinned up. The poses and focused facial expressions of all the characters in this scene suggest an interesting conversation. The background of the painting forms a lit-up landscape. The high hills are reminiscent of a South Vitalian or Greek landscape. Siemiradzki, in his characteristic manner, hid the figures in the shade of nearby trees, thus protecting them from the scorching sun. Soft, diffused, light falls on them, building the atmosphere of a warm day. The color scheme is maintained in tones of broken whites, browns, ochres and greens, with gently contrasting accents of blue and red of the women's coats.


Henryk Siemiradzki (Pecheny (Belgorod), near Kharkiv 1843 - Strzalkowo near Czestochowa 1902) - prominent academic painter; initially a pupil of painter Dmitry Bezperch in Kharkiv, a graduate of the natural science department of Kharkiv University - from 1864 he studied at St. Petersburg's Academy of Fine Arts. He received five silver and two gold medals for his student works.
In 1871, as a scholarship recipient of the Academy, he went to Munich, where he stayed for a year, studying independently and maintaining contacts with the colony of Polish artists there. From 1872 he lived permanently in Rome; initially he had a studio in via Margutta, and from 1884 in his own palazzo in via Gaetta. Honored with membership in the European Academies - St. Luke's Academy in Rome (1880), the Academy in St. Petersburg, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, Turin, repeatedly awarded medals at exhibitions, decorated with state orders (including the French Legion of Honor and the Italian order Corona d'Italia), he enjoyed great recognition and fame. He maintained constant and lively contacts with the country - he sent paintings to exhibitions, and in 1879 donated his famous painting Candlesticks of Christianity to the city of Krakow, giving rise to the collection of the National Museum. He painted curtains for theaters in Krakow (1896) and Lviv (1900; the artist's gift to the city). He sought subjects for his paintings primarily in antiquity; in the history, life and myths of ancient Greece or Rome. But he also created religious scenes (Ascension), genre paintings and portraits. With masterful technique, he painted both monumental, theatrically staged and crowded canvases, and intimate compositions, set either in ancient scenery or in contemporary realities (With the Viaticum, With Comfort and Help). He painted decorative plafonds (Spring, Dawn, Light and Darkness), and was the author of a set of paintings in the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow 1875-1879). He was fond of painting the landscape, treated either as a backdrop for the scenes set in it, and sometimes as an independent landscape plunged into the falling dusk or bathed in sunlight. With particular mastery he recreated the effects caused by light penetrating through the branches of trees, which, as H. Sienkiewicz wrote, cast a strong shadow, among which vibrate golden spots, formed by the sun's rays pressing between the leaves /.../ No one paints this movement of the sun's rays as well as Siemiradzki.