Leon Wyczółkowski (1852-1936), "Autumn Landscape," 1910

pastel, watercolor, paper glued on cardboard, 49.5 x 69.5 cm,
Signed p.d.: L Wyczół / 910
Cardboard on the back pasted over a page of a newspaper from 1911, published at the Literary Printing House in Krakow, Jagiellońska 10 Street.

The presented work belongs to a group of about 60 paintings created during the artist's stay in the Hutsul region in 1910. The excellent "Hutsul Teka" also comes from sketches made during this period. Describing the period in question, Maria Twarowska finds a distant echo of Fauvism in Wyczółkowski's color search: "The artist painted hills red and dark gold, valleys sapphire, and on the horizon rock peaks in cobalt, ultramarine, snow white, the sky celadon, fields in the foreground yellow, green, red. Every color he was able to spot in nature, he brightened, glowed, and in addition, he used his own method of introducing 'counterparts', as he called them, into the painting to raise the effect of the landscape's colors" (M. Twarowska "Leon Wyczółkowski", Auriga, Warsaw 1962, p. 26).
These landscapes are often done in pastel technique, which the artist combined with watercolor, as in the case of "Waterfall (Jaremcze)", 1910, "Prut in Jaremcze", 1910, "Mountain Landscape", 1910 and many others from the period in question, which are kept in the collection of the National Museum in Cracow. The artist himself commented that: "In Jaremcz landscapes, color watercolors, and on top of that pastel. You had to know how to combine these colors, for example, on a red background with a green color." (Maria Twarowska "Leon Wyczółkowski. Letters and Recollections", Ossolineum, Wroclaw 1960, p.107).