Wojciech WEISS (1875-1950), Orchard at dusk, ca. 1897

Oil, canvas; 45 x 64 cm (light frame);
signed l. d.: WW
On the reverse, facsimile of the artist's signature WW and number 0032.

Wojciech Weiss's painting Orchard at Dusk is one of the notable Young Poland depictions of dark gardens, full of old apple trees whose bent branches form Art Nouveau lines. Weiss's orchard is painted in springtime, when the tree crowns are sprinkled with flowers. The trunks of the apple trees, whitewashed with lime, shine brightly against the background of the grassland plunging into darkness. In the further planes, dark bushes are juxtaposed with a pastel-carmine meadow, which owes its unusual color to illumination by the fading rays of the setting sun.
The painting was cropped boldly, as if to resemble a Japanese woodcut, and as is well known, Weiss was particularly inspired by Far Eastern art. In his memoirs he noted: "Japanese woodcut. Wonders of layout, tremendous taste for color, a different view of nature. [...] The classical style of composition gave way to the style of the Far East." Thus, the artist consciously frames the landscape, showing only a fragment of it, in order to strengthen the expression of the depicted motif, following the example of the Japanese. By doing so, he breaks definitively with the academic models of shaping a landscape composition, usually enriched with antique staffage.
It is worth quoting in the context of this work the words of a researcher of the artist's Young Poland work, Professor Wieslaw Juszczak, who drew attention to the particular depth of inner experiences contained in modernist landscapes, which he referred to as "inner and emotional landscapes," and which was connected with the fact that nature in Weiss' work "thus becomes [...] an indecipherable creation, enclosed in its silence and strangeness."
On the other hand, given the artist's aspiration to make painting musical, the expression emanating from Weiss's Orchard at Dusk is close to the mysterious sounds of Frederic Chopin's ballads.