Jacek MALCZEWSKI (1854-1929), Self-portrait in a hat, 1914

oil, board; 61 x 49.5 cm;
signed and dated. lower right: J Malczewski 1914;
Accompanying the painting is a 2003 opinion piece by Ms. Agnieszka Ławniczakowa, author of numerous studies of Jacek Malczewski's work.

The painting depicts Jacek Malczewski's own image, taken en face, in full bust, against the background of the interior of the artist's studio. [...]
The silhouette of the figure fills the foreground of the painting; behind her head, in the background, there is a view of a section of the studio, which along the right shoulder is exposed by a narrow strip all the way to the bottom of the painting. In the interior, on the left, diagonally inverted, leaning against a light olive-colored wall of canvases, on the right, a portion of Malczewski's large composition is visible, and below, thrown by a blue cloth and ochre rail (?), a shelf with books and a bundle of paintbrushes.
The aforementioned composition by Malczewski, visible in the studio, is a 1904 painting captured in a mirror image. "Knight" (or some version of it), currently in the collection of the Lviv Picture Gallery.
The painting is maintained in a muted, harmonized color range, based, in the foreground, on a tonality of light and dark grays broken by green in the part of the clothes and pink in the part of the face, while in the background it is juxtaposed with delicate, bleached greens juxtaposed with blue and ochre. [...]
Compared to many of Jacek Malczewski's other paintings, this one seems composed in a more planar manner, both in terms of the treatment of the figure's body and the illusion of the spatiality of the interior in the background.
The form of the figure, as usual in Malczewski's work, is outlined expressively and monumentally, although the line describing the shapes, in this painting, is seemingly more delicate. This is caused not so much by the nature of the drawing itself, but by the juxtaposition of color areas that are close to each other in tone and saturation. The entire painting is permeated by a delicate light emanating from the color. Its most vivid emanation is concentrated as usual in Malczewski's portraits - in the part of the face. The latter feature is, moreover, reminiscent of the artist's self-portraits from 1908, also dominated by green, placed by him on the side wings of the triptych "Grosz czynszowy" (owned by the National Museum in Poznań).
The original way of painterly modeling of the form of the clothes in which the artist portrayed himself, and that with the help of parallel colored "lines" with a brush, can be found in Malczewski's earlier works, for example in the image of the man in the right quadrant of the triptych "Three Heads" from 1902 ? (owned by the Raczynski Foundation at the National Museum in Poznan). [...]
This self-portrait, a work of very good painting class, as a portrait with a more intimate expression, perfectly complements the well-known, more official and symbolic representations of Jacek Malczewski's own, also created in 1914, in particular "Self-Portrait in Armor" (owned by the National Museum in Warsaw) and "Self-Portrait in White Clothes" (owned by the National Museum in Krakow).
[From an expert report by Agnieszka Ławniczakowa dated July 3, 2003.]