Julian Fałat, MOUNTAIN VIEW, 1910

49.2 x 117.3cm - watercolor, gouache, cardboard signed at lower right: Jul Fałat | 1910



The painting is accompanied by an expert's report by Ms. Elżbieta Charazińska dated February 2025.



The landscape shows, in close-up, a vast slope gently descending from left to right, obscured by a light curtain of sparsely growing spruce trees in a varied range of greens. The painter focuses our attention on the tree growing in the middle of the composition, brought out by the harsh light of the setting sun, whose orangish spots glide across the trunk and branches. To the right in the lowering, a dense dark green forest emerges, a strand descending toward the right, obscured by almost abstract patches in light green tones, an impression created by the illusory play of sunlight. A vast, empty grassy slope is in the depths, in the middle, cut by a lone clump of visible tips of dark, almost black spruce trees. Behind the forest line, some distance to the right, is drawn a lofty but gentle slope topped by a cone, treated with stretched patches in tones of grayed blues enlivened by a patch of rusty red in the shadows. The composition, on the line of the raised horizon, is closed by a monumentally uplifted, rocky mountain massif of lofty separate, as if "toothed" peaks. On their slopes, in places in rocky troughs, lie tongues of snow. The varied outlines of the mountain peaks are held in a range of subtly variegated sapphires, pierced by garnet and emerald. They are drawn with a sharp crest, standing out clearly against a narrow band of pale sky.

Formed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Fałat, enamored of the landscapes of Lithuanian forests and lakes and the marshes of Polesia, where, by the way, he mastered like no one else, the beauty and morphology of the various stands of trees, discovers the Polish mountains around 1893. Initially these are occasional trips to Zakopane (increasingly extended, as he notes in his correspondence), where he passionately paints pure landscapes, views with motifs of wooden architecture and studies of highland types. This growing fascination with the varied mountain landscape, this gentle growing in undulating cadences, this menacing in jagged rocky majestic formations, makes him finally decide in 1910 to settle in Bystra, a village in the Silesian Beskid (known to him since 1902, by the way), after a turmoil at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts that ended with his resignation. The village and its surroundings, surrounded by gently rolling ranges of stretched hills and low mountains, covered with a mosaic of meadows, spruce forests and forest glades, would become the content of his life and varied works. The local landscape, observed closely and with an understanding of the laws of nature in all seasons of the year and day, subject to the vicissitudes and vagaries of the weather, will impose on the artist the form of his art. He subordinates the composition to this variability of the landscape, increasingly simplifying the forms. He brings them out with an overflowing stain of watercolor mastered to perfection. He colors with a skillfully observed distribution of light, whether warm or cold sunlight, or diffused light seeping through a veil of light clouds or breaking through with reflections from under heavy cloud overhangs.

From the expert opinion of Elżbieta Charazińska

Julian Fałat (Tuligłowy [Lviv district] 1853 - Bystra near Bielsko 1929) - painter and pedagogue - one of the most outstanding Polish artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, member of Polish and European creative associations and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, repeatedly awarded medals at international exhibitions. He studied painting with Władysław Łuszczkiewicz and Leon Dembowski at the School of Fine Arts in Cracow (1868-71 and 1881) and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Alexander Strähuber and Johan Leonhardt Raab (1877-80). After his studies he spent several months in Rome, in 1884 he was in Paris and Spain, and in 1885 he made a sea voyage around the world. In 1886, while hunting with the Prince Radziwill family in Nesvizh, he met the later German Emperor Wilhelm II - for whom he then worked as a court painter in Berlin in 1886-95. In 1894-96 he collaborated with Wojciech Kossak on the Berezina panorama. In 1895 he was appointed director of the School of Fine Arts in Cracow, where he thoroughly reformed the teaching system, transforming the school into a modern Academy of Fine Arts (r.1900). He was rector of the Academy until 1910; after retiring, he settled in Bystra near Bielsko. An excellent watercolorist, he also painted in oils. In his earlier period he worked in the realist convention, with time he lightened and enriched his palette, and in watercolors he introduced an overflowing color patch. He became famous as a painter of hunting scenes usually set in winter scenery; he also painted landscapes, rural genre scenes, portraits and urban views.