Leon Wyczółkowski (1852 Huta Miastkowska near Kielce - 1936 Warsaw), Limba against the background of Mnich, ca. 1916.

crayon, pastel, gouache, paper, 43 × 34 cm in light passe-partout
Signed, dated, with dedication l. d.: "To the Director and friend/ a gift for Christmas L Wyczół 1916."

Provenance:
- private collection, Poland

Exhibited:
- "From Idea to Work. Leon Wyczółkowski," Leon Wyczółkowski District Museum in Bydgoszcz, January 29 - April 3, 2016.

Reproduced and described:
- Ewa Sekuła-Tauer, "From Idea to Work. Leon Wyczółkowski", exhibition catalog, Leon Wyczółkowski District Museum in Bydgoszcz, Bydgoszcz 2016, cat. no. 129, p. 121 (il.)

For Wyczółkowski, the Tatra Mountains were one of his greatest inspirations. It was the Tatra landscapes that allowed the artist to show his unimaginable fascination with nature, nature. As one of the master's students, Teodor Grott, recalled, "[The Tatras] this land unknown to him - Wyczółkowski - became acquainted with late. Probably after a mountain excursion in the company of mountaineers, who encouraged the subject, he left the studio for a while and moved to the open air, to the deaf crags above the Black Pond and the peaks of the mountains. [He studied the mountain landscape at all times of the day. From the early morning, from his open tent, he watched the light effects of the first rays of the sun as they fell on the huge mass of granite peaks. He especially liked to paint the mountains on cloudy gloomy days." (Leon Wyczółkowski. Letters and Memoirs, compiled by. M. Twarowska, Wroclaw 1960, p. 274)
Wyczółkowski showed his admiration for the power of the mountains in his works both by depicting them from a distant perspective and by carving out only a certain fragment of the view, an example of which is the work "Limba na tle Mnich", included in the auction offer. The way he used such a tight, narrow frame and synthetically treated drawing alluded to the solutions taken by the artist from Japanese art, which he so often used in his work. Clearly moved by the beauty of the Tatra limbs, Wyczółkowski repeated this motif many times in his oil paintings, pastels, many sketches or prints. In addition, in the presented composition Wyczółkowski also used a motif extremely close to his heart - a tree, in this case a limb. It was trees that for Wyczółkowski were "the object of the highest attachment and constant longing, the strongest creative stimulus" ("Leon Wyczółkowski, "Letters ...", op.cit., p. 183). He painted them from the 1880s to his last realizations, created a few months before his death in 1936. Spruces, pines, limbers, acacias, elm trees, maples, birches, guest oaks, Rogalin oaks or those of Bialowieza "were subjects of reflection, deeply felt in their semantic content. Their expression changed with the season, the weather or the time of day, reflected the moods and feelings of the artist himself" (W. Milewska, "Trees and forests in the work of Leon Wyczółkowski", [in:] "In the circle of Wyczółkowski", Leon Wyczółkowski District Museum in Bydgoszcz, Bydgoszcz 2013, p. 65). As the artist said, "I am a child of the forest" ("Leon Wyczółkowski, Letters ..., op. cit. p. 130). and it was the trees that constituted the element of nature with which he identified the most.