Altweibersommer

When Chelmonski first hung this at the Zacheta gallery in Warsaw, some visitors were offended. A barefoot peasant woman sprawled flat in a dry September pasture, doing nothing, was not what a gallery public in the 1870s expected to admire. He had painted it in 1875, fresh from months in Ukraine watching country life run on the rhythms of the land rather than the calendar. The thread she lifts and studies against the sky is gossamer, the fine floating spider-silk that drifts across Polish fields at the turn of the season and gives the picture its name. Recognition came slowly. For a while, the dirt on her feet was all people could see.