Stanisław Masłowski
1853–1926 · Poland · Realism
The story
Moonrise was first shown in 1884 under a plainer title, Evening. Stanisław Masłowski built it around the colour of fading light, and it now hangs in the Sukiennice, the Cloth Hall gallery of the National Museum in Kraków.
Masłowski was born in 1853 in Włodawa, a small town on the Bug river, and trained at the Warsaw Drawing Class under Wojciech Gerson, the city's leading teacher. In the mid-1880s he belonged to the circle around Wędrowiec, a Warsaw weekly, alongside the painter Aleksander Gierymski, and his work moved from the studio to painting outdoors.
His main medium was watercolour, which he carried to market squares and riverbanks. In 1900 a market scene from Kazimierz, a small town on the Vistula, earned him a medal at the Paris World's Fair. He died in Warsaw in 1926, a year after a jubilee exhibition of his work at the Zachęta, the city's main art gallery.
