A Painter's Apprentice

In Kraków in 1890, canvases more than three metres tall mostly belonged to history painting, the kings and battles of the city's great history painter Jan Matejko. Jacek Malczewski gave that size to a boy sitting on a garden bench. He is an apprentice house painter. His clothes are spattered with paint, his shoes are torn, a soft hat sits on his head, and a roll of stencils for decorating walls lies beside him on the birch-wood bench, with a wooden bucket of paints and brushes at his feet. In Polish the same word, malarz, means both the house painter and the artist, and the National Museum in Kraków reads the boy's faraway look as Malczewski's own doubts about the trade he had chosen. The painting has a second title, Introdukcja, an opening onto an uncertain future, and it is usually taken as the start of his Symbolist period. The museum bought it in 1936, and it hangs in the Sukiennice, the old Cloth Hall on the city's main square.