Cranes

Chelmonski painted this in 1870, barely 21 and working in Warsaw, in a Poland that did not exist on any map. The country had been carved up between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and Warsaw lay under Russian rule after a failed uprising a few years earlier. He turned to a scene of pure quiet, a flock of cranes at first light on a marsh, gathering to fly south before winter. The mood owes something to Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz, the long poem Poles read as a homesick portrait of a lost homeland. Look for the single crane with a broken wing among the birds preparing to leave, the small note of loss he set inside an otherwise still, grey dawn.