Evening on the Seine

Gierymski came to Paris in 1890 on a commission and stayed about three years, and what held him there was the city once the daylight went. He painted the Opera house at night in 1891, the Louvre at night in 1892, and made a small study the same year for this large canvas, finished in 1893. It takes a stretch of the Seine at dusk, the Pont du Carrousel in the distance, the long front of the Louvre on the bank, mist lifting off the water. The water is where he worked hardest, laying separate small strokes of blue, grey and orange side by side, and it is the most openly impressionist surface in his work. The National Museum in Kraków bought the painting from him in 1894, at the urging of the painter Henryk Rodakowski, who then chaired the museum's committee. A cleaning in 2013 removed the yellowed varnish and brought those colours back.