In the Arbour

Aleksander Gierymski painted this garden gathering in 1882, just after a stay in Rome, and he had something to prove. Critics had boxed him in as a painter of the poor, of street sellers and hard lives, and here he answers them with the opposite: aristocrats in elegant 18th-century rococo dress, idling on a bright summer afternoon in an arbour. The point was less the costume party than the light. He was working out an almost Impressionist handling of sun filtering through leaves, dapples falling across faces and fabric, at a moment when that way of painting was still new and suspect in Poland. So the powdered, old-fashioned figures are really a stage for a very modern experiment with daylight. The whole scene is built around those broken patches of sun and shade.