Mill

The mill stood on the Ruszczyc family estate at Bohdanów, in what was then the Vilna province of the Russian Empire and is now Belarus. Ruszczyc painted it in 1898, the year after he finished at the academy in St Petersburg and went home. He set himself above it rather than in front of it, a raised viewpoint he took from Japanese woodblock prints, which stacks the weir, the wheel and the moving water into flat bands one behind the other. The picture has gone under several names over the years, Mill at Night, Spring Evening, Above the Weir, Summer Evening, and catalogues still disagree about what hour it shows. It reached Kraków in 1933 under the will of Stanisław Tomkowicz, who had spent decades as the conservator of the city's monuments.