Moonrise

When Stanisław Masłowski signed this canvas 'Warsaw 84,' there was, on the map, no Poland. The country had been carved up among Russia, Prussia and Austria a century earlier, and Warsaw itself was governed from St Petersburg. Open patriotism was watched and punished, so for many Polish painters the land did the speaking, and landscape carried a weight it does not carry elsewhere. What Masłowski made here is quiet almost to the point of emptiness. A low sandy dike and a row of bare, leafless trees divide the water from the sky, gray clouds lie in flat horizontal bands, and the real subject is the moon just clearing the horizon and laying a cold light across the water. He was in his early thirties, moving into the phase that would define him, and here he let the moon itself be the main figure of the picture, the thing the water and the bare trees seem to wait on.