Peasant from Bronowice

Gierymski came back to Poland at the end of 1893 after years in Paris and Munich, hoping for a teaching post at the Kraków academy, and spent most of two years in Bronowice, a village just outside the city, staying with the painter Włodzimierz Tetmajer, who had married a farmer's daughter there. Half of artistic Kraków was going out to Bronowice for the costume, the customs and the light. In November 1900, in that same house, the poet Lucjan Rydel married his host's sister-in-law, and one of the guests, Stanisław Wyspiański, made the party into The Wedding, the play that fixed the village in Polish memory. This man in Kraków dress was painted about five years before that, and nobody recorded who he was. What the study carries instead is the cool grey and violet daylight Gierymski brought home from France, put down in loose strokes, and a bearing the museum describes as that of a prosperous farmer. Tetmajer gave the painting to the National Museum in Kraków in 1902, the year after the artist's death.