Portrait of Stanisław Witkiewicz with Wojciech Roj

Poland was not on the map in 1902. Zakopane sat in the Austrian part of the partition, and Stanisław Witkiewicz, the painter and critic in this picture, had spent 10 years arguing that the carpentry of the Tatra highlanders was the basis for a genuinely Polish architecture. He drew the houses. The man with him built them. Wojciech Roj was a Zakopane highlander, a mountain guide and a carpenter, and he was the one who put up Witkiewicz's designs.

Wyczółkowski painted them together in 1902, the theorist and the builder, on a canvas about 130 centimetres wide.

It belonged to Feliks Jasieński, a Kraków collector who argued in public for Witkiewicz's ideas, and it went with the rest of his collection to the National Museum in Kraków in 1920. Witkiewicz had left the mountains for the Adriatic coast in 1908, for his lungs, and never came back.