Un manzano junto a un arroyo

Gierymski was 17 when he joined the January Uprising of 1863, the Polish revolt against Russian rule that ended in executions and mass deportations to Siberia. Four years after it collapsed he was in Munich on a government scholarship, studying at the Academy, and in 1868 his younger brother Aleksander followed him there. This apple tree over a stream dates from that year. What made his name was the uprising itself, painted small and grey, patrols of insurgents in wet open country, and Polish collectors wanted those pictures badly. A quiet study like this one carries nothing of that. He had six years left. Tuberculosis killed him at Reichenhall in the Bavarian Alps in 1874, at 28, with roughly a hundred finished works behind him, and the National Museum in Krakow holds this one.