Estrella matutina

For most of the 1870s and 1880s Chełmoński had lived in Paris, turning out galloping troikas and hunting scenes the dealers loved. In 1887 he gave it up and went home — to a country that, on the map, no longer existed. Poland had been carved up between Russia, Prussia and Austria a century earlier, and the village of Kuklówka where he settled lay inside the Russian partition. There he stopped painting spectacle and turned to the land itself at its quietest hours. For Poles with no state of their own, such plain rural scenes had come to stand in for the nation. The full title of this one is 'Before Sunrise. The Morning Star,' and that is what it holds: the low Mazovian country in the last minutes of night, with Venus still hanging over it and the colours of the sky shading one into the next without a seam.