L'Attelage à quatre

Chelmonski painted this enormous canvas in Paris in 1881, though there is nothing Parisian in it. A team of four horses comes straight at you out of the Ukrainian steppe, driven hard by a man in a fur hat, the whole thing built almost at life size, the picture close to seven metres wide. He had left the plains of the old Polish east to make a living in the French capital, and scenes of that wild home country, its mud and speed and open sky, were exactly what buyers there wanted from him. The horses seem about to burst out of the frame. It stayed in his Paris studio for years, and only in 1899, long after he had gone home, did the city of Krakow buy it for its museum.