Autoportrait en tenue blanche

He painted this in 1914, the year Europe fell into war and, as it turned out, four years before Poland would recover the independent state it had lacked for over a century. Malczewski was by then the grand old man of Polish Symbolism, and he sat for himself dozens of times. Here he wears a woman's white blouse with puffed sleeves and a beret, a broad highlander's leather belt slung across the hips, and he holds up a brush like a badge of office. The pose is half ceremonial, half theatrical. White floods the canvas, broken by a stab of amaranth red at the collar. He was 60 that year, working in Kraków, then part of Austrian-ruled Galicia.