冬之巢

Witkiewicz began this canvas in 1904, set it aside when his lungs failed him, and finished it three years later. He was living in Zakopane, the mountain village whose timber building he had worked up into a Polish national style, and he wrote to his son that the painting was putting him through a cataclysm. The topography he could hold in his head. What was breaking him, he said, was the light, and the colour.

So the work is in the whites. Snow in sun against snow in shadow, cloud sitting down on the ridge, all of it assembled from weather he had been watching at close range since 1890.

In 1908 his doctors sent him to Lovran on the Adriatic. He died there in 1915, three years before Poland came back onto the map.