水中仙女

Polish painting in 1877 was expected to be sober. After the collapse of the January Uprising of 1863 the mood among critics was practical, and the useful, honestly observed subject was what they asked for. Pruszkowski gave them water spirits out of Slavic folklore, and dressed them in the everyday clothes of Ukrainian village girls, copied with something close to ethnographic care. That was the trouble. The critic Henryk Struve welcomed the picture as the first serious attempt at Polish folk types in place of borrowed sirens and nymphs, while most reviewers decided that peasant girls had no business in a fairy tale. The man lying in the grass at the bottom is an earlier victim, and the figure in the hat further back has not noticed anything yet. The same year Pruszkowski painted a second, tamer canvas of nymphs over water, the kind of thing the salons wanted.