Leon Wyczółkowski (1852 Huta Miastkowska near Kielce - 1936 Warsaw), Old Spruce Tree

ink, watercolor, crayon, scratchboard technique, cardboard, 48.3 × 32.7 cm (light passe-partout)

On the back is an exhibition sticker dated 1937 from the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Cracow with a description of the work and the number "763/7"

Provenance:
- (before 1937) - collection of Gustaw Karol Bartke (1896-1992) - member of the Merchant Mutual Credit Society of Tomaszow Mazowiecki, from where he also came. Owner of the local tenements located on the Market Square.
- private collection, Poland

Exhibited and described:
- "Leon Wyczółkowski" [posthumous exhibition] June 1937, Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Cracow, pos. cat. 7, s. 19.

It was the trees that for Wyczółkowski were "the object of the highest attachment and constant longing, the strongest creative stimulus" (Leon Wyczółkowski, "Listy i wspomnienia", ed. Maria Twardowska, Wroclaw 1960, p. 183). He painted them from the 1880s to his last realizations, created a few months before his death in 1936. Spruces, pines, acacias, elm trees, maples, birches, guestrad, rogalin oaks or those from Bialowieza "were subjects of reflection, deeply felt in their semantic content. Their expression changed with the season, weather or time of day, and reflected the moods and feelings of the artist himself" (Wacława Milewska, "Trees and Forests in the Work of Leon Wyczółkowski," [in:] "In the Circle of Wyczółkowski." Bydgoszcz: Leon Wyczółkowski District Museum in Bydgoszcz. 2013, s. 65). As the artist said, "I am a child of the forest and it was the trees that were the element of nature with which he identified most" (Twardowska, op. cit. 130).
The presented work is distinguished by the unusual subtlety of monochromatic color. This fascination with black and white was characteristic of his work. As he recalled: " (...) The most elaborate colored things do not take me. I prefer to give in black the entire keyboard, from bass to viola." (Twardowska, op. cit. p. 130).