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Moonlit Night

Jozef Chelmonski

Basic information

ID: Ж-51
Author: Jozef Chelmonski
Name: Moonlit Night
Date of creation: 1906
Country: Poland
Technique: oil painting
Material: canvas oil
Dimensions (height x width, cm): 101.5 x 74.7

Additionally

Type: painting
Genre: landscape
Provenance: Collection of Lviv City Gallery
Exposition: Lozinski Palace

Information about author

Author: Jozef Chelmonski
Artist's lifetime: 1849–1914
Country: Poland
Biography: Jozef Marian Chelmonski (7 November 1849, Boсzki, Poland – 6 April 1914, Kuklowka Zarzeczna, Poland) was a Polish painter and illustrator, a prominent representative of Realism. He studied painting in 1867 at the Warsaw Drawing Class and in Wojciech Gerson's studio. From 1871 to 1874, he continued his education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. The Munich community of Polish artists had a significant influence on the painter. From 1875 to 1887, he lived in Paris, where he worked as an illustrator for the French magazine "Le Monde Illustré". During these same years, Chelmonski made several trips to Ukraine and Lithuania, the impressions of which played an essential role in shaping his artistic style. In 1889, he returned to Poland and settled in the village of Kuklowka Zarzeczna. Since 1869, Chelmonski had been exhibiting his works at the Warsaw Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. He participated in the Paris Salons in 1876, 1878, and 1882. He presented his art in Chicago (1893), Vienna (1898), and Düsseldorf (1904). The artist's solo exhibitions were held in Warsaw (1890, 1907), Krakow (1907), and Lviv (1907). The artist received numerous accolades, including the Grand Prize at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, a gold medal at the Munich Exhibition (1894), and a gold medal at the World's Fair of Art in San Francisco (1894). In 1897, Jozef Chelmonski was appointed honorary president of the Society of Polish Artists "Sztuka", established in Krakow. In the artist's body of work, dynamic compositions featuring images of horse-drawn carriages and Polish villages with their markets and fairs alternate with static landscapes painted in a sketchy style, which are often devoid of staffage but sometimes enriched with silhouettes of animals or birds.

Object description

A representative of the realist movement in Polish painting, Jozef Chelmonski is primarily known for his numerous landscapes and rural genre scenes. However, the artist transcended Realism and approached Symbolism in some of his works. For Chelmonski, the landscape was always the visual impulse to contemplate the essence of existence. Dawn, sunset, and night were his favourite times for communicating with nature. The "Moonlit Night" work is a special type of landscape – a nocturne, meaning a night landscape, which is rarely seen in both Polish and global painting due to the challenges of conveying the colouristic characteristic of nighttime. Chelmonski masterfully depicts the nocturnal forest using a nearly monochromatic palette of black, dark brown, and grey. The gentle light of the full moon, entangled in the branches of a tall tree, and the silence and tranquillity enveloping the forest create a poetic mood in the scene, encouraging introspection and contemplation of the eternal.

Inscriptions

At the bottom right, the artist's signature and date: "Józef Chełmoński 1906".

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Moonlit Night

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