Church in Staszow (K. W. Kielisinski's Album)

Kajetan Kielisiński created numerous etchings and drawings dedicated to folklore, the life of Polish villages and towns, historical monuments, and landscapes. In 1853, the Poznań publisher Jan Konstanty Żupański issued "Kielisiński's Album", gathering the artist's scattered works, most of which had remained unpublished during his lifetime. Two years later, in 1855, Żupański released a supplementary volume to complement the previous edition, which included etchings depicting coins and seals, figures in historical costumes, alongside rural and urban landscapes.
The presented etching belongs to the graphic sheets published within this 1855 supplement.
The sheet depicts a panoramic rural landscape. In the central part of the composition rises a wooden church with a massive helmet-shaped dome surmounted by a lantern with a cross. To the right of the church, nestled among dense trees, is a large village cottage with a ladder propped against its chimney.
In the foreground, an everyday genre scene unfolds: along a wide dirt road, a woman is herding livestock (cows, sheep, and goats) to pasture.
The work demonstrates Kielisiński's high mastery in constructing aerial perspective – from the sharply rendered foreground with the genre scene to the expansive sky depicted through horizontal hatching.

Beneath the image, the artist's inscriptions read: on the left – "KWK. rys. z n. 1835." [Drawn from nature by KWK. 1835]; and on the right – "rob. aqf. 1838. 19. Marca. w Medyce" [Executed in etching. 19 March 1838 in Medyka].

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery