Topics of coins
Józef Chełmoński
Józef Chełmoński’s oeuvre captures the
quintessence of the Polish countryside,
the realm of its inhabitants, nature and
landscape. The artist remained faithful to
those themes throughout his lifetime. He
grew up in a family estate near Łowicz, and
spent the last 25 years of his life in a rural
manor house of Kuklówka near Grodzisk
Mazowiecki. He studied in Warsaw and
Munich, and for a long time he lived in Paris,
where he gained both artistic and financial
success. While staying in urban parks,
he was longing for nature and peasant
cottages. He pursued his artistic leitmotifs -
farmyards, dashing horse teams, the scenes
in front of an inn and in the field, all of this
set against the background of the memoryevoked
landscapes which he remembered
from wandering around Mazovia and trips
to Ukraine, Podolia, Lithuania and Polesie.
The works by Chełmoński, known as realistic
genre in the Polish painting, go beyond the
scope of this categorization. One of his early
paintings, Cranes, depicting a crippled bird
abandoned by its flock in the foreground,
was by 10-20 years ahead of ideas promoted
by the symbolists, also because of its
colours and original composition. Indian
summer - known to all, which triggered the
indignation of contemporary critics over
the improper topic, was the first depiction
of a female peasant not at work, but lying
dreamily on the meadow. The girl was a part
of nature, as simple as the nature itself, but at the same time full of poetry. Such a vision
of the world revealed itself most fully in later
work by Chełmoński in which glimpses of the
steppe, swampy meadows and forest roads
which came from his brush became a vision of
spirituality which permeates nature.
Individualism of Chełmoński’s artistic attitude
reflected his dislike of the existing stereotypes
in imaging, which he rejected, while relying
on his own intuition and instincts of a painter.
As a human he rebelled against social
conventions and artificiality of the salon’s life.
He demonstrated his attitude also in his attire
- not overly careful, composed of the elements
of urban and peasant costumes. Both in art and
in life he valued authenticity most of all.
The obverse of the coins is a transposition of the
left side of the oil painting by Józef Chełmoński
Night in Ukraine in winter from 1877.
The reverse bears the portrait of Józef
Chełmoński, modelled on the image drawn
by Leon Wyczółkowski in 1900; the motifs
from a painting Cranes by Chełmoński
from 1870 in the background.
Urszula Makowska, Ph.D.
Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences