LAUSANNE.- In summer 2025, through an exceptional partnership with the National Museum in Warsaw, the Fondation de l’Hermitage highlights the remarkably vibrant art of Poland in the period 1850–1914.

The 19th century was a key period in Polish history, when the country’s entire territory was shared out between Russia, Austria and Prussia, and Polish artists strove to keep their culture alive. The painters created a unique iconography of Polish landscapes and traditions, celebrating the return of the independent Poland towards which the country’s intellectuals were working. Polish painters often trained at the art schools of Munich, Paris and St Petersburg, and were fully involved in the conversations that drove the development of European art.

This exhibition featuring 100 iconic works explores the main movements reflected in the work of Polish artists: Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism and Modernism. It gives visitors a unique opportunity to discover treasures from the National Museum in Warsaw that underpin the Polish culture of today, in all their originality.

Founded in 1862, the National Museum in Warsaw is one of Poland’s leading cultural institutions. It holds an outstanding collection of works ranging from antiquity to contemporary art. The institution plays a key role in the research, preservation, and promotion of Polish art, while placing its collections in dialogue with European and global artistic heritage.

A Dream of Poland1
By Agnieszka Lajus, Director of the National Museum in Warsaw

Weakened by many wars and internal divisions, in 1795 the great empire that once bordered that of the Ottomans came to an end with the last of three partitions (1772, 1793, 1795) conducted by the neighbouring powers: the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg monarchy. The Republic’s fall marked the start of a period of subjection and repression that sought to erase any national identity, but also triggered a drive to regain independence among the Polish elite. Art became a weapon in the fight to preserve the Polish language and culture, with a mission to consolidate the divided “nation”, shaping a vision of a thousand years of history and solidarity between peasants and lords.

[…] Over the course of the 19th century this dream of Poland found idiomatic and poetic expression in picturesque historical figures and allegories rooted in the collective imagination, in the noble, chivalric world of heroes, kings, hetmans and humanists who were part of the ancestral cultural heritage of the Slavic world and regional folklore, in landscape and in the dreamlike symbolism and expressive gestures of the modernists. […] As there were no art academies in their home country, after brief periods at different schools, Polish artists – including women, who were then gaining greater visibility internationally – completed their training in Paris, Munich, Vienna, St Petersburg, Berlin or Rome. They acquired their skills through classes at the academies and in private studios, and their success often earned them the highest distinctions.

[…] Despite a difficult inheritance of historical disasters, Polish painting had its “moment of happiness” in the second half of the 19th century, a period that saw new ideas flourish in the fields of art and the history of philosophy. […] Artists saw popular tradition as the potential source of a modern national style. They explored the mysterious realms of the imagination and the unconscious – “the naked soul”, obsessions, fears and hidden desires – portrayed with a vigour born of artistic ferment. The world of decadent bohemia revealed its melancholy, dreamlike side in intensely expressive language.

The exhibition A Dream of Poland leads us through a tortuous labyrinth and down the unpredictable paths of a Polish art that stubbornly sought to express a complex, shifting identity that reflected its dialogues with other Europeans, modern struggles with form and a drive for artistic autonomy. The contradictions and tensions between competing ideas are clear to see In the jumble of modernist tendencies within the Young Poland movement (c. 1890-1918). “We require our art to be Polish, entirely Polish, for if it loses its specific nature it will lose its force, its value and its raison d’ętre”, wrote the critic Artur Górski in a manifesto of 1898 published in the journal Życie (Life). The imaginations of the Young Poland artists were filled with nostalgic images and ghosts from the past “most deeply rooted in the minds and sensibilities of the Polish nobility and intelligentsia”. But the century’s end also brought the concept of pure, absolute art, unconstrained by nation or morality and understood as the expression of the artist’s immediate subjective feelings and their metaphysical power, as stated by Stanisław Przybyszewski in his impassioned text Confiteor of 1899.

The Soul of a Nation

The year 1795 saw the disappearance of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a state that had existed since 1569 and which encompass a large part of present-day Ukraine and Belarus. Its territory was dismantled in a series of three partitions, starting in 1772, that saw the land divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Among Polish artists this generated an urgent need to develop shared myths, figures and symbols that could give new life to their dismembered “nation”. The loss of independence led the elites to promote an idea of solidarity between the peasants and the nobility, who alone had exercised all civic powers until then. Reflecting the high level of engagement typically see in oppressed countries, the painters made it their artistic mission to shape a national identity.

From Romanticism through to Modernism, Polish art was rooted in the world of chivalry and the nobility; it portrayed kings and heroes and made reference to figures and symbols that recalled lost grandeur. Driven by an idealised vision of Polish history, with its military triumphs and rich culture, it also highlighted the tragedy and suffering of the nation in themes linked to the patriotic demonstrations and insurrections of the years 1830–1863, notably deportations to Siberia.

Romantic conceptions of history were underpinned by the idea of a “national spirit”, which fostered the emergence of a modern sense of nationhood and nationalism in different lands throughout the 19th century. The process of defining the Polish nation and “Polishness” required reductive simplification, since the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been a mosaic of cultures, languages and religions.

History and Imagery

In the great 19th century historical narratives of political and ethnic conflicts, the line between reality and fiction became blurred in a mythology that forged the genealogy of the nation and built a collective memory.

The great “historical machines” of Jan Matejko and Józef Brandt were fuelled by references to the past and by often intimist genre scenes portraying the lives of famous figures. These included episodes from the Piast (10th–14th century) and Jagellon (14th-16th century) dynasties, the period of elected kings (16th-18th century) and victorious war leaders. Paintings depicting members of the nobility generally conveyed a historical and moral message.

Meanwhile evocations of wars and clashes on the eastern borders of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th and 18th centuries were part of the Orientalist vogue that swept through 19th century Europe. In a territory long notable for its ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, the picturesque figure of the Turk, Tartar or Cossack was the Polish version of “exoticism”.

Polish artists thus embarked on a lively dialogue with European art while simultaneously constructing an impressive theatre of Polish history. Their aim was to provide moral edification for the nation, while also reflecting the preferences of salon audiences for spectacular anecdotes, strong emotions, abundant accessories and colourful costumes.

Slavic Magic

With the emergence of ethnology in the early 19th century, traditional Slavic culture became material in the construction of an identity for the nations of Central and Eastern Europe. These peoples sought their mythical roots in pagan legends, rituals and tales of magic spells featuring miracles, wonders and apparitions from another world (including water nymphs known as rusalki, mermaids and ghosts that haunted graveyards on the Day of the Dead – see Room 1).

For poet Adam Mickiewicz, professor of Slavic literature at the Collčge de France, Slavic popular traditions expressed a “different culture”, full of mystery, imagination, regenerative power and a spirit that could breathe new life into “the old, sick world of the West, saturated with civilisation and spiritually withered”. He saw Slavic peasants as living in symbiosis with the earth, having a particular capacity for intuition and a close connection to the cosmos.

In the mid-century painters began to look for the sources of Slavic culture in the endless steppes of southern Ruthenia, the Dnieper Basin and the plains and hills of Podolia and Volhynia. These regions of present-day Ukraine were seen at the time as lands of dreams, instinct, freedom and a primal connection to the wild beauty of nature. In the works of Stanisław Masłowski and Leon Wyczółkowski (basement room), figures in traditional Ukrainian dress and scenes of peasant life embody a physical and spiritual harmony between human beings and nature. Pan-Slavic movements continued to flourish in the 20th century: Zofia Stryjeńska was inspired by Slavic mythology and rituals during the interwar period (basement gallery).

Luminist Landscape

Polish painters often trained in St Petersburg, Paris or Munich, and had a great diversity of formal languages at their disposal. Like the landscape artists of Western Europe who worked outdoors, they were interested in conveying impressions generated by light, atmospheric variations and the riches of nuance and colour. Choosing to portray nature in all its softness, luminosity and vitality, the artists created atemporal, peaceful images that reflect nothing of their country’s problems and turmoil.

The realist paintings of Stanisław Witkiewicz and Henryk Weyssenhoff show simple views of the Polish countryside, with flower-filled meadows and fields dotted with hayricks. They were particularly inspired by spring and autumn, seasons when light may be bright or diffuse, and intense and duller colours coincide, all of which they sought to reproduce. Aleksander Gierymski was a major figure of Polish realism who carefully portrays the sunlight glittering on leaves in a study for his painting W altanie (“in the arbour”).

Władysław Podkowiński discovered Impressionism in 1889, while staying in Paris with Józef Pankiewicz, and was strongly influenced by the movement. His views of Mazovie (Warsaw region) are drenched in intense sunlight, with hardly any shadows and deep colours that glow with new brilliance. Jan Stanisławski also painted plein air studies, filling the foregrounds with light by painting irregular patches in pale colours. Meanwhile Władysław Ślewiński’s simplified forms, vigorously painted in uniform shades, are vibrant with light and colour.

Mountains and Snow

Although Poland takes its name from the plains that make up most of its territory [pole means “field” in Polish], Polish art gives an important place to landscapes of mountains and snow. In the late 19th century many artists visited the Tatra mountains on what is now Poland’s border with Slovakia, and particularly the village of Zakopane. They were drawn by the region’s picturesque views and mountain traditions, which they saw as a source of national culture. They often use the symbolism of winter, when nature lies still, as a time suited to contemplation and introspection.

Foremost among the artists of Zakopane was leading realist Stanisław Witkiewicz, who painted the landscape he saw around him. His paintings often show nocturnal scenes from which human beings are completely absent, evoking the disturbing power of mountains and the sublime aspect of icy peaks. Stefan Filipkiewicz, Stanisław Gałek and Alfred Sipiński followed him in depicting imposing, inaccessible summits surrounding deserted valleys, forests and lakes.

Władysław Ślewiński had spent time in Pont-Aven, where he was influenced by Gauguin. He uses supple lines and patches of similar, uniform colours to portray the variations of mountain landscapes and the emotions they arouse. Ludwik de Laveaux gives a metaphysical dimension to his scenes: here a ray of light falls onto a roadside cross as a sign of divine presence. Meanwhile Julian Fałat specialised in winter themes and uses simplified, decorative forms to convey piles of fluffy snow.

The Symbolism of Nature

Symbolist art is based on the belief that visible reality does not offer a complete image of the world. Symbolist artists sought to pierce the surface of matter to reveal the inner life of nature – its soul – which they saw as akin to the human spirit and beyond the grasp of rational thought.

Trees and forest scenes are particularly suited to meditations on the spirit of the natural world. Ferdynand Ruszczyc, who trained in St Petersburg, approaches old apple trees as beings with personality. Their twisted branches seem to tremble, expressing the emotions of their troubled existence. Another artist who trained in St Petersburg was Kazimierz Stabrowski, who painted motifs taken from dreams and fantasy. His spirited brushwork and bright colours render his paintings highly expressive, while his attention to the fine detail of bark heightens their air of strangeness and menace.

More atmospheric and less Expressionist in its brushwork, Józef Pankiewicz’s painting Park w Duboju (“park in Duboj”, on the landing), evokes ineffable mystery with its lonely chapel by the water, enveloped in a film of mist.

When living creatures appear in Symbolist landscapes, they serve to heighten the atmosphere of strangeness. The snowy, nocturnal landscape by Henryk Szczygliński places a soldier among strange trees with aggressive, string-like branches, adding to the overall sense of dread. In the painting by Julian Fałat a lone stag embodies the suffering of the decimated forest.

Portraits and Interiors

The Young Poland movement of the years 1890-1918 comprised modernist writers, musicians and painters, whose Symbolist tendencies were often tinged with Expressionism and for whom painting was an expression of an artist’s inner life – their personality, mood or state of mind. This approach reflected the theories of the writer Stanisław Przybyszewski, a key figure for Young Poland, for whom all art stemmed from the artist’s “naked soul”.

Portraiture was a genre particularly valued by Young Poland painters. Wojciech Weiss, who admired both Przybyszewski and the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, conveys emergent sexuality through his allegory of spring as a naked boy in a field. Meanwhile the gloomy portraits and interiors of Konrad Krzyżanowski show the influence of decadent aestheticism.

Other portraits reflect the influence of French artists, notably Paul Gauguin. One obvious example is Stanisław Wyspiański’s portrait of a girl, with its intensely red background. Władysław Ślewiński studied under Gauguin and enlivens his paintings with outlined patches of plain colour, for example in his portrait of a sad-eyed Orphan From Poronin. Olga Boznańska, who spent forty years in Paris, painted revealing psychological portraits in her characteristically “misty” style of irregular brushtrokes.

The unusual work of Witold Wojtkiewicz draws on the worlds of childhood and the grotesque in portraits with a strong emotional charge. He uses touches of vibrant colour and sinuous lines to portray his sitters lost in thought.

Peasant Farmers and the Land

The rise of ethnology in the 19th century led to an interest in the world as it had been before modernity, and saw Polish painters turn their attention to rural life and popular culture. The desire to escape the urban environment and nostalgia for a more authentic life close to nature, combined with a search for the sources of Polish culture, generated an idealised view of a people who lived in harmony with nature, worked the land, were pious and preserved the old traditions and customs.

Some artists portrayed scenes from peasant life in vast panoramas. These included Stanisław Masłowski, who painted a man and two boys in an idyllic moment of rest as their cows graze, and Jacek Malczewski, who places a bored young swineherd whittling a stick in an idealised landscape based on his own childhood memories.

Other painters focus on figures to create moving portraits of peasants. Stanisław Lentz captures the lonely sadness of a shepherd boy seemingly left all alone, while Włodzimierz Tetmajer glorifies rural life. To experience his ideal notion of the Polish people for himself, Tetmajer moved to the village of Bronowice, near Krakow, and married a peasant woman. He portrays fragments of everyday life in the countryside with very free brushwork and use of colour.

The artists were also inspired by Ukraine. Leon Wyczółkowski created many plein air paintings there, depicting work in the fields or on a river bank, bringing out the nuances of colour and light in the landscape and the connection between people and the land.

Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929)

Jacek Malczewski was a major figure in Symbolism and the Young Poland movement, whose highly original work combines a range of different elements. His references include Polish martyrs, Romantic poetry, classical mythology, life, death, the duty of the artist and the role of art. His paintings tend to be autobiographical, and often include patriotic and historical aspects that link them to the work of Matejko, with whom Malczewski trained in Krakow.

Moje życie (“my life”) is one of many paintings combining autobiographical, political and mythological references. It shows the family setting in which Malczewski grew up, the figure of a deportee sent to Siberia for participation in the uprising against the Russians – identifiable by his big brown coat – and Thanatos, the allegory of Death. Malczewski also depicted the fantastical figures of harpies and angels alongside shepherds in fertile fields and, on many occasions, the Fates, fauns, winged horses and heroines from Juliusz Słowacki’s famous poem Anhelli (1837).

Malczewski is also notable for his almost obsessional fascination with his own image. In his many self portraits, and in large compositions which show him alongside other figures, he appears in different roles and costumes, from the habit of St Francis of Assisi to a knight’s armour.

Vision and Faith

While the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a mosaic of cultures and religions, in the 17th century Catholicism became gradually came to be identified with “Polishness”. This was reinforced when the country was partitioned, since Russia was largely Orthodox and Prussia protestant. The stability of the Catholic Church helped to bind the “national spirit” that emerged among the Polish intelligentsia in the 19th century. Representations of religious feeling, notably among the peasants, took on a patriotic aspect.

Jacek Malczewski and his student Vlastimil Hofman placed modest rural madonnas, or fauns and satyrs taken from ancient myths, in humble Polish settings such as farmyards, fields and meadows. The presence of these figures in the Polish landscape asserts the Romantic idea that humble people and children were most open to transcendence.

In the very different domain of sacred art, Stanisław Wyspiański and Józef Mehoffer created monumental, visionary works drawing on the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau and paintings by the Nabis. The stained glass and polychrome motifs that they designed for churches in Krakow, Lviv and Fribourg are masterpieces of Polish modernist religious art.

A Fascination with Popular Culture

Over the course of the 19th century, attitudes towards peasants and peasant culture underwent an evolution. The Romantics, led by the poet Adam Mickiewicz, saw the common people as the repository of the authentic values of Polish national culture, morality and faith, and believed the popular arts expressed a universal creativity that was original, spontaneous and rich in myth. Seen as the vehicle of Slavic culture, folklore grew in importance and provided an alternative to the old representatives of national myth that had been imposed by the nobility.

A wave of ethnographic studies generated an interest in regionalism and minorities. Polish painters were fascinated by the regions of Podhale (near the current border with Slovakia), the eastern Carpathians that were home to the Hutsuls (now in Ukraine), and the countryside around Krakow. They admired the people of these areas for their beauty and physical strength and also for their customs, rituals and colourful folk costumes. This fascination among Krakow’s artists and writers for the rural world took the form of a “peasant mania” that notably led some of the men to marry peasant women.

But while these artists drew on popular arts and traditions for their subjects, in style they remained influenced by developments in international art. For example, Władysław Jarocki, Fryderyk Pautsch and Kazimierz Sichulski simplified forms and used broad patches of colour, reflecting the Synthetism of Gauguin and the art of the Nabis.

Popular Culture and Modernity

From Art Nouveau to the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Deco, as the 19th century became the 20th, modern art took inspiration from the simple, colourful motifs, rhythmic forms and picturesque regional themes of traditional imagery. This imagery was also the basis for a Polish national style, which the artists developed in the early 20th century, notably through the Society of Polish Artists “Sztuka” [Art], founded in Krakow in 1897. The same idea that local traditions could provide a catalyst for modernity can be identified in many European countries in that period.

In 1917 the Polish Expressionist painters founded a group, of which Zbigniew Pronaszko was a member, describing themselves as Formists. Exploring the spiritual and symbolic aspects of “primitive” arts, and drawing on Russian and Byzantine art, Gothic painting, Polish popular art and also post- Impressionism, they developed a style combining archaism with simplified forms. Their ideas were continued by the artists of the Rytm group, joined by Wacław Borowski, leader of the new Polish classicism, and Zofia Stryjeńska, one of Poland’s most talented painters.

In 1918 Poland regained its independence, 123 years after its territory had been dismantled. Seven years later Polish artists enjoyed great success at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. The design of the Polish pavilion was based on popular art and geometric aesthetics, and decorated with monumental paintings by Zofia Stryjeńska, who won the Grand Prix.

1 Agnieszka Lajus, “La Pologne ręvée”, in Sylvie Wuhrmann, Agnieszka Lajus, and Agnieszka Bagińska (eds.), La Pologne ręvée, exh. cat. (Lausanne, Fondation de l’Hermitage, 27 June – 9 November 2025), Lausanne/Ghent: Fondation de l’Hermitage/Snoeck Publishers, 2025, pp. 14-19.