Jarocki’s artistic legacy is associated in the history of Polish art with images of the countryside, colourful peasant customs and rituals from the Hutsul and Podhale regions. Folklore motifs attracted the artist’s attention as early as his polytechnic studies. During his stays in Kharkiv, Kursk Governorate, Crimea and the Caucasus, where he was employed as an architect, Jarocki sketched episodes from the life of the village (Ploughing with Oxen). He also tried his hand at portrait and landscape painting. In 1904, together with Fryderyk Pautsch and Kazimierz Sichulski, he spent six months in Tatarów by Prut painting the images of Hutsuls and their religious rituals (Hutsul Procession to Jordan). He returned to this subject many times later, such as in 1910, when he was in Pokucie, Vorokhta and Mikuliczyn (Hutsuls in the Carpathians). The way he composed festive scenes and everyday episodes testify to Jarocki’s ability to combine direct observation of events with an attempt to monumentalise them, to give them a timeless, archetypical dimension (Hutsul Funeral, 1905). The artist’s paintings, being part of the patriotic, popular Young Poland movement, reflected the spiritual peace and vitality of peasants, who, in accordance with the beliefs of modernists, were the bearers of traditional moral values and elements of nationality.
In 1911, Jarocki widened the range of his motifs of interest to include the inhabitants and landscape of Podhale. Initially, he painted in the village of Witów, then in Chochołów, Poronin and Harenda. In numerous portraits of highlander women and men, he emphasised the beauty of regional costumes (The Return from Golgotha – Good Friday, 1913).
He used a flexible outline to create patterns of multicoloured scarves, festive corsets and skirts of beautiful highland women, creating static, decorative compositions with saturated colours (The Highlander Girl, 1913). He gave his male portraits strength of expression and blunt characterisation (The Ukrainian Zagloba, 1908; The Healer from Mikuliczyn, 1937). He veristically portrayed faces of old shepherds, cut with wrinkles, allowing him to demonstrate the extent of his craft (Cheerful Old Age, 1926). The artist was interested in ethnographic differences and distinctive features of costumes, customs and models’ appearance; he painted and drew Caucasian Chewsurs (1907), Kashubians (1922, 1923) and the inhabitants of Zaleszczyki (1926, 1927) posing outdoors or busy with everyday activities (Fishermen at Work, 1924).
Jarocki also created excellent group portraits, mainly of representatives of the intellectual and artistic elite (Portrait of Graphic Artists, 1942) and portraits of befriended artists (Portrait of Jerzy Żuławski, 1913; Portrait of Stanisław Kamocki, 1920; Portrait of Kazimierz Brzozowski, 1929). He also produced a number of his own portraits (Self-Portrait with Horses, 1908; Self-Portrait on Skis, 1909). Married to Jan Kasprowicz’s daughter Anna, he repeatedly painted images of his father-in-law, a notable poet, in love with the Tatra Mountains. He decorated Kasprowicz’s chapel in Zaleszczyki with frescoes and designed the poet’s sarcophagus in his mausoleum in Harenda. In 1947, with the cooperation of highland craftsmen, he moved an 18th-century wooden church from Zakrzów to Harenda, where he restored the polychrome and made three altar paintings (St John the Evangelist, Christmas, Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary) and a series of Christian theological paintings.
Fascinated with views of Venice in 1911, he painted in watercolours and pastels various interestingly framed landscape studies of the city and lagoon. His landscape works also include paintings of Lithuania (View from Neris) and views of the Tatra Mountains striking with a deep sense of beauty, severity and majesty of the mountains (Morskie Oko; Black Lake below Mount Rysy; Monk at Morskie Oko; Dolina Pięciu Stawów, 1936). Jarocki’s use of Japanese aesthetics is evidenced in some of his landscapes such as Cerkiew (c. 1915), with the frame narrowed down to a single architectural motif boldly truncated by its upper edge and cut by the slanting trunk of a white birch tree.
In 1912, Jarocki widened the range of his means of expression by adding graphic techniques. In a series of etchings, he recorded views of Paris, Lviv and Venice. Together with Kazimierz Sichulski, he published a graphic portfolio in Lviv titled Autolitografie: Teka Graficzna Lamusa (1912). The views of Italian cities included in the portfolio are characterised not only by a perfectly mastered drawing technique but also by a realistic approach to forms. In most of his prints, the artist sampled motifs developed in oil painting. Colour lithography served this purpose particularly well; soft contours and subtle chiaroscuro modelling deepen the lyrical expression of the lithographic images of young highland girls (Highlander Girl, 1912). Jarocki’s etchings are characterised by a veristic recreation of the facial features of old shepherds; faces that have been battered by time, expressing the strength of character, stubbornness and determination (Old Highlander, 1920).
Marian Dienstl characterised the artist’s realistic approach:
He is an incomparable painter of everything folk [...]. The rich and vivid colours of the Hutsul region are reduced in Jarocki’s lithography to three tones at the most, which increases and emphasises the advantages of the artist’s drawing technique. However, when it comes to interesting details of the furrowed head of a highlander’s shepherd, Jarocki contented himself with single-colour drawing material. The portrait study of a Sarmatian nobleman’s face is no longer a portrait, but a type and synthesis of racial characteristics, a work reminiscent of the unsurpassed portraits of the Dutch master Frans Hals.
Władysław Jarocki and Kazimierz Sichulski, 'Wieś Ilustrowana', 1913, no. 6
The artist also dealt with caricature, practising an international drawing style of Parisian provenance; his greatest achievements in this field include illustrations made in 1903 for the satirical biweekly Liberum Veto, modelled on the German Simplicissimus. Jarocki also illustrated Kasprowicz’s work Marcholt, Fat and Obscene (Lviv 1920).
Originally written in Polisby Irena Kossowska, Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, May 2006, translated into English by PG, March 2022.
