All Souls’ Day – Witold Pruszkowski | #photography & visual arts

All Souls’ Day – Witold Pruszkowski

Although it was originally one-third of a triptych depicting a vision of the night of ‘All Souls’ Day’, when the souls of the dead come back to the world of the living, the painting remains in itself one of the key works in Witold Pruszkowski’s oeuvre. It combines the influences of the Munich ‘stimmung’, luminism and impressionism with the painter’s neo-romantic sensitivity, creating a work that links between the romantic tradition and the new art of Young Poland.

In All Souls’ Day, painted in 1888 by Witold Pruszkowski, the real world meets the metaphysical world, which is a recurring theme in the painter’s art. On a vertically oriented canvas, we see a fragment of a modest country cemetery. The remnants of daylight illuminate several simple graves with plain crosses, whilst the melancholic mood is created by the landscape itself, submerged in the evening mists, with a solitary willow stretching its branches over the unostentatious metropolis. The grey sky turns dark blue – when the night of 1st November bleeds into the 2nd, the time when, according to folk beliefs, the dead visit the world of the living for a moment.

On one of the graves, at which a small candle is flickering, the ghost of a young girl appears as if emerging from the mist. The face and torso of the figure placed in the centre of the composition are rendered in detail, whilst the lower part serpentines into a shift, a long white shirt worn by the deceased, blurring with the background like smoke. The girl’s ghost looks straight at the viewer, withdraws her arm and seems to escape into the depths of the image, as if frightened by an unexpected encounter.

Originally, the painting was part of the triptych From That World, which included the canvases entitled In the Cottage and Return. The remaining paintings have been lost, but graphic, black-and-white press reproductions from the period and descriptions exist. Although these descriptions do not say much about the works’ purely painterly qualities, they allow us to reconstruct the full narrative intended by Pruszkowski. In the missing central picture, the ghost of a girl, in accordance with folk beliefs, visits her home on All Souls’ Day. The lonely mother of the deceased sits in a room lit by moonlight and a small lamp, seemingly immersed in a dream or a prayer. She does not see a ghostly figure, although she seems to be awaiting a visit.

The belief in visits of the dead resulted in 19th-century Polish customs in the countryside, which involved special preparations such as refraining from any work on the day of All Souls’ Day, during which they could accidentally hurt the souls wandering around the house. In the last painting of the triptych, the visits come to an end – the girl’s ghost, according to Wiktor Gomulicki’s description: ‘returns to the temporarily abandoned grave, bathing in the greyish morning light’. The ghostly figure flies back into the afterlife, no longer in terror but somewhat inert, with no emotions visible on her face, her arms spread to the sides. Pruszkowski transforms her, for his own purposes, into the iconographic motif of Assunta – Mary’s Ascension.

The triptych comes from the artist’s late period when he moved to Mników near Kraków, but it reflects both his fascination with folk culture and his earlier Parisian and Munich experiences. Like many other Polish artists of the time, Pruszkowski received his education in Kraków, Munich and Paris, though he followed the opposite path to many of them – he started in the French capital and finished under the supervision of Matejko, not much older than himself, at the School of Fine Arts, as an already matured artist. Despite his respect for the master, he did not succumb to strong influences, and spoke critically about the epigones of the creator of Grunwald. Some Matejko influences are indeed visible in the Portrait of a Son with a Dog on a Leash (1880), but in the only known historical painting by Pruszkowski, Offering of the Crown to Piast (1872), the visionary character and the interpenetration of the real world with the otherworld are far from Matejko’s formula of historical painting.

Pruszkowski’s multi-layered body of work, in which themes and painting formulas intertwined, cannot be easily divided into consecutive periods. The artist painted, amongst others, genre scenes and portraits maintained in the realistic convention together with symbolic landscapes and fantastic visions and scenes illustrating Juliusz Słowacki’s works. Works of a fantastic and realistic character were created practically simultaneously in the 1870s and 1880s. However, it was the neo-romantic, fantasy part of the painter’s output that won him the favour of the critics. In the 1880s, Pruszkowski was perceived as an innovator, who departed from the conventions of moody realism of the Polish Munich painters and the naturalism of Stanisław Witkiewicz’s circle.

Fairy-tale and mythical motifs appeared in Pruszkowski’s works during his studies in Munich, influenced by the works of Mortiz von Schwind and Arnold Böcklin, as well as the literature of Polish romanticism, which he became interested in thanks to other Polish artists who participated in the Polish artistic colony in Munich.

During his studies in Munich he became friends with Adam Chmielowski (later Brother Albert) and Aleksander Gierymski, and after his return to Poland he maintained close relations with Jacek Malczewski. He was, therefore, a painter who was thoroughly romantic in his themes, but by no means backwards in terms of form. Irena and Łukasz Kossowski wrote: ‘it can be said that he learned painterly luminism in Paris and Munich but equally important inspirations for his art were the painterly values of the poetry of Mickiewicz, Slowacki and Krasiński’. His works, especially paintings such as All Souls’ Day or a series of works depicting scenes from Słowacki’s Anhelli, thus went down in the history of Polish art as a link between romanticism and symbolism at the turn of the century.

In his posthumous memoirs about the artist, Włodzimierz Tetmajer wrote:

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If [...] we believed in metempsychosis [...], we would have to assume that if the soul of Słowacki, who wrote ‘Anhelli’, took up residence in Jacek Malczewski, then the soul of Słowacki, the author of ‘Balladyna’ and ‘King Ghost, chose Pruszkowski as his temporary refuge.

Thus, Pruszkowski remained immersed in the romantic past with one foot, whilst with the other he moved forward as a formal innovator, adapting in his own way the achievements of modern French painting. Romantic sensitivity and modern formal solutions derived from the luminism of the Barbizon School and the techniques of the impressionists combine in Pruszkowski’s oeuvre into a surprisingly harmonious whole. As Wiesław Juszczak wrote, in Poland luminism had ‘as much impressionistic as romantic origins. It could draw patterns both from foreign painting and from the domestic poetic tradition’. All Souls’ Day is the best example of that.

However, the way Pruszkowski processed the experience of impressionism is far from orthodox and less obvious than the impressionist paintings of Józef Pankiewicz and Władysław Podkowiński. The creator of All Souls’ Day belonged to the group of artists who were the earliest to adapt in their own way the achievements of modern French painters, especially the pre-impressionist paintings of Édouard Manet. Jerzy Malinowski wrote: ‘The free, somewhat hurried manner in which the paintings are built up with relatively broad, flat patches indicates that Pruszkowski was the first Polish painter to find himself in the orbit of new French art.‘

The sketchiness of representations, blurring of lines and the building of subtle colour combinations with free, short brush strokes, however, served the artist not to study light and atmospheric effects but to build the atmosphere of visionary scenes, rooted in romantic literature and folk beliefs. At stake was finding not only a personal, but also to some extent a national language for painting. As Milena Chilińska wrote:

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The combination, permeation and overlapping of artistic tendencies: impressionism, influence of the Munich school, romantic tradition, both Polish and, indirectly, German, make Pruszkowski’s work evidence of a personal search in the heterogeneous and ambiguous art of the turn of the century. Pruszkowski, who creates at the moment of the shaping of ‘great’ movements – Impressionism, Symbolism, Secession – searches for a language for Polish painting, gradually entering the circulation of European art.

The impressionist experience is fully reflected in his late works around 1890, when he switched from oil to pastel. In this technique, the artist repeated several earlier oil compositions, including All Souls’ Day.

One of the breakthrough moments in Pruszkowski’s career was his stay in Mogiła near Kraków, where the artist, together with Leon Piccard, created paintings in the chapel of the Cistercian monastery. The time spent in Mogiła resulted in an increased interest in folk themes, as well as the establishment of closer relations with the local peasants. Eventually, in 1882, Pruszkowski moved to the countryside from Kraków, to Mników, where he created rural genre paintings, portraits and paintings illustrating folk beliefs. After moving from Kraków, he started to dress ‘like a Cossack’, he made friends with the local inhabitants, and he roamed the surrounding fields and forests during daytime and night-time excursions on horseback.

In Pruszkowski’s case, his fascination with folk culture, as evidenced by, amongst others, the All Souls’ triptych, went beyond a superficial love of folklore. With ‘feeling and faith’, the artist tried to come closer to a folk perception of the physical and metaphysical world. Thus, the motif of All Souls’ Day under Pruszkowski’s brush acquires a unique character in comparison to other art of the period. In 19th-century painting, the theme of All Souls’ Day was not particularly popular, and when it was taken up, it was rather in the convention of a genre scene, in the form of mourners visiting a cemetery, as in the painting by a Czech painter Jakub Schikaneder (from the same year as Pruszkowski’s All Souls’ Day), which depicts a beggar woman praying by the cemetery wall. In Poland, additional scenes in cemetery scenery acquired a patriotic touch, for instance depicting mourning for an insurgent over his grave, as in the painting by Ludomir Benedyktowicz. Witold Wojtkiewicz’s watercolour All Souls’ Day, which refers to the motif of danse macabre, is a completely different, visionary and symbolic representation of the theme.

Pruszkowski, on the other hand, depicts only the phantom – he refrains from portraying the figures of mourners. He does not present the night of All Souls’ Day in the countryside with the cool eye of an ethnographer but pulls the viewer into the very centre of the action. Thus, the mood of Pruszkowski’s painting is closer to Young Poland’s ‘stiummung’ paintings, such as Chmielowski’s Landscape with a Phantom (also from 1888), presenting a figure of a pale female phantom emerging from a landscape bathed in evening mists at dusk, though in this case without the context of particular beliefs and legends, than to other representations of All Souls’ ceremonies. At the same time, Pruszkowski’s triptych not only uses the atmosphere of melancholy and horror, but also tells a fully-fledged story which takes place during the entire All Souls’ night, from dusk till dawn. Although the other two paintings have been lost, the story has survived in its literary form in Maria Konopnicka’s poem From That World, inspired by the triptych. The painterly vision of Pruszkowski, to a large extent based on literary foundations, found a worthy literary development in the poem itself:

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What a bright world! What a silent night!
As the crosses creak, creak, and groan…
As thyme breathes on the graves…
As the mist slither through a spider’s yarn…
[…]
My linen shift writhes,
The raw earth weighs heavily on it…
I emerged from the grave like a lily,
Taken over by this long sleep!

Originally written in Polish by Piotr Policht, translated by PG April 2021