Italian Cemetery at Dusk, also known as In Italy, Italian Cemetery after the Sunset or Cemetery I, was painted in 1880 in Lviv, where Chmielowski settled after he visited Italy. The main theme of this composition is, as the name suggests, an Italian cemetery at sunset, or just after the sun has set. This picture may be connected with his other painting, The Grey Hour, as they seem to be depicting the same cemetery from different viewpoints. It’s also important to point out that were it not for the artist’s friendship with Leon Wyczółkowski, this piece of art may have never been finished. While Chmielowski felt the task overwhelming, it was his friend that helped him persevere.
Italian Cemetery at Dusk is a view of a necropolis. The canvas is filled with white, romantic-looking gravestones and lush vegetation, mainly dark green bushes and trees. The scene was probably inspired by one of the cemeteries that Chmielowski happened to see during his short stay in Italy. The setting sun bathes everything present in the painting in vivid reds and oranges, contrasting with the darkened flora and cold, white headstones and statues. The interplay of these three colours is the central compositional device of this work.
The white statues, darkened greenery, and red sunlight are not only distinguished by their contrasting colouring, but also alternate vertically throughout the whole canvas. The dimming light causes the details of trees and gravestones to become blurred, causing them to lose their individuality and become just a mass of colourful stains differentiated only by their tinge.
The canvas itself is also atypical, and its shape of a long rectangle emphasises the panoramic feeling of the whole picture. Further perspective point enables the artist to create multi-levelled background and foreground, which in turn creates the feeling of vastness in the picture. The horizontal orientation of the scene is sometimes disrupted by the verticality of the trees and one of the statues, which prevents the composition from becoming monotonous or boring. Italian Cemetery at Dusk is, overall, based on the juxtaposition of contrasting colours and elements of the composition which create a harmonious whole.
The white statues, darkened greenery, and red sunlight are not only distinguished by their contrasting colouring, but also alternate vertically throughout the whole canvas. The dimming light causes the details of trees and gravestones to blur, causing them to lose their individuality and become just a mass of colourful stains differentiated only by their tint.
This unity of meaning created by what would normally be considered opposing symbols is brought to life by two more general rules that this piece of art abides by. The act of looking itself can elicit some kind of incongruence in the person looking. The cemetery is not only intriguing, with its Renaissance-like statues and mysterious nature, but also disturbing, even a little bit eerie. The moment of sunset is, again, dual in nature. The intensity of this faint event forces us to both mourn the unretrievable, but also fills us with fascination and even a kind of elevation.
Chmielowski, in his work, tried to capture the duality of feelings caused by watching the sunset. To be able to do so, he had to choose the perfect moment and in that moment show a certain process. We do not perceive the whole process, but only the final stage of it, yet we realise that the place, which is now almost completely shrouded in darkness, was once illuminated by the dying sunlight. Reliving this suggested process builds up, together with aforementioned contrasting colours, the mood, which is a key term in understanding this piece of art.
This process thus sets out to create said mood, in which both the painter as well as the spectator partake, with the help of artistic means. The whole canvas is, no doubt, filled with many, well thought out artistic devices, but it is emotion that Chmielowski is after. After all, already in 1876, in his manifesto On the Essence of Art he wrote: ‘In the work, the important thing is what the artist felt, not what the artist thought’.
Chmielowski’s painting is a nocturne, a scene depicting night, dusk, or dawn. What is more, the picture may be also connected with the school known as stimmung painting, the main idea behind which was to capture the mood caused by observation of a fleeting moment in time, such as a sunset. As Wisława Milewska said: ‘Stimmungsbild (Ger. Stimmung painting) should be not only the display of mastery in harmonising low-intensity colours and manipulating their nuanced tones, but it should also captivate the spectator’s imagination with its mood. It should touch deeply and be thought-provoking’.
Chmielowski’s painting may indeed be considered under this broad definition, but it nonetheless at least partly escapes categorisation. It is not only about harmonising the colours, but also about harmonising of opposing symbols to show spiritual life and transcendental ideas. That is why Italian Cemetery at Dusk is not only a mixture of nuanced colours, observed somewhere in Italy by the painter, but a story about the paradoxical coexistence of being and passing in a fleeting moment. It is also about experiencing this coexistence. Chmielowski’s goal was to capture the moment of the paradox and let spectators experience this duality in his painting.
Author: Jakub Zarzycki, grudzień 2016. Translated by AS, January 2017