Four-in-hand
Józef Chełmoński (1849 to 1914) · 1881
Four horses come straight at you. They are harnessed abreast to a light peasant cart, their hooves throwing up mud and water, their manes flying, and the driver, a Ukrainian peasant in a sheepskin cap, leans back and hauls on the reins with his whole body. A second man sits behind him. The road is a churned track across a flat steppe under a grey sky, with a village on the horizon. It is a painting about speed, noise and animal energy, and at more than six metres wide it seems to burst out of the frame.
Chelmonski painted it in Paris in eighteen eighty one, when he was the most successful Polish painter in the city and horses were his speciality. Look at how each horse is different: the grey on the left with its head thrown up, the bay in the centre with ears flat back, the way the harness strains and the collar bells fly. The perspective is unusual, low and head on, so that the viewer stands in the road. The mud is painted with thick, fast strokes, and the whole surface has the freshness of a picture done from memory of the artist's youth in the eastern borderlands, where he had ridden in such carts.
The painting was bought for the museum in the nineteenth century and has been in the Sukiennice gallery since. It was recently cleaned and restored, and the varnish that had yellowed it for a century has gone, so the sky is grey again and the horses' coats have their true colour. Visitors tend to stand well back from it, as if the horses might run them down, which is exactly what the artist intended.
Did You Know? The painting was restored in twenty twenty five, and the museum let visitors watch the conservators at work on it.
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