Motherhood

Wyspianski was the genius of Kraków's Art Nouveau, a playwright, poet, designer of stained glass and furniture, and a draughtsman who worked almost only in pastel because his health did not allow the slow labour of oil. Look at how the flowers are as important as the people, drawn at the same scale and with the same care, in the flat decorative manner he learned from Japanese prints and from his own studies of plants. The doubled figure of the girl is not a mistake but a way of showing movement and time in a still picture. The mother's exhaustion is real; the artist was already very ill.

The pastel was bought in nineteen hundred and five by the collector Feliks Jasienski, who gave it to the museum in nineteen twenty. It now hangs in the Stanislaw Wyspianski Museum, the branch opened in twenty twenty four in a renovated building on Sikorskiego Square, among his other family portraits, views from his studio window, cartoons for the stained glass of the Franciscan church and his furniture. Wyspianski died two years after making it, at thirty eight.

Did You Know? The same daughter, Helena, appears twice in the picture, once in profile and once facing the viewer, so that the composition seems to move.