Indian Summer
Józef Chełmoński (1849 to 1914) · 1875
A barefoot peasant girl lies on her back in a meadow, one arm behind her head, holding up a strand of gossamer and watching it float against the pale autumn sky. Her dog sits beside her, cattle graze in the distance and the flat Ukrainian landscape stretches away under a haze. It is the season the Poles call babie lato, old women's summer, the warm days of early autumn when spiders' threads drift through the air. Nothing happens in the picture, and that is exactly what made it so shocking.
Chełmoński painted it in Warsaw in 1875, at the age of twenty six, having spent time among the villages of Podolia. Critics attacked it as ugly and pointless: a dirty peasant with bare feet sprawled in the grass was not a subject for art. Look at the way the figure is foreshortened, feet toward you, so that you seem to be lying in the meadow beside her, and at the freedom of the brushwork in the grass and the sky, closer to the French painters of Barbizon than to anything in Poland at the time. The palette of greens, browns and greys is muted, and the light is the soft, low light of September.
Unable to sell his work in Warsaw, Chełmoński left for Paris the same year and became successful there with paintings of Polish horses and hunts. Indian Summer was bought later and came to the National Museum, where it is now regarded as one of the founding works of Polish realism and a favourite of visitors. Stand back and the girl's dreamy expression comes into focus; step close and the face dissolves into a handful of brushstrokes.
Did You Know? The painting was so disliked when first shown that a critic called it a picture of a girl who had eaten too much cabbage.
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