Death
Jacek Malczewski (1854 to 1929) · 1902
An old man with a white beard leans out through the open window of a wooden manor house, and a young woman in a rough dress stands outside with her hand raised to close his eyes. She holds a scythe. Her face is calm and almost kind; his is slack with exhaustion. Behind them are the outbuildings of a Polish country estate under a wide grey sky. Malczewski has painted death not as a skeleton but as a peasant girl doing a necessary job, gently, as she might close a gate.
Malczewski was the great Symbolist of the Young Poland movement, and death, in the form of a woman with a scythe, walks through dozens of his pictures, sometimes tender and sometimes seductive. Look at how ordinary everything is: the whitewashed wall, the geraniums on the sill, the woman's bare arms and plain skirt. The model for death was probably Maria Balowa, the painter's muse, who appears in many of his works. The colours are pale and the light flat, and the composition puts you right beside the window, as if you were the next in line. The old man's hands hang loose over the sill.
The painting was made in 1902, when Malczewski was living in Kraków and painting the dying world of the Polish gentry, the manor houses and old servants of his childhood. It came to the Warsaw museum and hangs among the works of the Young Poland period on the first floor, alongside his self portraits in armour and his fauns and chimeras. Notice how the picture refuses to be frightening; Malczewski said that death was simply the end of the Polish landscape's long day.
Did You Know? Malczewski painted death as a woman more than fifty times, and often gave her the features of Maria Balowa, the wife of a landowner with whom he was in love for years.
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