Portrait of a Girl in a Red Dress
Stanisław Wyspiański (1869 to 1907) · 1895
A small girl in a red dress with a white collar sits very still and looks at you with enormous eyes, her fair hair cut straight across her forehead. The background is a few strokes of pale colour and her arms and hands are barely indicated; all the attention is on the face, drawn in soft pastel with the strokes left visible, so that the picture seems to have been made in a few minutes before the child grew bored. It is one of the earliest of the portraits of children for which Wyspiański became famous, made in 1895 shortly after his return to Kraków from Paris.
Wyspiański was a poet and playwright as well as a painter, the central figure of the Young Poland movement, and he worked almost entirely in pastel because it was fast and because he suffered from a disease that made oil painting difficult. Look at the way the red of the dress is rubbed in flat and the outline of the shoulders drawn with a single wavering line, and compare the delicacy of the eyes and mouth. He drew children as they really are, tired, wary, sulky or wondering, and never sentimentalised them. The flowing, decorative line of the hair and collar shows his links with Art Nouveau, which he also brought to stained glass and book design.
The museum has a large group of Wyspiański's pastels, but because pastel fades and is fragile they are shown in rotation and in low light, so this particular sheet may not always be on the wall; there will always be some of his children and his self portraits in the gallery. The sitter here is not identified.
Did You Know? Wyspiański drew his own children so often that his son Staś later said he could not remember a day when he was not being asked to sit still.
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