704 - Jan Stanisławski, Full Moon Behind Trees (Pełnia księżyca za drzewami), oil painting, c. 1895

Jan Stanisławski, Full Moon Behind Trees (Pełnia księżyca za drzewami), oil painting, c. 1895 Jan Stanisławski, 1860 Olschana, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) - 1907 Kraków, a leading Polish Modernist painter, regarded as one of the most important figures in modern Polish landscape painting; shown here: Full Moon Behind Trees (Pełnia księżyca za drzewami), oil on wood, 23.5 x 29.5 cm, signed on the left. About the artist: Jan Stanisławski initially studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw and in Saint Petersburg. He began his training in painting under Wojciech Gerson in Warsaw, continued it in Kraków and finally in Paris, where he was strongly influenced by the style of Claude Monet. In 1897, he took up the chair of landscape painting at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts. He modernised academic training by taking his students out into the open air (plein air painting) to study nature directly, and is regarded as the founder of the ‘Krakow School of Landscape Painting’. Stanisławski is famous for his small-scale, atmospheric paintings, such as the present work. They are characterised by dynamic brushwork and intense lighting effects. Frequent motifs included vast Ukrainian and Polish landscapes, cloud formations and village scenes.