Dimensions: 100 x 132 cm
Signature: p.d.: Batowski / Lviv / 191... [illegible].
Provenance
Warsaw, private collection
Stanislaw Batowski-Kaczor, although in the popular consciousness he went down in the first place as a battle artist and author of historical scenes, he also had a second, extremely intimate painterly face. It was landscape - a genre that for the artist became a space of freedom, sunshine and pure joy of creation.
The presented "Black Sea Landscape", of a monumental scale rarely seen in Batowski's landscape works, is a mature testimony to his artistic peregrinations. In 1900, after years of travel - from Paris, Italy, Spain and Morocco to the sunny Crimea - he returned to Lviv, bringing with him an extraordinary capital of memories. The offered painting is a painterly sublimation of these experiences. It is not a typical "postcard" from the south, but rather a profound synthesis of the local light, developed in the privacy of the Lviv studio.
The artist here operates with extraordinary freedom with a vivid, juicy color palette based on ochres, greens and blues. The painterly rendered composition is bathed in sunshine. The white of the walls, contrasting with the saturated blue of the water and sky, becomes a pretext for virtuoso play of light. Broad, bold brushstrokes give the canvas an almost impressionistic breath and dynamism. This is a work in which the artist - a collector of impressions - with tenderness and mastery returns with his thoughts to the landscapes that shaped his color sensibility, making them a hymn of praise to the sun and the beauty of southern nature.
