Landscape of the Kottiss family’s village

Rybkowski's landscape depicts a broad mountain panorama, gently merging jagged mountain peaks shown in the distance and a flat strip of fields in the foreground. The landscape study in Rybkowski's painting shows an interest in rural motifs, customs, costumes and nature, typical of the late 19th century. A thorough observation of nature, following realistic patterns in Polish artistic culture at the end of the 19th century, stemmed from the tradition of ‘heroic’ landscapes and historical scenes associated with the Munich school, towards an unpretentious searching for the truth of nature in vast landscapes and genre scenes.

Rybkowski's work developed these motifs, the artist became an attentive illustrator of folk scenes and Hutsul motifs, accompanying Oskar Kolberg's ethnographic expeditions. The landscape also gained an independent, autonomous character as scenery emotive of the power and harmony of nature.

Rybkowski's painting was not an expression of the radical artistic experiments of the end of the 19th century, which posed new painting problems in contact with nature, related to the painted landscape's intensity, transience, and impressiveness. Rybkowski remained an academic, looking for spatial order in the landscape to create harmony in the painting. His landscape is arranged in colour-differentiated spheres, reproducing the most saturated foreground up to the blue highlights connecting the tops of the mountains and parts of the sky. His composition shows a balance based on the principle of the classical triangle, capturing the edges of the imagined scenery. This classical moderation is complemented by evenly dispersed groups of tiny human figures working, resting, hauling hay, arranged in a regular spatial rhythm. Groups of figures inscribed into a monumental landscape express an allegory of life subordinated to the rhythm of nature and blended into a superhuman order.

Rybkowski's keen observation of nature did not discover new painting possibilities so much as continue the established patterns of meaning and visuality.

Marcin Lachowski