Portrait of the artist’s wife Luisa Comello

An important part of Julian Fałat's artistic output was his mastery of the watercolour technique. The artist was one of the most radical reformers of the Kraków School of Fine Arts, which under his leadership adopted the status of the Academy of Fine Arts. In his didactic and artistic programme, he departed from the traditional academic hierarchy of subjects, emphasising the independent role of landscape and personal portrait studies. The portrait of the artist's wife, Luiza Comello Stuckenfeld, a young Italian woman related to the Habsburgs, who married Fałat in 1900 in Kęty, was painted in this convention. She was twenty-one at the time, he was forty-seven.

In his wife’s portrait, Fałat included both his emotional attitude to the loved one and his technical skills and new artistic explorations. The study of the portrayed person was planned in an unconventional pose. The woman, leaning with her arm against the back of the armchair, turns towards the viewer. Her face is shown in contemplation, looking into the distance. Fałat combined the dynamics of the representation, created by the diagonal arrangement of the backrest of the armchair, with reverie on the model's face. The artistic elaboration consisted in loosening the scene, breaking the frontality of the portrait and a hasty, as if improvised, way of painting with watercolours which created transparent, permeating layers of colour spots. At the same time, the artist illuminated the most telling areas of the portrait such as the face, the arrangement of the hands, the gaze. In his portrait study, the artist adapted the Impressionists' solutions, related to the free use of colour spots, but he also reached for the repertoire of Japanese art, which fascinated his generation; he used a narrow frame, the delicacy of colour spots, shaping a subtle, tender portrait of a close person.