Born in 1858 in Nowosiółki Gościnne, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Piotr Stachiewicz ranks among the greatest Polish artists of his generation. Between 1877 and 1883, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków under the painters Władysław Łuszczkiewicz and Florian Cynk, before completing his training from 1883 to 1885 at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, in the studio of Otto Seitz. In 1886, newly graduated, he undertook a long journey, traveling through Italy, Greece, and the Near East as far as Jerusalem. Upon his return, he established his studio in Kraków, where he began a brilliant career as a portraitist and history painter, notably designing mosaics for the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in the city. Painted between 1893 and 1895, his important series depicting the workers of the Wieliczka salt mines earned him the prize of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. A member of the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Kraków from 1889, he served as its vice-president from 1900 to 1913. Although he took part in international exhibitions under the Austrian flag, Stachiewicz became a fervent advocate of an unapologetic Polish nationalism, notably at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where he presented an ambitious group of religious paintings illustrating the legends of the Mother of God (cat. no. 138), partly inspired by the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. In the same spirit, he worked as an illustrator for the writings of major Polish literary figures of his time, such as Adam Mickiewicz, Maria Konopnicka, and Józef Ignacy Kraszewski. His most remarkable achievement in this field remains a series of twenty-two paintings produced in 1910 for Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz. Having become a national figure when Poland regained its independence in November 1918, he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1923, the highest distinction of his country.
Dated 1917, our watercolor seems, through its macabre and symbolist subject, to reflect the concerns haunting Piotr Stachiewicz’s mind at a time when Europe was still mired in a conflict with no apparent resolution. Rising above the low flight of black crows, in the semi-gloomy landscape of an autumn evening, a skeleton (an allegory of death) plays the violin, clothed only in a transparent gauze. Like the dead leaves surrounding it, it is lifted by a gust of wind, floating like a specter among strange birch trunks mottled in black and white. Directly inspired by the Danse Macabre imagery of the late Middle Ages, this singular iconography inevitably refers to the particularly deadly conflict engulfing Europe. Its Polish title, “Taniec Jesieni,” inscribed on the mount and literally translatable as “Autumn Dance,” likely alludes more specifically to the contemporary events of the October Russian Revolution, which profoundly disrupted the political balance on the Eastern Front and already appeared, quite rightly, as a serious threat to the possible rebirth of the Polish nation.
Piotr Stachiewicz« Taniec Jesieni », Danse d’automne, 1917
