The purchase of Józef Chełmoński’s Four-in-hand for the National Museum in Cracow

Abstract

At the beginning of October 1879, as part of the celebrations of Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s (1812–1887) jubilee, the painter Henryk Siemiradzki (1843–1902) donated his work Pochodnie Nerona (Nero’s Torches) to the Sukiennice gallery.Many Polish painters soon followed in his footsteps, thus founding the collection of the future National Museum in Cracow. The first director of the Museum (in the years 1883–1900) was Władysław Łuszczkiewicz (1828–1900), one of Cracow’s most illustrious personages at that time, an art historian, painter and teacher. Under his directorship the Museum began to buy pictures by contemporary Polish painters. Based on documents from the Museum archive, the article presents the circumstances of purchasing the painting Czwórka (Four-in-hand) by one of the most famous and most valued Polish artists, Józef Chełmoński (1849–1914). This large-format oil-on-canvas work (275 × 660 cm), showing a four-in hand driven with dash by a Ukrainian peasant (fig. 1), is one of the top achievements of naturalism in Polish art. Painted in Paris in 1881, it was purchased from the artist for 3000 silver roubles in 1899. Ever since then, it has been exhibited in Sukiennice, the oldest historical location of the National Museum, and it is now one of the gems of the Museum’s Gallery of 19th-Century Polish Painting.