Narodowe Muzeum Morskie w Gdańsku

Ours new marine painting

Jacek Malczewski has painted only four paintings with the sea as background. One of them has just been purchased by the Polish Maritime Museum in Gdańsk. "Dame Portrait with Sea Background" probably shows Maria Balowa – Malczewski’s "femme fatale". The sea in the background shown at sunset brings reverie and melancholy, symbolising mystery, eternity and longings for what is impenetrable and ungraspable.
The picture is, very unusually for the artist, a portrait against a sea background. His two other portraits with similar composition are in the National Museum in Cracow and one more can be seen in the Lvov Picture Gallery. The sea motif sometimes appears in the background with a distinct symbolic character.

Ever since its establishment, one of the Polish Maritime Museum’s priorities was to collect Polish maritime pictures from the end of the 19th century and from the period between the two world wars. The newly purchased picture by Jacek Malczewski has significantly enriched the collection. It has been exhibited in our "Maritime Gallery" located in the Granaries (Spichlerze) on Ołowianka island, where we show the most interesting achievements in Polish and European maritime and river paintings from the museum’s collection.

The purchase of the picture has been financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage and by the Friends of the Polish Maritime Museum Association.
 

Jacek Malczewski (1854 Radom - 1929 Cracow) studied from 1872 at the Fine Arts Academy in Cracow under Władysław Łuszczkiewicz, Feliks Szynalewski and Henryk Grabiński, and in the period 1875/1876 and 1877-1879 under Jan Matejko. He continued his education in the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris under Ernest Lehman. For many years he worked as a lecturer and teacher at the Fine Arts Academy in Cracow, and in the period 1912-1914 he was heading it.
The artist left over two thousand pictures inspired mainly by works of the famous Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki, with strong references to the Polish January Uprising in 1864, many portraits, genre paintings and landscapes strongly influenced by symbolism. The biggest collections of his works are in the National Museum in Poznań and the National Museum in Cracow.
Jacek Malczewski belongs to the most outstanding Polish artists and he can be compared to Jan Matejko. The similarities are not about the painting style but about the very strong patriotic tones in their creations.