Landscape: Motif from Białowieża

The painting depicts a section of inaccessible backwoods of the Białowieża Forest, where fallen, uprooted trees are left to slowly decay.
In 1890, Konstanty Jellenta described one of these works as follows: “In recent days [Chełmoński] sent […] a landscape of considerable size depicting the depths of a fir forest, dark and filled with even darker trunks of towering trees. […] The only bright spot in this gloom is the broken, reddish pine branch, jutting upwards as evidence of its violent breakage, while the boughs themselves lie scattered on the ground. This godforsaken wilderness is interrupted only by the sound of a woodpecker tapping its beak on the bark of one of the coniferous giants.”