Swans in the Saski Garden at Night

This nocturne portraying a section of the Saski Garden in Warsaw is a work which lies somewhere on the border between representational painting and abstraction. The work is painted in very dark tones, brightened with a mere handful of spots of light – the moon and a gaslight. It show a dark body of water with swimming swans. The distant shore of the pond, indistinctly outlined by the surface of the water, is swallowed in the blackness of the night. The artist provokes the viewer to carefully study the shapes blurred in the darkness. He forces the viewer to give themselves over to the impression of the night, the mysteriousness of the place, and the singularity of the scene. The night may bring to mind themes of death, of oblivion. A man at night becomes vulnerable, subject to fear of an unseen and unknown threat. The night and the mist make the elements present in the painting seem different than when viewed in the light of day. more dangerous, more unreal, ominous.
The painting evokes a sombre mood. It a Symbolist work par excellence, born in the decadent atmosphere of the fin-de-siècle, full of existential fears and unease. In Polish art of the turn of the century, evocative artists combined the “stimmung” traditions of the Munich school of artists with inspirations coming in from England and France based on the theory of aesthetics of the American artist, James McNeill Whistler. In Józef Pankiewicz’s (1866-1940) painting, there is a masterful use of shadow and values of black, from a thick, velvety, warm, enveloping black of palpable space through a dilute, black slightly imbued with light and mist to a transparent, graphite, cold, subdued black tinged with silvery greys.