Jan Stanislawski (1860-1907), Horizon from Panorama of the Berezina River, ca. 1896

Provenance
Warsaw, private collection.

"(...) Fałat proposed to me that I make a panorama with him in partnership, in Berlin, where he was already enjoying the favor of Kaiser Wilhelm, against a worldwide background. We chose the Berezina, giving me the richest figural field one could dream of, while Fałat was given the snows that he so sensibly and perfectly captures" - Wojciech Kossak
(Kossak W., Memoirs, Olszanski K. [compiled], Pax Publishing Institute, Warsaw 2016, pp. 132-133)
In 1894, Julian Fałat proposed to Wojciech Kossak to create a large panorama "Passage under the Berezina". The scene was to faithfully recreate the action of the incredible crossing of the French army over the Berezina River on November 28, 1812, during Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The best artists were engaged for the project. Kossak was assisted in the figural composition by Casimir Pulaski, while Fałat was assisted with the entire landscape, the pedestrian bridge and the crowd of marauders in Studzianka by Michal Wywiórski, Antoni Piotrowski and Jan Stanislawski. The painting took sixteen months to complete. The work, 15 meters high and 120 meters in circumference, was completed in April 1896. The panorama was first shown in Berlin, where it was a great success - Kaiser Wilhelm II himself was interested in it, describing it as the best of the panoramas he had seen. It was then viewed successively in Warsaw, Kyiv, Moscow and Krakow. There, in 1907, it was decided to cut it into fragments and, after some repainting, began to be sold as separate paintings.
Before realizing Berezina, Stanislavsky had already worked on Panorama Raclawicka. He was an undeniable master of landscape, but a poor painter of figures, who, according to an academic anecdote, "when looking at a nude, saw a tree" (quoted in Czajkowski B., Portrait from Memory, Ossoliński National Institute, Wrocław et al, 1971, p. 51). Perhaps it was due to this passion for only one subject that the artist developed an extraordinary sensitivity for recording nature and rendering the sum of its impressions on canvas. The presented fragment of the Berezina River, showing the distant horizon in a winter aura, is in its style completely consistent with the rest of Stanislavsky's works. It's like a synthesized vision of the endless steppe, blurring in pinks, violets and orange. The work was annotated by Kossak on the reverse with the description "Horizon from my panorama | Berezina | painted by the late Jan Stanislawski | Wojciech Kossak". This is an extraordinary souvenir and a definite collector's rarity for connoisseurs of Stanislawski's work.