Kazimierz LASOCKI

LINDEN TREE AVENUE IN KRYNICA, 1895
Oil on canvas mounted on board; 48 x 61.5 cm
Signed lower left: Kazimierz Lasocki / Krynica 1895
Kazimierz Lasocki is considered one of the most important Polish landscape and animal painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From 1890 to 1895, he studied at the Drawing Class in Warsaw under Wojciech Gerson and Jan Kauzik, and then left for Munich, where he studied at the Academy under Franz von Stuck and Anton Ažbe from 1895 to 1898.
The work on display, dated 1895, was therefore created at the very beginning of Lasocki’s independent artistic career, even before his departure for Munich. It is an interesting example of his early landscape work, created before the artist focused on scenes featuring cows, which became characteristic of his later oeuvre.
The motif was drawn from Krynica, which, at the end of the 19th century, was one of the most important Galician health resorts. A particularly distinctive feature of the town’s landscape were the old tree-lined avenues leading toward the spa complex; contemporary sources mention, among other things, a road lined with linden trees leading to the spa.
Here, Lasocki focuses almost exclusively on the scenic qualities of the landscape. A wide, sandy road, monumental trees, and wooden rural buildings create a tranquil, late-summer landscape. The small figures of passersby, placed in the distance along the avenue, emphasize the scale of the trees and lend the scene the character of a study from nature. The light filtering through the dense tree canopies and illuminating the road is rendered particularly effectively.
The painting is distinguished by its free, painterly treatment of greenery and a rich, varied palette of greens, yellows, and browns. Already evident is Lasocki’s characteristic ability to construct a landscape through observation of nature and a synthetic yet highly evocative depiction of vegetation. Critics later emphasized precisely his “spirit of observation” and his realistic approach to the landscape.
“Linden Alley in Krynica” is thus a particularly interesting early work by Kazimierz Lasocki—both because of its very early date and because of the preserved, concrete depiction of the place, which serves as a record of the landscape of the popular Galician health resort at the end of the 19th century
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