Author: Maksymilian Biskupski (born 1958, Warsaw)
Bronze, contemporary cast
Signed on the lower left: MAX. BISKUPSKI
Property of the Dom Pracy Twórczej in Radziejowice, inv. no. OT-18/2017
Purchased from the artist in 2017 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the writer’s birth
The sculpture depicts Władysław Reymont (1867-1925), a remarkable epic writer, a naturalist, an author of unforgettable great novels: Ziemia Obiecana (The Promised Land) about the life of the industrial city, a vast, devouring metropolis, and people entangled in it; and Chłopi (The Peasants) whose expansive narrative is subservient to the eternal cycle of seasons, and each of them is filled with human passions, artfully captured by the perceptive observer. For this epic about the village life, written in 1904-1909, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1924.
Viewed from every angle, short bust of an old man, cut at sides on shoulder length, depicts a head slight turned to right. Its elongated shape is emphasized by tousled wavy hair, backswept from the wrinkled forehead. A concentrated gaze emerges from behind the pince-nez set low on the nose. Thin, triangular face with a shortly cut beard, marked by pronounced cheekbones and deep furrows descending from the nose to the tightly pressed, faintly contorted lips, shadowed by a small moustache, is rendered in a realistic manner. The sculptor achieved a sense of animation and undulation in the material through the gentle lines of the modelling of the garment. The soft collar and the raised, broad lapels of the frock coat, flowing down to the sides, reveal within their opening at the chest to disclose additional layers – the outline of a waistcoat and the collar of a shirt. How it was admitted by the artist himself, the inspiration to make the likeness of Reymont in this form was the painting by Jacek Malczewski from 1905 (in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw).
The sculpture in Radziejowice is an artistically reworked, small-scale version of a monumental long-bust composition unveiled in 2016 in Lipce Reymontowskie, in front of the writer’s museum.
Text: Elżbieta Charazińska
Editing: Beata Fiugajska
Photo: Piotr Ligier