Kept in the same family for over a century and never shown in public, Henryk Siemiradzki’s Parnassus is an exciting rediscovery for collects ors and art historians alike. It is a version, reduced in size, of the artist’s last great work, and one of his most celebrated, the curtain of the Opera House in Lviv (fig.1).
Siemiradzki started working on the curtain in 1899, having previously demonstrated his talent for large-scale compositions with the curtain for the Krakow Opera House (1893-1894). Then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and known by its German name of Lemberg, Lviv expanded rapidly around the turn of the century and became a major centre for Polish and Ukrainian culture. Siemiradzki, a Polish nationalist but truly pan-European artist who lived and worked in Rome must have been an obvious choice for this commission. As Tatiana Karpova notes in her monograph on the artist, working for the theatre was also a natural step for Siemiradzki considering the close affinity between academic painting on the one hand, and opera and ballet on the other. Here, we find all the themes and motifs he had used in his paintings over the last thirty years (Karpova, 2008, pp.194-5).
Drawing heavily on classical allegories, Parnassus is a monumental representation of creativity and the arts. At the centre of the composition is the Pythia, the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, who represents inspiration. She is flanked by a winged figure representing imagination on the left, and Minerva holding scales representing wisdom on the right. In the background, we see the Temple of Apollo with a relief featuring the God of music, dance and poetry. The three main elements of artistic creation are repeated more explicitly in the marble cartouches with the inscriptions Intuitio, Phantasia, Sapientia, (inspiration, imagination, wisdom) (fig.2).
On the left, we find allegorical representations of dance, poetry and music, the latter in the form of a Siren, half-woman, half-bird. On the right, History is holding a book with the inscription Sic fuit, sic est, erit semper? (Thus it was, thus it is, thus shall it always be?). She is looking at Comedy and Tragedy and is pointing to Wealth, Fame and Love, who are set against a backdrop of violence.
Work on the curtain was finalised in 1900, and the grand opening of the Opera House took place on 4th October of the same year, attended by the artist as well as many other representatives of the European cultural elite. The present work, almost identical in composition only far smaller than the Lviv version (which measures 6 by 9 metres), is dated 1900. Technical analysis has shown that the artist used an innovative photographic method to transpose the contours of the Lviv composition onto the canvas, serving the artist as a preparatory drawing. It is therefore obvious that the present work is not a study; rather it is a later, smaller and highly finished version, most likely the result of a commission.
The work has belonged to the Herbst family for over a century. It is interesting to note that in the summer of 1901 the artist visited Lodz, where the family owned textile factories and had one of their main residences, the Palais Herbst (figs.3-4).
While no written proof exists, according to family lore, Siemiradzki was acquainted with August Moritz Eduard Herbst, one of Lodz’s most prominent residents and the great-grandfather of the present owners, who in 1875 had married Mathilde Scheibler, the oldest daughter of Karl Willhelm Scheibler (figs.5-6). Scheibler was one of Lodz’s most important industrialists who had helped turn the city into a European centre for textile manufacturing. It is therefore entirely possible that the painting was the result of a commission by the Herbsts.
In 1918, the couple's youngest son, Eduard married Ella Grohmann, a member of another important industrialist family in Lodz, and they moved to his manor in Silesia, where Parnassus is thought to have hung until Eduard’s unt.mes ly death in 1929. After her son's death the work was returned to Mathilde, now at her Palais in Zoppot, until she passed away in 1939 shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1943, Mathilde's granddaughters Ingeborg and Ursula sent the painting together with other valuables for safe-keeping to Innsbruck, where their mother Ella had had a house since 1931. Against all the odds, the work survived the war unscathed, hidden in a crate stored in the coal cellar of the house which for a t.mes was used by French occupation forces.
Having remained with the family until now, Siemiradzki’s Parnassus is offered at auction for the very first-t.mes
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Henryk Siemiradzki’s materials and techniques: the case of Parnassus
By Dominika Sarkowicz, Phd, National Museum in Krakow
The painting Parnassus by Henryk Siemiradzki, a reduced-scale replica of the large-curtain of Lviv Opera House, is a unique example of the artist’s use of a photographic technique in the execution of his work. The composition, which is an almost exact reproduction of the first version, is executed in oil on canvas. However, instead of a traditional ground, the canvas was coated with a protein-based medium (most likely gelatin) containing photosensitive silver compounds. In the layer covering the canvas, gypsum has also been detected. A negative, most likely taken of the original Lviv curtain, was then projected onto the prepared support. Then the image was developed and fixed as part of the photographic process. As a result, a monochromatic image of the curtain was reproduced on the canvas support, a copy of the Parnassus composition only on a significantly smaller scale. The contours and details would have been slightly blurred, however they would still have been sufficient for the painter to use as a preparatory drawing to determine the proportions and distribution of particular components. It is important to emphasise that it was not a print made on photosensitive paper adhered to the canvas but a photograph enlarged and fixed directly onto it. Using this photographic technique, the artist simplified his work by omitting the stage of transferring the outlines of the composition onto a new canvas (and moreover, on such a reduced scale) with the use of a grid of auxiliary lines. Maria Siemiradzka, the artist’s wife, described this latter method in a letter as ‘boring and tedious’, certainly citing her husband’s opinion. Parnassus is not the only example that shows evidence of Siemiradzki’s use of a photographic technique to replicate a composition. The other is Idyll, executed after 1895, in which a very similar method was applied[1] (fig.7).
Siemiradzki used a brush on top of the image fixed in the photosensitive emulsion to sketch out some of the contours, including the accurate rendering of the architecture, which is a characteristic feature of his paintings. Then, the artist executed the oil painting on top depicting the figurative scene. The painting technique is of the same high artistic level one would expect in a work by Siemiradzki. One can find here plenty of features typical of his way of working, such as the juxtaposition of thickly painted, highly impastoed areas with thinly and smoothly worked areas; also, the dynamic and freely handled drapery and the expressive use of texture in the areas of vegetation. Other artistic techniques peculiar to Siemiradzki that are used in the painting also draw our attention: these consist of scratching into the wet paint with a thin tool, depicting jewellery with separate flecks of impasto (fig.8), and partially outlining the naked bodies with brown paint (fig.9). The perfectly harmonised and sophisticated colours are also characteristic of Henryk Siemiradzki’s work.
The pigments identified in the painting correspond with those found in Siemiradzki’s palette, confirming his authorship. The way they are combined also corresponds with the artist’s preferences, as documented in previous studies. Among the identified pigments, chrome, iron and copper compounds often used by the artist were found; including copper-arsenic green applied in different parts of the painting, viridian, and various shades of yellow. The use of Hatchett’s brown is also characteristic. The predominance of zinc white as the white pigment used in the picture layer, as identified in Parnassus, is rare in Siemiradzki’s works. However, examples of paintings by him in which zinc white was used to the same extent do exist. Among them, the closest one is probably the aforementioned Idyll executed using a similar photographic technique.
Another feature found in the painting is the specific way in which the nails are hammered in when tacking the canvas onto the stretcher. This practice is also representative of Siemiradzki. Long thin nails are very often found in the artist’s works, driven in halfway, then bent and hammered to the stretcher. Numerous traces of this method were found on the tacking edges of the canvas.
The materials and techniques used in executing the painting Parnassus correspond to those used by Henryk Siemiradzki and serve to confirm his authorship. They concurrently show him to be an innovative artist who was continuously experimenting and taking advantage of new methods such as those offered by modern photography.
[1] Sarkowicz D., Klisińska A. 2017, Investigation of the Painting ‘Idyll’ Attributed to Henryk Siemiradzki: The Unusual Technology of a Canvas Painting Executed on an Enlarged Photograph, ‘Studies in Conservation’ (2017), access online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00393630.2017.1364876