Józef Mehoffer
Today we start our monthly partnership with a new partner, the National Museum in Warsaw. We have chosen an amazing selection of Polish paintings; we hope you will enjoy them. : ) We start with one of the most enigmatic artworks in Polish art history. Just take a look at this huge dragonfly and the golden boy!
The work intrigues the viewer with its extraordinary mix of reality and colorful fiction. In the context of Polish painting, preoccupied with the fate of the homeland, this image constitutes an entirely unique, sun-drenched, and optimistic accent.
The concept of this spectacular work was born during a family holiday, which the artist spent in the countryside with his wife and son. In an orchard filled with old apple trees, bursting with gold-tinted fruit, a naked boy is standing in a blossoming meadow and holding long stalks of hollyhocks in bloom. Next to him we see Mrs. Mehoffer, reaching for an apple in an elegant sapphire-blue dress (her husband designed her clothes himself). In the background, a nanny in traditional costume is extending her hand towards garlands of flowers hanging from the trees. The association of this work with Christian iconography of the Garden of Eden has long been pointed out, perhaps unsurprisingly for a painter whose greatest works include the set of stained-glass windows of the medieval Cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Fribourg. The most remarkable element of this painting is the giant dragonfly depicted contrary to all principles of perspective and spatial logic. Its wings resemble pieces of colored glass in black lead frames. The dragonfly was often interpreted as a symbol of vanitas or an allusion to the three stages of life—by analogy to the development cycle of an insect. Such hypotheses find no confirmation in accounts given by the artist himself, however ,who wrote that the dragonfly stood for the sun. This brings us back to the idyll, while the tall flowers held by the child and flooding his figure with light suggest fatherly pride and aspirations.
P.S. You can get to know more about this painting and its author here. <3