Peasants from the Lublin area
The painting depicts a domestic scene from the life of peasants - a family of peasants gathered in the courtyard of a farmhouse, sitting on the ground, the father combing his son's hair, while the child, with an easily recognisable movement, crushes the lice that fall from his head with his finger. The whole family is dressed in light white linen clothes, tied together with black bands. The woman and one girl have headscarves tied around their heads, the younger daughter wears a straw hat. The whole scene is watched by a thiyun, standing in the foreground of the painting, but easily visible to the viewer because he is depicted wearing a bright blue jaipon. The landscape is not detailed - the corner of the wooden thatched hut, a fragment of a large tree growing nearby and the bushes painted on the other edge of the picture are visible. All these elements are essentially just backgrounds to highlight the figures and help construct the composition, while the artist has focused all his attention on the rendering of the scene itself, has painted the faces carefully, and has depicted the type of clothing in a non-pedantic but reasonably accurate way. The painting probably captures a specific event when the hygiene of the peasants of the manor was of concern, but it also reflects the more general cultural trends of the Enlightenment - the increased attention to the peasantry, the concern for the well-being of the folk household. The nature of the painting, the drawing style, even the character types and the way of modelling the faces are typical of Franciszekas Smuglevičius' paintings. There is also historical data to support this authorship. He began painting domestic compositions depicting scenes from the life of peasants while still living in Italy (1776-1784), and later created several works of this type in Poland and Lithuania. The collections of J.I. Kraševski included two drawings from the artist's travel book dated 1784 depicting "Peasant domestic scenes", a well-known canvas "Lithuanian Peasants" in the Lithuanian Art Museum, and two versions of a painting depicting peasants in a Cracow tavern. Two paintings entitled "Polish Peasants with Children" were in the collection of Stanislaw August Poniatowski. Even two of Smuglewicz's works on peasants were in the collection of Hugo Kołłątaj, a prominent politician, social activist and writer, in Warsaw. In 1795, this collection was sold off and a detailed description of it was drawn up for the occasion. The description mentions a total of four small canvases by Smuglewicz, and the description of one of them corresponds perfectly to the scene painted here: 'the painting depicts a Lublin peasant sitting amongst his family members, combing the hair of his son'. He was paired with another canvas depicting peasants walking in the Lublin area. Two other paintings depicted the Kšešovice estate: one of a Pauline monk, Fr. The other depicted the promenade of Kšešovice and the Jews sitting on it. The Czartoriski Museum in Krakow currently holds a painting attributed to Antanas Smuglevičius, which could easily be identified with the Kšešovice image in the Kolontay collection. There are also obvious stylistic and colour similarities between this work and Peasants of the Lublin Area, suggesting that both works are from the former collection of H. Kolontay and can be attributed to Smuglevičius' brush. The town and manor of Kšešovice are located near Kraków, and in 1788 the construction of a manor house on the site was started by Izabela (Elizabeth) Czartoriscyte Liubomirska, wife of Marshal Stanislaw Lubomirski, a prominent aristocrat and patron of art. As stated by V. Drėma in his biography of the artist (1973), P. Smuglevičius may have visited the Kšešovice manor in 1789, when, at the invitation of H. Kolontajaus, he painted altarpieces in the nearby Kšižanovičiai parish church. He may also have painted a portrait of Izabela Liubomirska at the same time, which was later in the collection of Adam Giunter in Dobrovleni. By the way, Liubomirskienė is known as a progressive patron of the peasantry, so it is quite likely that the peasants of the Lublin area could have been painted at another of her estates. In any case, it can be said that the idea of these paintings was born in the environment of aristocrats and intellectuals who propagated the ideas of the Enlightenment (Dr. (hp) Rūta Janonienė, Chief Researcher, Institute of Art Studies, Vilnius Academy of Arts).
