Old man praying

Old Man Praying was painted by Julian Fałat in 1881 in watercolour, early in the career of the artist who would become the most celebrated Polish watercolourist of the late nineteenth century. Fałat trained in Kraków and Munich and would later spend time at the Japanese court, an experience that deeply influenced his fluid watercolour technique. In 1881 he was still working within the Polish realist tradition of recording rural and religious life, and this figure study of an elderly man in prayer belongs to a broader European interest in the piety of simple rural people, comparable to the peasant subjects of Bastien-Lepage or Millet. The National Museum in Warsaw holds a significant collection of Fałat's watercolours, which together document the development of Polish watercolour as a serious medium for ambitious painting rather than merely preparatory study.

Fałat employs watercolour with considerable confidence even at this early stage, using wet-in-wet technique to model the old man's face and clothing without hardening into the tight finish that weaker watercolourists use as a substitute for confidence. The figure is defined through tonal variation and selective clarity rather than outline.