Return with a bear.

Return with a Bear, painted in 1892 and in the National Museum in Warsaw, belongs to a specific category of Fałat's hunting paintings that recorded the conclusion of a successful bear hunt — a prestigious event in the aristocratic hunting calendar of eastern Europe. Bear hunting in the forests of Poland, Belarus, and Russia was by 1892 already becoming rarer as bear populations declined, giving these paintings a documentary character as records of a practice that was disappearing. Fałat participated in several such hunts and depicted the bear hunt in multiple works, of which this is among the most celebratory — the return of the hunters with their quarry, accompanied by dogs and beaters. The composition allows him to combine his interest in winter landscape, figure groups, and animal subjects in a single ambitious painting.

The painting requires Fałat to manage a complex composition combining figures, horses, dogs, and the bear carcass against a winter landscape. His characteristic snow handling appears throughout — the blue-violet shadows in snow tracks and the warm reflection from the hunters' faces and the horses' flanks. The bear's dark mass provides a strong visual anchor in an otherwise light-toned composition.