Italian landscape with cypresses.

Aleksander Gierymski painted this Italian landscape with cypresses around 1900, during his extended stay in Rome that followed years of work in Munich and Warsaw. Gierymski had left Poland in search of both artistic freedom and relief from the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. The Italian landscape — and particularly the distinctive vertical forms of the cypress trees that punctuate the Roman countryside — offered him subjects that combined the pleasure of direct observation with a meditative quality quite different from his earlier genre paintings. The painting is held in museum storage rather than on permanent display.

Gierymski renders the cypresses as strong vertical accents against the Italian sky, their dark, compact forms contrasting with the softer, more varied textures of the surrounding landscape. His handling of light suggests the hard, clear quality of the Italian sun rather than the diffuse northern light of his Polish subjects. The palette is warmer and more saturated than his earlier work.