Thistles against the sun

Thistles Against the Sun, painted in 1903 and held at the National Museum in Warsaw, is one of Jan Stanisławski's most celebrated works — a backlit study of common thistles in which the plant becomes a vehicle for extraordinary effects of light. Stanisławski was a leading Polish Post-Impressionist who studied in Paris and brought French plein air methods back to Poland, where he applied them to characteristic subjects of the Ukrainian and Polish landscape. Thistles — common, thorny, vigorous — were exactly the kind of unpretentious natural subject he favored over conventional landscape beauties, and against the sun they become silhouettes crackling with energy.

Backlighting transforms the thistles' spiky forms into semi-transparent silhouettes with luminous halos where the sun catches their edges, Stanisławski rendering this optical effect with impressionistic looseness that captures the shimmering quality of contre-jour. His palette here is reduced and tonal, the sunlight creating a bleaching effect on the surrounding landscape.