Wittelsbacher Square in Munich at night.

Wittelsbacher Square in Munich at Night, painted around 1890, represents one of Aleksander Gierymski's most adventurous explorations of artificial light and urban nocturne — a subject that had preoccupied painters from Whistler to the early Post-Impressionists. Gierymski lived in Munich for extended periods across his career, and the Wittelsbacher Platz, dominated by the equestrian statue of Elector Maximilian I, offered him a formal, aristocratic civic space to contrast against the warm gas-lit atmosphere of evening. Night scenes posed particular technical challenges for nineteenth-century painters working before electrical illumination standardized urban lighting: the interplay of gaslight, moonlight, and reflections from wet pavements demanded an entirely different approach to tone and color than daylight work. Gierymski's nocturne belongs to a pan-European current of night painting in the 1880s and 1890s that rejected the academic convention of painting everything in even, clarifying light. The National Museum in Warsaw holds this as evidence of the experimental range Gierymski brought to a relatively conservative period in Polish painting.

The nocturne setting requires Gierymski to abandon his usual attention to natural color and work instead with the warm yellow-orange of gaslight against blue-gray atmospheric darkness. The paint application is likely looser and more gestural than in his daytime street scenes, since artificial light dissolves firm contours. Tonal relationships dominate over color contrast, with the lit zones of the square acting as compositional focal points against surrounding shadow.