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 ART FROM THE RENASCENCE he tells in his paintings the story of the village, of the peasants' weal and woe. Scenes from Cracow street life, painted in a similar spirit, are the favourite subject of Hippolytus Lipinski (d. 1884). At the same time with Kotsis, Witold Pruszkowski (d. 1896) turned to naturalism, preserving, however, a tendency for poetical idealisation. In Pruszkowski's pictures we frequently meet with psychological motives evidently repeated from the works of Arthur Grottger, who, in three famous series of drawings, entitled Lithuania, Poland, and War, had immortalized the terrible tragedy of the disastrous national insurrection in 1863 (illustration 89). Pruszkowski, who studied with assiduous devotion the effects of colours, reminds us by his refined way of harmonizing them, of his great affinity in the world of sounds—Chopin. He was our first "impressionist," like Manet in France. No more than the names can here be mentioned of the genre painters, Kozakiewicz, Koniuszko, M. Gottlieb; the landscape painters, Benedyktowicz, R. Kochanowski, A. Mroczkowski, A. Gramatyka; the battle painters, Z. Ajdukiewicz, W. Kossak, A. Piotrowski; the portraitists, K. Pochwalski, J. M. Krzesz, Machniewicz, Bryll, &c.; and the most popular illustrators, P. Stachiewicz and St. Tondos.

Besides the Cracow artists above mentioned, we find in the National Museum many works of others who did not live in Cracow at all, or only stayed here for a short time, but who have taken a high place in the history of Polish painting. Thus there is Henry Siemiradzki, a painter of antique life, a sort of Polish Alma Tadema, whose pictures are full of the golden sun and blue seas of the classic South. His curtain for Cracow Theatre (illustration 90), showing the spirits of Comedy to the right, Tragedy on the left, and Drama, uniting the genius of Comedy and Tragedy, in the middle, with Burlesque and Satire at its feet, is a perfect masterpiece of decorative symbolism. The National Museum has his Torches of Nero (burning of Christians), a picture of world-wide fame. In the same collection we find some works of Leopolski (d. 1892), a master of chiaroscuro; then there is one of Poland's best landscape painters,