Pożegnanie Wacława z Marią (Wacław and Maria's Farewell)

In the deep darkness, a man and a woman emerge in a single ray of light.

It is the moment of a tragic farewell that befalls two lovers torn apart by cruel fate.

The motif for this work is a passage from 'Maria,' a tragic love poem of Polish Romanticism by the poet Antoni Malczewski.
The poignant emotional conflict of two lovers, compelled to part despite their love, is masterfully condensed onto a small canvas, just 33 centimeters high, through dramatic contrasts of light and shadow.

However, this masterpiece has, in fact, followed an unusual fate, having long been mistakenly attributed to a completely different painter (Franciszek Tegazzo) in later databases and catalogs.

In late 19th-century Poland, a culture of reproduction flourished, where different illustrators would create precise preparatory drawings for engravings to bring famous paintings to a wider audience.

This painting's later involvement in reproduction engraving work by Tegazzo and others, combined with confusion in historical records, eventually led to the true artist's name being lost in the tides of history, becoming 'ghost data'.

Nevertheless, the masterpiece quietly continued to tell its truth. In the lower-left corner of the canvas, the artist's own signature, 'JSimler / 1848,' is inscribed with a confident hand.

This miraculous small piece was created by Józef Simmler, who would later become a master leading the Polish art world, when he was in his twenties. The intense passion, no less profound than that in the monumental version he himself painted on the same theme years later (1856), still quietly emanates from the canvas, transcending over a century and a half.