EN
The article aims at identifying various references that Józef Chełmoński’s painting made to the widely perceived tradition of 19 th -century European landscape. The analysis does not only include the Polish artist’s direct connections with the group of Munich or Paris painters (both from among the academic circles and unofficial ones), but also the ways the artist drew from the modern aesthetic tendencies, conventions, and visual strategies he became acquainted with when abroad, all of those rooted in the discovery of photography, Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism, or Japonism. The Author also analyses the position J. Chełmoński’s art held in the national discourse of Polish artistic criticism and the myth it implied of a painter of land, attached to native landscape and thence drawing nutritious creative forces, national in content and form, while indifferent to cosmopolitan vogues. This suggestive vision of Chełmoński as a wild instinctive artist, consolidated particularly by Stanisław Witkiewicz, is confronted with the organic concept of Gustave Courbet’s creative process, the searches of the Barbizon School and of its German followers.