Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (14.1973)

formations indeed. One is completely right in saying that only after crossing the river Danube,
the Alpine scenery comes to its own right. I don't think it should be so difficult to distinguish
Savery's paintings inspired by the Alpine district — boasting high mountains and panoramie
views — from the ones I have been claiming to be inspired by countryside within the kingdom
of Bohemia.

I have been trying to split Savery's work between Bohemian and Austrian countryside out
of one simple reason. In my opinion Savery who painted both Bohemian and Alpine landscapes
in Prague before 1612 had a most keen and truły pioneering spirit. I believe he did see the dif-
ference among various types of Central European countryside and he aimed at expressing in-
dhddual character of each of them. I feel therefore an exciting duty to try to follow his steps
in order to understand how this sensitive Flamand felt when confronted with landscape reality
so strange to him.

The deep changes which happened in the artist's position after his patron died affected his
career — as a possibly even much more important landscape-painter in a quite substantial
way. He soon switched entirely away from landscape-painting to an endless repeating of animal-
-gatherings in an artificial landscape-setting. But this is a very different story, written already
by several students ineluding professor J. Białostocki and even myself. Though most interesting,
mainly as an iconological problem, it is completely lacking the freshness and pioneering spirit
of Savery's experiments in landscape-painting, during his stay in the Emperor's service. These
were probably the best years of artist's life. Let us not forget that Savery's landscapes were
painted exactly at the same time when Elsheimer made in Korne the most decisive effort to
bring the landscape-painting to the highest attention of the most fastidious contemporary
connoisseurs of art.

N. F. Smolskaya
UN NOUVEAU PAYSAGE DE RUBENS A L'ERMITAGE

Le paysage oceupe une place importante dans 1'hćritage artistique de Kubens. Durant sa
vie 1'artiste peignit des paysages tres divers, tant par leur composition que par leur interpreta-
tion emotionnelle.

Dans beaucoup de ses oeuvres Rubens, continuant la tradition de Part Neerlandais, a intro-
duit des paysages, montrant toute la diversite et la grandeur de la naturę. Le probleme du
mouvement, jouant un role primordial dans 1'ensemble de l'oeuvre du maltre, acquiert dans
le paysage une signification toute particuliere. L'artiste tendait a montrer 1'inconstance de
la naturę, la variete de 1'eclairage et de l'heure de la journee.

Pleins de romantisme et de pathetiąue sont les tableaux du maitre, ou il montre des rivieres
tumultueuses, coulant en torrent de hauts rochers, de puissants arbres se courbant sous 1'ouragan
et les trombes d'eau, les lourds nuages au-dessus de la terre, dechires par des eclairs. Les scenes
de chasse et de combat, se deroulant souvent dans de tels paysages, sont dramaticrues.

Parfois les paysages de Rubens sont extraordinairement poetiques. Us sont pleins de joie
claire et tranąuille des jours ensoleilles, partie invisible de tout ce qui existe, montrant le labeur

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