Hares and partridges.

Painted in 1891 when Józef Pankiewicz was just twenty-two, this hunting still life belongs to a genre with deep roots in Dutch and Flemish tradition, and one that enjoyed renewed popularity in late nineteenth-century Poland. Game painting required demonstrating facility with varied textures — fur, feather, and limp weight — and served as a test of academic accomplishment. Pankiewicz had trained at the Warsaw Drawing School before traveling to St. Petersburg and subsequently Paris, where he encountered the realist tradition of Courbet alongside the emerging Impressionist challenge to academic painting. The choice of hares and partridges as subject echoes motifs common in aristocratic trophy painting, yet Pankiewicz treats them with an unsentimental directness rooted in observation rather than elegance. The work entered the National Museum in Warsaw's collection, where it stands as evidence of the artist's mastery of traditional subject matter before his full conversion to Post-Impressionist color theory in subsequent decades.

The composition employs a dark ground against which the animals' textures are rendered with close attention to differentiation — soft fur against rigid feathers, limp weight against taut surfaces. Earthy ochres and muted reds dominate the palette, with localized highlights defining form through contrast rather than outline.