Riders

Riders, dated 1896 and held in the National Museum in Szczecin, is a late work from Kossak's prolific career, executed in his preferred paper medium with the fluid, confident handling of an artist who had spent sixty years painting horses. By the 1890s Kossak had outlived the generation of Romantic painters with whom he began his career and was working in a cultural landscape transformed by the emergence of Symbolism and the Young Poland movement. Yet he remained committed to the horse subjects that had defined his art. A work simply called Riders strips away historical or literary narrative, presenting horsemen as an aesthetic subject in their own right — the pure pleasure of depicting horses in motion that had driven his art from the beginning. The National Museum in Szczecin, now in northwest Poland, holds the work as part of its collection of Polish nineteenth-century art.

The late date suggests a mastery so complete it barely needs to announce itself. Paper and watercolour or mixed media allowed Kossak to work swiftly and freely, and a subject simply called Riders would have been a kind of pure exercise in the vocabulary of equestrian motion. Line and wash are integrated with the ease of long habit, the horses rendered from automatic knowledge rather than laboured study.