Stanisław Wyspiański

Biography

The first thing to remember about “The Wedding” is that Wyspiański did not invent the plot. On 20 November 1900 he was a guest at the wedding of his friend, the poet Lucjan Rydel, in the village of Bronowice near Kraków, and the play grew out of that evening.

A long apprenticeship came before it.

He was born on 15 January 1869 in Kraków, the son of the sculptor Franciszek Wyspiański and Maria, née Rogowska. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was seven, his father drank and could not bring him up, and guardianship passed to his aunt Joanna and her husband Kazimierz Stankiewicz. Jan Matejko was a visitor at their house and gave the boy his first drawing lessons. Stanisław attended St Anne’s secondary school, where teaching was in Polish and much attention was paid to Polish history and literature; among his schoolmates were Lucjan Rydel, Stanisław Estreicher and Józef Mehoffer. He was not a top pupil, but he passed his final examinations well. His aunt remembered that he was forever sketching village cottages, animals, plants and old armour. One of his first literary experiments was a dramatic reworking of Matejko’s painting “Stefan Batory at Pskov”.

In 1887 he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy at Jagiellonian University, where he attended lectures on history, art history and literature, and at the same time at the School of Fine Arts in Kraków, which Matejko headed. Matejko drew him into the decoration of the church of St Mary, then under restoration. In 1890–1895 Wyspiański travelled in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Bohemia and France. In Paris he studied at the private Académie Colarossi, applied for a grant because the fees were beyond his means, met Paul Gauguin and his circle, admired the frescoes of Puvis de Chavannes, and went often to the theatre, where he saw classical and Shakespearean plays. It was then that he worked on his first dramas. In August 1894 he returned to Kraków.

For the Franciscan church he made a polychrome decoration of floral, heraldic and geometric motifs, and then received a commission for stained glass; among the windows are “Let It Be” (“God the Father”) and “The Stigmatization of Saint Francis”. For St Mary’s he made 36 windows together with Mehoffer. His designs for stained glass for Wawel Cathedral (Saint Stanislaus, Casimir the Great, Henry the Pious) remained on paper in his lifetime; they were executed in 2005–2007 and are displayed in the Wyspiański Pavilion on All Saints’ Square. In 1905, with Władysław Ekielski, he drew up a plan for rebuilding Wawel Hill. He was among the founders of the society “Sztuka” (“Art”) and from mid-1898 art editor of the weekly “Życie” (“Life”), and at the Municipal Theatre of Kraków he worked first as a designer and then as a director.

In painting he made his favourite works in pastel: portraits of friends and clients, his wife, his children. “Sleeping Staś” (1902), “Sleeping Mietek” (1904), “Motherhood” (1905) and “The Artist’s Wife with Their Son Staś” (1904) show the children without posing, in everyday life, asleep and being fed. Views of Kraków, of the Planty park and the Rudawa, and at the end of his life the Kościuszko Mound seen from his studio window, won him a prize from the Academy of Learning. To my mind, these sleeping children and this hill, drawn many times from one place, tell us about him no less than the plays do.

His first dramas, “Legend” (1897) and “Daniel” (1898), were not accepted by the critics. Success came with “Warszawianka”, which had its premiere on 2 July 1901, with Helena Modrzejewska in the role of Maria. Next came “Protesilaus and Laodamia”, “Lelewel” and “Legion”. In 1900 he married Teodora Pytko, the mother of his four children. “The Wedding”, published in 1901, mocked Polish society, the intelligentsia, landowners and peasants, and showed its inability to change anything. The censors tried to limit the print run of the book, but the play was staged and was a great success. His significance for Polish literature is compared with that of Yeats for Irish and Maeterlinck for Belgian literature. After it came “Liberation”, “Achilles”, “Bolesław the Bold” and a second “Legend”, “November Night” and “Acropolis” (1904), then “Skałka” and “The Return of Odysseus”, as well as translations of Corneille’s “Le Cid” and Voltaire’s “Zaïre”.

In 1906 Wyspiański became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, and in his last years he also sat on the city council. He underwent treatment at Rymanów and Bad Hall and settled in a small house in Węgrzce near Kraków. He died on 28 November 1907 in Kraków, in a clinic on Siemiradzkiego Street. The funeral turned into a national demonstration, and he was buried in the Crypt of the Distinguished at Skałka.