At the end of the 19th century, Krakow artists went out with their sketchbooks to suburban meadows. They wandered among knee-high grasses, and in the evenings brought home armfuls of field plants. They feasted their eyes on them, but also painstakingly studied their appearance, filling their sketchbooks with drawings.

The artists sketched flowers and herbs with almost botanical precision so that they could later rework them in their own way. Flowers in this period found an important place in probably every field of arts and crafts – painting, architecture, illustration, typography. They also took over the swirls created at the beginning of the 20th century, becoming one of the most prominent features of the then emerging Krakow Stained Glass School. 

The designers of the stained glass, partly due to the technical limitations imposed by the nature of this medium, achieved effects reduced to uniform patches of colour and masterfully guided lines. It is the lines, spots and flowers that are the main protagonists of the exhibition.

Lines. Flexible, wavy. Vivid, giving the impression of movement, taken straight from nature. Perhaps the line was the most important feature of the Krakow Stained Glass School, close to the Art Nouveau line – similarly expressive and sensitive, unable to be grasped by mathematical formulas.

In the case of stained glass, however, this vivacious and unbridled line had to bend under one formal constraint – its width, determined by the width of the lead connecting the glass, remained constant, while the Art Nouveau line in drawing or architecture narrows and expands without limitation.

The exhibition discusses selected stained-glass windows created in the trend of the Krakow Stained Glass School, located in several locations: in the Franciscan Church, and in tenement houses on Staszica, Straszewskiego and Sarego streets, among others.

I sit all day in Bielany, drawing plants […] and I see what a huge world it is’, Wyspiański wrote to Rydel in 1896. Another time, again: ‘It is a whole shining, rainbow-coloured, strange world – I want to get into it. What wonders there are!