Edward Hartwig was trained and made
his entry into the art world as a landscape painter, but he also is recognized
as an accomplished photographic portraitist in his native Poland. He has had a
lifelong fascination with nature and landscape, traditional subjects for the
fine arts, and it is the commingling of these interests that has impelled
Hartwig to pursue the peopled landscape genre. Not so much a portrait of the
man himself but a description of a painter at work en plein air this picture is an idyllic representation
of man and nature. The soft focus romanticizes the scene; the matte surface of
the carbon print imparts a richness and sensuality to the image and approximates
the look of a highly finished drawing.