Wiktor Teofil Gomulicki

“ A rich, southern nature, full of diversity and solemnity. The setting sun is beautiful and its beams are extended fan-shaped over the horizon, sending their shafts beyond the mountains and trees.
But the Mazurian plain was wearisome and humdrum. The earth, as if it consisted of widely spilt and somewhat crinkled waves, stretched in a grey, boundless mass of clods to the remotest line of the horizon. A narrow, garnet-coloured strip of distant woods divided it from the horizon which was also grey and only at one spot, close above the wood, slightly tinged with yellow. ”

“ A sketch forming the nucleus of the cycle, "The Dance of Death," representing an old villager who is ploughing the hard soil at sunset, while death is urging on his horse. My villager and his plough were likewise floundering along through the clayey soil, and above them the invisible envoy of destruction appeared to be creeping. . . . Only the landscape was different. In Holbein's picture we see clusters of shady trees, roofs of numerous dwellings, picturesque bridle-paths, the turret of a stone-built church, and, on the horizon, the curving line of a mountain chain. ”

“ At every jerk of the horse, the old man staggered, as if he were falling. It was difficult to believe that he was guiding the plough. It might rather be said that the plough was his support and that it was dragging him after it. Every moment that the horses stopped, the plough stopped also, and the old man struggled with an evil-sounding cough. ”