“I am going to paint your picture, nobody but you, always you”: Portrait paintings of women in the literature of the Young Poland period

Ekphrases are fairly common in the literature of the Young Poland movement, with descriptions of paintings of women making up a notable portion of such visual representations. This article examines the functioning of the motif of a woman’s portrait in the work of writers of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Stanisław Przybyszewski, Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer, Jan August Kisielewski, Karol Irzykowski, Wacław Berent and Stanisław Grudziński. The analyses, guided by feminist literary theory, focus on the implied artist's control over the painted figure (man over woman, but also the woman artist over the male recipient), the ways in which the work of art can becomes a vehicle of subconscious truths, the correspondences between emotions and colours.