What do we really miss every year before the arrival of spring? The smell and the brightness, or the promise of life that accompanies spring? This promise was once associated both with blood and the warm force of the sanguine temperament – the embodiment of spring and one of the four personality types that was considered most desirable for hundreds of years.

Actually, the same thing happens every year. When the warm season replaces the long, dark winter months, suddenly something changes in and around us. The beam of photons that lights up my wooden floor in the morning takes on a different hue. It has a completely different force and brightness than before, during wintertime. When I look at it, I think of the specific aura of cruelty that follows spring when it invades our little municipal garden on a yearly basis.

First blood

Flushed and burnished, wearing a robe made of prickly twigs, the maiden painted by Jacek Malczewski in 1898 is an adequate personification of spring in the Polish climate. Malczewski authored a whole series of spring-themed paintings (in 1900, 1909 and 1914), but only the first work portrays the characteristic, unsettling aura that accompanies this