Although he spent most of his adult life living in Paris, the painter and graphic artist Konstanty Brandel often visited his native Poland and continued to consider himself a Polish artist. His work may be described as Symbolist and has much in common with that of figures such as Odilon Redon and Gustave Doré, although Hieronymus Bosch, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Francisco de Goya have also been cited as possible influences.

Brandel’s imagery often includes architecture fantastically interpreted, with exaggerated and highly improbable structures, scale and perspective. Elsewhere he creates similarly disturbing landscapes. These fantasies are frequently inhabited by men, women and animals engaged in strange or ritualistic behaviour, but sometimes the spaces are eerily empty, as in this view of a Polish cemetery, where crosses rise out of a copse isolated amid empty fields.