At the exhibition XX + XXI. Polish Art Gallery in the Young Poland Hall, near Józef Mehoffer’s cartoons for the stained glass Holy Sacrament and Martyrs, shown there permanently, on exhibition are now the artist’s other cartoons, not shown to the public for a long time, made for the church of St Nicholas in Fribourg – Adoration of the Magi and God the Father.

In December 2023, they were purchased by the National Museum in Krakow, with Mehoffer’s other fourteen Fribourg cartoons. The Museum, whose collection already included the artist’s four cartoons for the stained glass in the Fribourg church, is now the owner of the whole collection – the collection of twenty-one designs which gives an idea of the artist’s stained glass decoration of the Fribourg Cathedral.

On 15 July 1895, Józef Mehoffer won an international competition for stained glass designs for the Fribourg church of St Nicholas. The artist devoted forty-one years of his life to the work on the designs for the stained glass in the main body and chancel of the monumental Gothic church in Fribourg, erected between the 13th and 16th centuries. The last ones of his stained glass appeared in the cathedral’s chancel in 1936. All of them were made by the Fribourg stained glass company of Vincenz Kirsch and Karl Fleckner.

Adoration of the Magi, one of eight seven-metre stained glass, decorating the double windows in the chapels of the naves of St Nichoals church in Fribourg, consists of stained glass compositions Three Magi and Holy Family, cartoons for which were designed by the artist in 1904. It shows a traditional Polish nativity play – a folk nativity scene popular in Małopolska (Lesser Poland). It is an essence of the Young Poland style and iconography, and at the same time a superb example of the art of around 1900, Art Nouveau.

The stained glass God the Father, made based on the two-part cartoon of 1922, fills in the central, one of five, almost twelve-metre windows of the chancel. It shows a scene from the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus (Ex 3) in which God appeared to Moses, tending a flock of sheep near Horeb, in the burning bush. This composition, built of overstylised, geometricized and as if fragmented motifs, is close to the style of interwar art.