Abiding Mysteries
By way of conclusion, The Polish Rider remains one of Rembrandt's most mysterious and controversial paintings. Its origin, provenance, and meaning have aroused debate since it first came to the attention of the Western public at the end of the nineteenth century.
Was the rider really a Cossack as he was first identified? Or, less likely, was he a Tatar, as von Wurzbach thought? Or, again, was he a Pole, or a Lithuanian? And what meaning did these national categories have in the mid-seventeenth century when Rembrandt painted his canvas? More basically, did the painting originate as a portrait or merely an allegorical representation of some historical or literary figure? And most basically of all, was it Rembrandt himself who painted it, or one of his students or imitators?The evidence presented above tends to support the idea that the creator of the painting, or at least the most important parts of it, was indeed Rembrandt and that it was a portrait of a very real person into which allegorical meanings (only perhaps intended by Rembrandt) have been read by certain modern scholars. Moreover, this person is almost certainly the Lithuanian magnate Marcjan Aleksander Oginski.
We may thus end by saying that Rembrandt's rider of about 1650 was, if not a Pole by political origin, ethnicity, or religion, at least an actual subject of the great multinational Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth who registered as a “Pole” in the University of Leyden and who later in a sense became a “Pole” through his conversion to Catholicism. Moreover, his family - Ruthenian and Lithuanian by origin, and Polish and Lithuanian by destiny - was to play an important role in that Commonwealth to the end of its existence. Thus, although some may refer to it in other ways, the picture's current label, The Polish Rider, remains more or less accurate both because of its provenance, through the royal collection of Stanislaw Augustus and the Dzikow Castle in Galicia, and also because of the complex personal history of the Oginski family in general, and of Marcjan Aleksander Oginski in particular, who is currently the best candidate for being Rembrandt's marvellous and eternally intriguing “Polish Rider.”