Out of the Shadows (1870s-1910)
When in the 1890s the painting first came to the attention of the Western art community, it hung in the private collection of Count Zdzislaw Tarnowski (1862-1937), in the ladies drawing room in his family home, Dzikow Castle, in Austrian Galicia, in what is today part of Tarnobrzeg district in Poland.
The castle, a venerable building, had recently been renovated in the neo-gothic style. The Tarnowskis were a great landowning family, with estates in both Poland and Ukraine and including entire towns and cities like Tarnobrzeg, Tarnow, and Ternopil associated with their name.The picture itself seems to have been esteemed by the Poles - who call it Lisowczyk (after an irregular light-cavalry unit) - and was noted in print as early as 1842 (by the poet Kajetan Kozmian); in 1843 the historian Maurycy Dzieduszycki printed a somewhat fanciful engraving of it in a Galician scholarly journal and noted that in 1833 it had been sent to Vienna for “restoration” (do odchξdozenia), where, in his words, it “delighted the experts who without any doubts recognized in it Rembrandt's brushwork.”5
In the 1870s the painting was studied in greater detail by various Polish scholars, but Count Tarnowski - who did not believe it a family portrait, and perhaps also for taxation purposes - wished to sell it and sent it again to Vienna for restoration. Wilhelm Bode, a Rembrandt expert from Germany, citing its use of colour, dated it to “probably” 1654, in Rembrandt's late period (he died in 1669). “The picture depicted,” Bode wrote in 1883, “a young Polish magnate who casually trots past the viewer in his national costume on an Arabian white horse.” In a footnote, Bode added, “Even when Polish and other great men from half-civilized eastern Europe visited Holland, they showed a partiality for having themselves painted by Rembrandt.” He wrote during the so-called Kulturkampf conflict (1872-78) between the new German government and the Catholic church, when German-Polish relations were quite tense.6
The first Western Rembrandt scholar to examine the original in detail was the Dutch scholar Abraham Bredius, who seems to have been encouraged by Bode and was invited to Dzikow by the Polish art historian Jerzy Mycielski, a cousin of the Tarnowskis.
In 1897, the two scholars visited Dzikow, and Bredius described his experiences there in De nederlandische Spectator, no. 25 (1897), 197-9: “Just one look at it,” he wrote, “a few seconds' study of the technique, were enough to convince me instantly that here, in this remote fastness, one of Rembrandt's greatest masterpieces had been hanging for nigh on a century.” The two experts arranged to have the painting exhibited in Amsterdam the following year, and notices, reproductions, and reviews of the exhibition were widely printed. The picture instantly became a true sensation for the art world. Remnants of Rembrandt's signature - “Rem... ” - were still visible at the bottom of the painting. Bredius, despite Bode's research, always considered the canvas his greatest discovery.7Only one dissenter questioned its authenticity. Alfred von Wurzbach, in the first volume of his 1906 encyclopaedia of Dutch painting, assigned the work rather to Aert de Gelder (1645-1727), one of the master's last students, who copied his later style but, as the dissident put it, could not compete with his use of colour. He called the picture A Tatar Rider and noted that de Gelder was enamoured of Oriental costume, but gave no further explanation, and was generally disregarded.8
Meanwhile, Tarnowski still hoped to sell the work. Knowing that sending such a great national treasure abroad would cause an uproar in Poland, the count hid the matter. In 1910, he decided to sell it through the Carfax Gallery in London and Knoedler and Co. in New York. The prospective buyer was Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), a steel, coke, and railway magnate, reviled for his merciless business practices and ruthless breaking of labour strikes. During the infamous Homestead Strike of 1892, which he pretty much provoked, ten men were killed and some sixty wounded, most of them poor immigrants - “foreigners” - many of them Poles, Slovaks, and other Slavs from central and eastern Europe.
Frick lived in Pittsburgh and from 1905 on in New York, where he built a home at East 70th Street and Fifth Avenue to house his exquisite collection of European Old Masters.
He purchased The Polish Rider through the mediation of Roger Fry, an English writer, painter, and art critic, who, at Tarnowski's insistence, went to Dzikow to finalize arrangements. Fry thought the castle and its furnishings “second rate,” but was stunned by the painting. He later told a colleague that a cord was pulled, a curtain was rolled back, and there before his eyes “was revealed one of the world's masterpieces of painting.” The agreed price for the work was £60,000, or $293,162.50, an enormous sum. Meanwhile, news of the sale was leaked to the press and became common knowledge in Poland, where the public was greatly aroused. Articles appeared in the press, and the Polish art historian Zygmunt/Sigismund Batowski, claiming great art as the property of the nation and lamenting the decline of appreciation for such art, objected to the sale in the Polish journal Lamus. The painting was exhibited in London on its way to New York, and a copy was made for the count. But in 1927 a fire broke out in Dzikow Castle, and part of the collection, including the copy, was destroyed. Had The Polish Rider remained in Galicia, it too might not have survived.9The assembling of the Frick collection and the arrival of this gem in New York stirred a new wave of publicity, including articles in the press and commemorative poems. In 1917, shortly before Frick's death, an article in a leading art magazine described the gallery and discussed the exotic and somewhat mysterious Polish Rider:
Who the young man is, no one knows, but his red cap with a thick border of fur, his long tunic of a pale yellow note secured by blue buttons, his close-fitting red breeches and yellow boots proclaim him a Pole or a Russian, a man of the Slavs to the eastward who furnished light cavalry to western armies, the forerunners of the Hussars... [The art historian] Bode thinks that he can specify the regiment to which he belonged - Prince Lisowski's: at any rate that is the name this picture bore when in Count Tarnowski's collection.
The author concluded: “Rembrandt rarely painted horses and among the immense number of his etchings there is scarcely one. Yet what a horse this is!... It is not the somewhat barbaric harness and garb of the horse rider, nor the stern landscape well in keeping with the light, that compels the attention and urges conjecture... it is the human being, the expression of the face which is pondering, if not exactly dreamy - but the look is decipherable.”10
Similar sentiments were expressed in poetry. As early as 1910, the Lotus Magazine reprinted F. Warre-Cornish's poem on “the Polish Rider” that had first appeared in the British journal the Spectator. With a direct reference to the Ottoman siege of Vienna and its relief by Jan III Sobieski in 1683, and an indirect allusion to the later partition of the country, he asked:
Does he ride to a bridal, a triumph, a dance, or a fray,
That he goes so alert, yet so careless, so stern and so gay?
Loose in the saddle, short stirrup, one hand on the mane
Of the light-stepping pony he guides with so easy a rein.
What a grace in his armor barbaric! Sword, battle-axe bow,
Full sheaf of arrows, the leopard-skin flaunting below.
Heart-conqueror, surely - his own is not given a while,
Till she comes who shall win for herself that inscrutable smile.
What luck had his riding, I wonder, romantic and bold?
For he rides into darkness; the story shall never be told:
Did he charge at Vienna, and fall in a splendid campaign?
Did he fly from the Cossack, and perish, ingloriously slain?
Ah, chivalrous Poland, forgotten, dishonored, a slave
To thyself and the stranger, fair, hapless, beloved of the brave!11
After Frick's death in 1919, in accordance with his will, his widow lived in their home till her death in 1931, after which it was converted into a museum, which finally opened in 1935, and The Polish Rider was there for all to see.
Stately Polish Ride:
From Stanislaw Augustus to Dzikow Castle (1793-1910)
In 1944, a Jewish refugee from German-occupied Europe, Julius S.
Held (1905-2002), who could read a little Polish, had done research in Poland, and in 1933 had even visited Dzikow Castle, penned the first extensive English-language study of the picture. Others followed.Research by these scholars and their Polish predecessors traced the provenance of The Polish Rider back to the end of the eighteenth century, when the multinational Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the great states of central and eastern Europe, was on its last legs. Its last king, Stanislaw Augustus Poniatowski, was a great patron of learning and the arts. His collection of European Old Masters was renowned, and he wished to expand it further. In August 1791, he received a letter from Michal Kazimierz Oginski (1728?-1800), grand hetman of Lithuania and a composer, writer, and poet of note:
Sire,
I am sending Your majesty a Cossack whom Reinbrand had set on his horse. [Odsylam Waszey Krolewskey Mosci kozaka ktorego Reinbrand osadzil na koniu...] This horse has eaten during his stay with me 420 German gulden. Your majesty's justice and generosity allows me to expect that orange trees will flower in the same proportion.
Bowing to your feet, Your Majesty's,
My Lord Master's most humble servant.
Michal Oginski,
G[rand] H[etman] of L[ithuania].12
The scholar who discovered this letter, Andrzej Ciechanowski, believed that since Oginski had spent much of the previous year in western Europe, including Holland, he had purchased the painting, which he called “Cossack on Horseback,” for the king's collection, in return for which he wanted some orange trees for the palace that he was building at Helenow near Warsaw. (The king possessed an orangery in the gardens of his Lazienki Palace in Warsaw.) Ciechanowski thinks that, apart from the suggested barter agreement, the letter is “whimsical,” and the reference to the “Cossack on Horseback” fanciful.
At any rate, the painting entered the king's collection, where it was labelled Cosaque a cheval.13 Nevertheless, many Poles blamed Ukrainian Cossacks and their insurrection of the 1640s and 1650s for the decline and fall of their Commonwealth, and as early as 1797 the king was referring to the painting as a portrait of a “Lisowczyk” - a soldier of the Lisowski company, a freebooting regiment of light cavalry often referred to as “Cossacks” in Polish service.
Its ranks included Poles, Ukrainians, and even some Tatars; it was disbanded in the 1630s.14By the end of the 1790s, the Third Partition of Poland had occurred, the Commonwealth had disappeared, and the king was dead. Some ten years later the monarch's niece and heir, Countess Therese Tyszkiewicz, ordered the sale and dispersal of the royal art collection. In 1810, while viewing its contents, Countess Valerie Tarnowska, nee Stroynowska, expressed a wish to buy this Lisowczyk, seeing in this “shining youth” not any lowly Cossack, but rather a noble condottiere from the Lisowski Regiment, perhaps even her distant relative Colonel Stanislaw Stroynowski, who commanded the regiment during the Thirty Years War. Therefore, argued Andrzej Ciechanowski, it was probably she who talked her uncle, the bishop of Vilnius, Hieronim Stroynowski, into buying the portrait for five hundred ducats - a huge sum.
Bishop Stroynowski purchased the painting from Prince Franciszek Ksawery Lubecki (1779-1846), who had saved it from falling into the hands of the firmly anti-Polish Russian plenipotentiary, Nikolai Novosiltsev (17611836), who wished to acquire as many Polish cultural treasures as possible. After the bishop's premature death in 1815, the so-called Lisowczyk was inherited by Valerie's father, Senator Valerien Stroynowski, and went from Vilnius to his castle at Horokhiv/Horochow in Volhynia in right-bank Ukraine (then under Russian rule). After the senator's death in 1834, it went to Dzikow in Austrian Galicia, the residence of Valerie Stroynowska and her husband, Count Jan Amor Tarnowski, where it remained until 1910.15
Although Lisowczyk was largely unknown to the Western world and to Western Rembrandt scholars before 1910, inside partitioned Poland it stirred up animated discussion. In the 1830s historian Dzieduszycki noted that the Lisowczyk forces had crossed the Rhine River twice, once in the early 1620s, when Rembrandt was fourteen, and again in 1636, when they even reached the Netherlands and one of them may have been sent to Amsterdam as an envoy and perhaps attracted the painter's attention. Dzie- duszycki speculated that Rembrandt painted his Lisowczyk about this time, although he thought it unlikely that the subject was Stroynowski himself.16 The expert's speculations influenced opinion in Poland for at least forty years, until Bode dated the work to Rembrandt's late period.
On the artistic level, two of the most successful nineteenth-century Polish painters of horses and battle scenes, Juliusz Kossak (1824-1899), whose name means “Cossack,” and Jozef Brandt (1841-1915), seem to have come under Lisowczyk's powerful spell. Brandt, who loved painting Cossacks and the Polish-Cossack and Polish-Tatar wars of the seventeenth century, which occurred while Rembrandt was flourishng, painted The March of the Lisowczyks (1863), Stroynowski Presenting Archduke Leopold Horses Seized by the Lisowczyks in the Rhine Palatinate (1869), and Lisowczyk (Bunczuczny) (1885), while Kossak rendered his own striking, though inferior Lisowczyk (1860-65), in direct imitation of Rembrandt. Other Polish artists inspired by the canvas include MichaI Pionski, A. Orlowski, and L. Kaplinski. Moreover, around mid-century the Piller lithographic firm in Galicia's capital, Lemberg/Lwow, printed Karol Auer's lithograph of Rembrandt's canvas. In the 1890s, an engraved interpretation of the painting appeared in Zygmunt Gloger's influential Encyklopedia Staropolska Illustrowana. “The portrait of the young ‘Polish Rider,'” concludes the art historian MichaI Walicki, “was the best-known Rembrandt picture in Poland.”17
The transfer of the masterpiece across the Atlantic occasioned grumbling in Poland and celebration in the United States, where it was almost universally deemed not a Lisowczyk but a somewhat more understandable and pronounceable “Polish Rider,” romantically linked in many people's minds, as Cornish's poem clearly shows, to the Polish struggle for independence. A generation later, however, this link was put into question by Julius Held's pioneering 1944 article in the prestigious Art Bulletin.18