While visiting the famous Tretyakov Gallery, which houses exclusively Russian paintings, we do not expect to see images of Polish poets, writers or aristocrats, and yet a careful observer sensitive to Polonica should not miss them!

The headline “POLOGNE”
In the picture „Newspaper Readers from Naples” by Orest Kipriensky we can see a group of four men engrossed in studying a copy of Gazette de France which carries a headline reading “POLOGNE”, while the background features a fuming Vesuvius - its explosion was considered a symbol of revolution. The combination of the headline in the French newspaper – “POLOGNE”, the inscription in the upper left-hand corner: “The year 1831” (written in Cyrillic script) and Vesuvius as a symbol of the outbreak of the revolution clearly indicates the topic of the painting: the November Uprising.

The explanation of reading this extraordinary paper and the expressive faces of the portrayed is their identity. The painting depicts Count Aleksander Potocki (holding a dog), next to him Adam Mickiewicz, Zygmunt Krasiński and Antoni Edward Odyniec or, according to other accounts, Stefan Garczyński. When the Uprising broke out they were staying in Italy together (mainly in Rome), and they were painted by their fellow traveller Orest Kiprienski, who was a conspirator and a Polish ally in the fight for independence. Mickiewicz set off from Italy to Poland to take part in the Uprising; he never got there, but it was in Italy that the idea of creating a national epic, „Pan Tadeusz”, first occurred to him.

The painting is a tribute of a Russian friend to Poles fighting for freedom, so it is well worth seeing while walking through the beautiful Tretyakov Gallery.