Helena d'Abancourt de Franqueville's article 'Piotr Michałowski (from a monograph)' in the journal Fine Arts,1931, no. 8-9, pp. 289-324 describing the life and work of Piotr Michałowski contains three reproductions of his works found in European museums. These are the watercolour 'Posttylion' from the Musée Curtius in Liège and two oil paintings in the Vienna Belvedere - 'Blue Hussars' and 'Horse Market'.

A modernised reading of the text

Piotr Michałowski (from his monograph).

PIOTR MICHAŁOWSKI is a completely unique and seemingly isolated phenomenon against the background of the artistic Polish relations of his contemporaries. This personage, connected with the Polish society with a keen sense of national and social moments, stands out in an incomparable way in terms of his feeling, understanding, grasping and captivation of artistic forms. With his attitude to art or artistic expression and artistic form, he was decades ahead of the notions and forms dormant in us. In addition to this, he is an individual, one of the typical spiritual individualities that usually appear at the turn of major historical periods, whose sense of the need to act gives rise to a certain versatility of interests and activities.

Rastawiecki says about him that "it happened that those who did not know him at close quarters divided him in their opinion into several persons, understanding that he was not one and the same Michałowski, but that there were many of them: a great philologist, a distinguished leader in the national mining industry, an excellent administrator, a rural farmer, and finally a painter of the first rank. There is something of the lush Renaissance individuality in this character, richly endowed spiritually and intellectually, and extravagant in multiple deeds. Of all these, it is understood, individual distinctions of Michałowski, we are primarily concerned here with his face and artistic character. His characteristic desire for continuous education, acquiring knowledge and various skills did not weaken his artistic temperament, but added to his interest in visual phenomena, making him all the sharper, all the more skilful, all the more determined to observe and grasp the phenomena of movement, colour and line.

A wide-ranging momentum, reaching into the essence of the phenomenon, becomes, as I said, completely isolated on the horizon of Polish contemporary art. In the West, various currents and artistic approaches of the 18th century are struggling: Academism, displaced by the classicising template, which gives way to the truth of seeing and grasping the phenomenon the simplicity of everyday life develops alongside the heroic artistic gesture, in turn illuminated by Romanticism with a kind of unravelled poetry. Technically, on the one hand, an artistic expression based on line and drawing is already beginning to emerge, while on the other, it is opposed by a direction supporting the development of stain and colour. These aspirations contend with each other simultaneously and successively, create movement, new life and cause development.

In Poland, at the moment of the cultural and intellectual development of the artist, there is still no question of a movement independent of established forms, of an individual approach to a phenomenon or form. After the splendid and colourful court art of the 18th century, which already reeked of a certain formalism, a certain broader interest in all phenomena, and not only in the individual manifestations of life, is beginning to emerge. Everyday life, under the influence of Norblin de la Gourdaine, attracts attention and artistic observation, but the best artists do not get out from under a certain pattern of forms. On the horizon, Orłowski, who owes much to Norblin in terms of thematic freedom, and who himself is full of a keen sense and grasp of the truth in phenomena, while filtering them heavily through caricature, is well-known and highly regarded.

By means of a certain preoccupation with this direction, he partly even loses the sense of the individuality of a phenomenon, and in time creates a kind of template for his own depiction of movement, silhouette and types. His horses even acquire a certain mannered showiness. There are enough contemporary painters, let us recall Franciszek and Jan Lampich, Peszka, a professor of painting at the Jagiellonian University until 1831, all still working in the 18th century tradition, there is also an academic stencil in an antique plaster and copies of Józef Brodowski, a believer; there is Stachowicz, a talented non-nuke, who was capable of producing huge canvases, which today can make us delighted with the value of family heirlooms. There is the talented Płoński, Piwarski, Suchodolski in Lviv, a poor imitator of Horace Vernet, Statler, a colleague of Micha³owski, and many others, more or less mediocre.

All of them pursue the same goals, within the same framework, which does not expand in any interesting way. There is no sense of a broader struggle, nor of extraordinary artistic assumptions. All of them use a similar artistic expression, differing in the degree of drawing skill, brightness or submergence of colour. This was the moment in which Piotr Michałowski grew up. In spite of the not very distant past in which our artist lived and worked, we encounter great difficulties in retrieving source material in the form of correspondence and notes which were destroyed by fires and the last war, both in the artist's personal estates, Krzysztoporzyce and Bolestraszyce, and in the estates of his relatives.

What has survived is quite scarce and can only serve as some help in establishing biographical facts. These include, among others, the letters of Michałowski's wife to his brother Ostrowski, in the beautiful collection in H. Ostrowski's Ujazd. The main source so far, however, has been an article by Paweł Popiel in Czas 1855, dated 7 June. In addition, a study by Professor Jerzy Mycielski, who was closely connected with the family, is valuable, but the main source, especially in the case of lost materials, is a partly used monograph by the artist's daughter, Celina, and son-in-law Łempicki.

It is interesting that even establishing the date of birth encounters a variety of data: 1800 and 1801. Sticking to the date given by his daughter, Piotr Michałowski was born on 2 July 1801 in Krakow, not in Warsaw, as stated in the catalogue of the Exhibition of Polish Art Lviv 1896. He came from an old Jasieńczyk family with deep traditions. He was the son of Józef Micha łowski, an exemplary citizen and landlord, and Tekla née Morsztyn, whose simplicity and cheerfulness exerted an outstanding influence on all his surroundings, especially the artist, who used to confide his hopes and intentions to her.

Talking about Michałowski, it is impossible, as in the case of many other artists of a single individuality, to limit oneself only to listing the phenomena strictly connected with the field of art. In contrast to those, art was not the only interest that indivisibly filled Michałowski's life. His occupations and interests were manifold, and they stemmed both from his temperament and the sense of duties imposed on him by his family or social life; they diversified his life and actions, without, however, suppressing his artistic inclinations, but entered and intertwined with his life of art.

His thoughts and artistic ideas were actively rooted in him, regardless of his occupation; his thoughts and eyes were constantly strained towards an artistic approach to external phenomena, and his interests outside art only seemed to fuel his artistic momentum even more. His home and surroundings gave him the atmosphere and mental mood which his works breathed. His first home education protected him from the prevailing Germanness of the schools. Home sustained a patrjotic mood, hopeful for the national future, closely linked to the figure of Napoleon, idolised and heroically over-idealised.

The passage of Prince Józef Poniatowski through Kraków in 1809 becomes an indelible memory for the young boy, as does meeting General Dąbrowski, who, during the march, lives in Kraków for a few days at the home of Piotr's grandmother, Mrs Podkomorzyna Michałowska, in a house near the Capuchin garden. We mention these experiences because they had a strong thematic and creative echo in the artist's development as a painter. His early and further life was essentially connected with Kraków. Here, at the age of 14, he passes his secondary school leaving examinations brilliantly, shows his musical abilities as a composer, draws and paints with an acrylic pencil. Already at that time, he showed great skill with pencil and brush, copying a painting by Orłowski, depicting some Hetman on horseback, so well that the commission of the School of Fine Arts could hardly distinguish it from the original.

In Cracow he also attends university, having chosen for his studies the natural sciences, mainly mineralogy and mathematics. This tendency does not surprise us at all when we see this researcher's flair and temperament alongside the artist's fantasy in his works and drawing studies. Initially, he studied painting under Stachowicz, then under Brodowski, but he benefited most from Franciszek Lampfgo, who commuted from Warsaw to Krakow and spent the time between November 1817 and July 1818 here. Michałowski, avoiding the social hubbub that surrounded the fashionable artist, painted in his atelier behind the curtain, taking advantage of Lam piego's advice given to others. Michałowski's life was not only rich in varied pursuits and passion, but also busy.

He was abroad many times, coming into direct contact with the achievements of Western cultures at an early age. In 1818, he spent several weeks in Vienna, visiting galleries and museums. On his return, driven not only by a certain anxiety to acquire knowledge, but also a desire to become useful to his country, he abandoned his natural sciences and devoted himself with enthusiasm to philology, mainly classical philology. In 1821, he travelled to Göttingen, via Dresden and Leipzig, where he stayed. In Göttingen, at the flourishing university, he studied mainly law and politics. He also studied philology, literature and the Greek, English, Spanish, Arabic and Persian languages. She does not neglect painting. In his free time, he draws a lot, mostly military scenes.

He makes a trip to Hanover on the occasion of the visit of English King George IV. and despite the difficulties, makes interesting sketches of the colourful Hanoverian army. On his return to Poland in 1823 1823, he enters public service in Warsaw at Duke Lucki's Treasury Commission, devoting himself to arduous work with enthusiasm. The military parades of Grand Duke Constantine gave him the opportunity for many sketches. He also painted many family portraits. In 1825, for the sake of his health, he travels to Italy and Switzerland, as Lêtowski says: "with his pencils in hand".

He also studied the state of agriculture and industry in the countries he visited, and sketched whatever came before his eyes. On his return to Poland, he wrote a dissertation on mining in Styria, and in 1826 Duke Lubecki entrusted him with the control of mining establishments. 1826 to inspect the mines, appointing him in 1827 head of the ironworks department. * Michałowski encountered great difficulties and even annoyances in the performance of his duties at that time, so, as Fr Lêtowski writes, "seeking relief in his favourite pencil", he enthusiastically drew the Polish army. At the beginning of 1830, he was sent to France, where he studied metallurgical and industrial relations, reporting back on them.

The result of five years of intensive work was "factories in the flourishing state in which they were found in 1830, he leaves an administration inspired by his spirit, i.e. the spirit of work, order, and devotion to the public good, he leaves a mining school and the huge factories on the banks of the River Bobra. * The National Council of the November Uprising appoints him a member of the Government Commission, de legated to the Government Forges, where arms are made under his direction, as in Sta rachowice and Białogon. After the uprising he goes to live with his father near Kraków, and having fulfilled what seemed to him to be a national duty and feeling absolved from further compulsory necessities for the time being, he turns indivisibly to art in the impulse of his deepest inclinations. In March 1832 he went to Paris.

Here, in the great global temple of art, the most varied artistic currents ran, as we have already noted, and crossed and coalesced, as always trampling over with novelty the old, preceding them, theories proclaiming new ideas and inclinations, or rather, most often not new, but sometimes borrowed from completely opposite to the general contemporary current, closer or further artistic realisations of the past. These currents, each capturing only a part of an artistic phenomenon and statement, unknowingly complemented each other in their further development, but now consciously fought each other. By then, the influence of David, who reacted against academism by introducing the template of pseudo-classicism of antiquity, resurrecting the silhouettes of Roman figures, form and the template of gesture, drapery and groupings, borrowed from vases and classical reliefs, was dying out.

His influence was fierce on form, overshadowing and suppressing colour. His voluntary exile to Brussels in 1815 further accelerated the new reaction that came out of the very studios of David's disciples, like Baron Gros. Gæricault, who was no longer alive at the time of Michałowski's arrival, but whose approach and understanding of art triggered the battle painting of painters who were also passionate about horses, such as Charlet, Raffet and others, may have contributed most to the liberation of a more vivid sense of movement and gesture, to a more confident turn towards truth, with a break with the stencil, to the brightening of colour.

In the wide area of artistic production in Paris, apart from the emergence of various individualities, we can see, strongly marked from time to time in the evolution of artistic forms, two fundamental and different approaches to them, imposing themselves either by the flow of the line or the massing of the patch. It is at this point that line and drawing, as represented by Ingres, strictly define artistic shape. Under the influence of the Middle Ages, and in the Renaissance mainly under the impression of Raphael, the artist closes the artistic shape with the course of line and drawing, bringing out the calm undulation of movement. The issue of colour, however, is inherently foreign to him, colour is the filling in of the space delineated by the line, but the artist does not use it as a means of construction. The artistic expression of Eugene Delacroix, a Romantic in the full sense of the word, is based on colour and its differentiation.

He appears decisively in the years 1830, in which also Ingres spreads his activity, which is contrary and not favourable to him. Delacroix wins the admiration of some connoisseurs, and the opposition of others, by painting the opposite of Ingres. The temperamental and broad sweep of his pencil creates effects in tones which are often gloomy, brightened by a full colour or subdued by the juxtaposition of its various shades. Dela croix did not open a studio, although he had numerous followers and imitators. Of the artists active in France or Rome at the time, we should recall Rosa Bon heur, Horace Vernet and many others.

At such a moment Michałowski arrived in Paris and turned to the one who was close to him both in terms of his artistic interests and his love for horses: Charlet, the heir of Géricault or, as art historians call him, Beranger of painting. Michałowski arrives at the French painter's studio not as an untrained pupil, but as an artist adept at observing and projecting an artistic impression. Familiar with the horse, which was his real and realistic love, and which he had already observed and sketched at the time, he immediately took a prominent position in the atelier. By casting an instant sketch of a lancer on horseback, he gained from the point of view of admitting even precedence over Vernet and the late Géricault.

Charlet's studio was an ideal environment for our artist. Apart from Charlet's personal and social qualities, which facilitated cooperation, he was able, by making friends with military men, to acquire types, figures, military uniforms and, above all, horses for his studio at any time. The studio, bubbling with life, love of art, wit, became an atmosphere even more exciting for the artistic and so lush tempera ment of our artist. He works 14 hours a day. From Fontainebleau, he moves to Paris from his father-in-law Ostrowski so as not to waste time.

He leaves the studio only to study the anatomy of a horse in the town's slaughterhouses or for Louvre, where he sketched or copied the masterpieces of the old masters. And he was interested in those who were approached by the new direction, who wanted to follow in the traditions David had broken: The Italian Renaissance, especially the Venetians, the Dutch and Hi szpanja. The unfettered freedom of the Charlet School gave Michałowski, with the ease of acquiring a model, the opportunity to develop his independent talent. Michałowski paints and draws with enthusiasm scenes from current life, in which the horse plays the main role, horse fairs, stagecoaches, loaded carts, Normandy horses, harnesses. He makes sketches of the figure of Napoleon and carves him in sculpture on horseback; Marshal Soult and General Favier expressed that they had seen nothing more like the Emperor.

The sculpture was cast from bronze by the gisernik P. Debrau in 1846, and the Ministry was to purchase it for distribution. According to the testimony of Rastawiecki and the artist's daughter, Charlet, appreciating the high knowledge of the horse's anatomy and drawing, often sought his advice and copied his horses for his paintings. An illustration of his friendly relationship with the French artist is Charlet's letter to Micha³owski from 1833, informing him of a commission for a painting from him, with which Jules Didot, the well-known great printer, intended to approach him.

In 1837 his carefree and undivided devotion to art was interrupted when he took over the administration of the estate after his father's death, and despite the complaints of outsiders that he would waste his talent for painting and would not be able to manage it, he multiplied the harvest, raised cattle and horses, and did not give up painting. He set up an atelier in the countryside with a device for lifting horses on straps, and his anatomical knowledge of horses helped him to purchase the most beautiful specimens, before buying them he had to first sketch each one, discovering in this way the faults and advantages of the horse. In these times, he painted and drew wandering old men, soldiers, the people of Cracow, etc. In 1838, we see him for a while in Vienna, as testified by a letter he wrote.

Letters from 1840 and 1843 from Vienna show him staying there again and visiting his beloved old masters in their galleries. In 1840 he moved to Bolestraszyce in the Przemyskie region, where his farm was flourishing and his sketches of paintings and drawings multiplied. According to his biographers, the nature of his surroundings and relations, sketches of oxen, bulls, horses from his own stud and from the neighbouring stud, Jews, portraits of Duke Leon Sapieha, Maksymiljan Oborski, the fair in Mościski, or in various horse compositions, we can see movement, vibrating, everyday, direct life, which, it is understood, is connected with a certain unfinishedness of the painting and a certain broader technical treatment.

The Horse Market in the Belvedere in Vienna also dates from these years, depicting horses in wide projections, restless in their movements, dissimilar in nothing, though similar in the treatment of Gericault's subjects, e.g. the horses in the painting Entrance to the Acfeifi Marina: calmly posing in their procession. The juxtaposition of these two individualities is not intended to deny certain influences of one on the other, but to confine them to a more thematic field. How different is Michałowski in his finished watercolour from the Musée Curtius in Lièges, depicting a "postilion" with two harnessed horses, of an earlier date, perhaps 1834 in Paris, i.e. a time more susceptible to foreign influence, and yet although the horses are standing and resting, they are alive in this movement, they are not posing, they are vibrating as if with the calm circulation of blood under the skin, brought out by the transparent, broad and light projection of watercolour paint. One of the details that distinguish Michałowski above all from his French contemporaries is his simplicity in the face of their certain artificiality.

Guido Chmarzyński rightly says in his article" that Michałowski "has a better feel for the horse than the French.... the French artist always styles the horse.... Michalowski depicts things as he sees them.... this absolute moment allows us to speak of Michałowski as a Polish artist...". We can still supplement these assertions with further observations of fundamental differences. One of the details that, moreover, distinguish Michałowski from the French is, above all, the strong anecdotalism motivating the subject in the painting, which in Michałowski's case was limited to a mini mum. It is not the anecdote of the subject that occupies him, but the phenomenon of life itself.

It is understandable that Michałowski is more in tune with the whole pleiad of French battle painters than with domestic ones, but it is precisely with his simplicity and this lack of anecdote that he differs from Gericault, Charlet, Swebach Desfontain, Horace Vernét and others, and even from the Romantic colourist but symbolist Delacroix, whose panache and projection are also closely linked with te ma to w motivation. With the latter he would share a certain commonality of darkened colour and the differentiation of colour with its own tones. But there can be no question of influence, as some seem to think. Alien to our artist's thoroughly painterly temperament, his symbolism and the aforementioned anecdotalism creeping into his painting subjects. If he had had some affinities or artistic sympathies with Delacroix, Michałowski would not have written from Paris in 1846, the year of Delacroix's already established importance, who at that time was the object of both great honours and fierce attacks:

"The French are slipping more and more into a true feeling of beauty and truth. And how many ugly, incorrigible images are contained in the golden Versailles?".

If he had been struck by it to such an extent that it would have left some mark on his work, he would not have refrained from a certain mention of it. On the other hand, the techniques of other, earlier artists drew his attention and observation at a time of his artistic maturation. He is first and foremost the broad, fully Renaissance Velasquez, As early as 1838 from Vienna, he writes;

"An hour spent in admiring two portraits by Van Dyck and especially the sight of an incomparable portrait by Velasquez enlightened me in the attitude of many difficulties!".

This impression continues, as we can see from a letter from Amsterdam 1846, in which, with a snarky expression about the Dutch school, he states that:

"Velasquez, of whom there are several pictures here, also approaches this school by the naivety and sublime simplicity of his brush".

Of the Dutch then, his painting of Potter mainly draws attention, of which he writes:

"I have found a solution to almost all the difficulties that the execution of life-size animals can present. It is a bold, broad way of rendering detail without detracting from the whole effect. No one has grasped nature in such a way as he has, and to this I shall henceforth adhere".

Here, then, in Potter rather than in any French artist, he took his cue from the broad brushwork of the last nine years. Velasquez and his simplicity of brush, appealing to the innate artistic simplicity of Mi chalovski, also contributed to the luminous and colourful brightness of our artist's portraits and studies of this last epoch of his activity. However, we have to come back to our initial statement that Michałowski, more than any other artist, from the very beginning had a rich and highly varied potential for evolutionary development, ever newer and fresher, in his progress and search for new ways both in nature and in the techniques of other masters.

However, for him, the most reliable, the most profound source of science was nature, and in it the relationship between the phenomena of form and light. And it is precisely this evaluation of the observed phenomenon as a finished image, and of light as the main factor in it, that places him as an early progenitor of the Impresjoni sts. It seems to be one of them who seems to have penned Michalowski in 1845 from Paris:

"nothing teaches massing like the sun".

.Numerous sunny studies of his rural types, cast in pure colour spots and in the collection of Count Michałowski in Krzysztoporzyce (p. 316). Around the years 18351838 the modeling of the portrait is differentiated by the planes of colour spots; the colour is darkened in brown tones, the face is lightened with toned spots, a type of this excellent portrait of a man no. 135390 in the National Museum in Kraków and with less differentiation of spots Portrait of a man in the collection of the Ja zło wieckie convent of the Congregation of Women Religious. SS. Immaculate. Pocz", whose eyes, realistically rendered, seem to glow with absorbed light, which the artist achieved masterfully by covering the eyes with green umber.

Some types of seated grandfathers, no. 121361 and no. 1102 in Muz. Nar. Krak. In the years 1840 and later, as we have already pointed out above, his form changes, the mo deline becomes broader as a result of less accentuated chiaroscuro, facial details change, the Velasquez-like colouring becomes lighter and more strongly coloured. Michalowski then uses burnt sjenna as a base, or in lighter reds, puzzles. In his handling of the stain, we find a certain alternation of brush touches with longer and more continuous brush strokes.

The eyes are marked mostly with dark, unexposed spots. From this time comes a beautiful portrait of her daughter (later S. Celina) at the age of a child, dating from around 1843, from Jazłowiecki's collection (p. 317). The light colouring of the face, the broad modelling with delicate blotches, the dark eyes and hair and the red bow, the wide brushstroke, all create a colourful and strong appearance in the Velasqiiez type. To this type we can refer the Portrait of a Man in White, from the Jazłowiecki collection, a series of five Jewish heads, the Portrait and the Head of a Peasant in the Krakowski National Museum.

The paintings of the last era are treated more and more extensively; the brushstroke becomes more continuous from one attack to the next, massaging the details of the whole more and more vigorously and generally. As a result of this momentum, the silhouette of the horse in the painting becomes more powerful, and although it grew out of an Arabian model and its line preserved the grace of movement, so closely related to that breed, its shape, as a result of the acceleration of the penis, becomes enormous, so that it becomes some kind of heavy, phenomenal steed, although the model was an Arabian, e.g. Beniszar, as in the oil painting Napoleon on a horse in a rush, owned by Mr Dominik £empicki in Warsaw.

This painting, full of a menacing mood, is the final and powerful synthetic expression of a whole series of numerous sketches of this figure. It was completed/ as we can see from the letter, in the year 184Ó. The figure of Napoleon, menacing, looking ahead with mysterious, dark eyes, seems to be stretching the frame of the painting and leaning out of the darkroom into space (200 X 260 cm.). The figure of Napoleon was of particular interest to Michałowski.

There is no large collection that does not contain his Napoleonic sketches in pencil, pen, oil paint or watercolour, or a larger, finished composition depicting him riding a horse and throwing a command and summons behind him with his right outstretched hand. Others put him at ease, surveying the waiting army in order. One also senses in Micha the hunter one of the enthusiastic singers of the colourful Napoleonic epic. From this era of 1846 and later comes also the equestrian oil Portrait of a Daughter.