When visiting the famous Tretyakov Gallery - an exclusive collection of Russian paintings - one is unlikely to see images of Polish poets, writers or aristocrats, and yet an eye sensitive to polonies should not miss them!

POLOGNE headline
In the painting Readers of the Naples Newspapers by Orest Kiprienski, we see a group of men reading the Gazette de France with a headline proclaiming POLOGNE, with a smoking Vesuvius in the background of the portraits - its eruption was considered a symbol of the revolution. The combination of the title of the French newspaper, POLOGNE, and the clear date in the upper left corner: 1831 [in Cyrillic] and the symbol of the outbreak of the revolution, raises no doubt as to what is being referred to - the November Uprising, of course.

The explanation for this unusual reading and the anxious faces of the men is the representation of the portrayed, who are Count Aleksander Potocki (with a dog), next to him Adam Mickiewicz, Zygmunt Krasiński and Antoni Edward Odyniec or, according to other accounts, Stefan Garczyński. All of them were in Italy together at the time of the outbreak of the uprising (mainly in Rome), and were painted by a companion on their joint Italian journey, Kiprienski - a conspirator and ally of the Poles in the fight for freedom. It was from Italy that Mickiewicz set off for Poland to take part in the uprising, of course he never got there, but in Italy the idea of creating a national epic was born - Pan Tadeusz...
The painting is a tribute by a friend of the Muscovite to the Poles fighting for their freedom, so it is worth seeing this painting while wandering through the beautiful Tretyakov Gallery.

1831

Orest Adamovich Kiprienski (malarz) , Aleksander Stankiewicz (malarz) (aperçu)