Portrait of Count Stanislas Potocki

Jacques-Louis David was a major French painter and draughtsman of the Neo-Classical period. Known for his shifting political alliances,[1] David was a prolific portraitist whose patrons included "enlightened middle class and aristocracy".[2] In his paintings, David "championed a style of rigorous contours, sculpted forms, and polished surfaces".[1] Between 1775 and 1780, he lived in Rome where his work was influenced by the paintings of Italian High Renaissance and early Baroque masters, prompting David to gradually abandon the dominant French style of Rococo in favor of classical forms.[3] His visit to Naples in 1779 is said to have further cemented the artist's commitment to Neo-Classicism.[3]

Anton Graff, Stanisław Kostka Potocki, 1785 (Wilanow Palace Museum)

Potocki came from a Polish noble family using the Pilawa coat of arms, the son of Eustachy Potocki and Marianna Kątska.[4] After losing both parents in 1768, he was cared for by his aunt Katarzyna Kossakowska.[4] Between 1772–1775, he traveled extensively around Europe, visiting Italy, France, Switzerland and Germany.[4] During that time, he developed a strong interest in architecture and art, particularly classical antiquity.[5] In 1776, he married Aleksandra née Lubomirska, a member of the Lubomirski aristocratic Polish family, and began his political activity in 1778 as a deputy to the Sejm of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from the Lublin Voivodeship.[4]

Potocki reportedly first met David in Italy during the artist's 1779-1780 Grand Tour.[6] This came during the twenty-year period between the First (1772) and Second (1793) Partitions of Poland, a moment of great political decline for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Potocki was a prominent patriot and would go on to serve as a general during the Polish–Russian War of 1792.[7] In addition to being a nobleman and a statesman, Potocki was an avid art collector and translated Johann Joachim Winckelmann's seminal 1764 work titled History of the Art of Antiquity into Polish.[8]

David, Sketch of Equestrian Portrait of Stanislaw Kostka Potocki, 1780 (National Library of Poland)

While Potocki's travels to Italy between 1779 and 1780, as well as his subsequent encounter with Jacques-Louis David, have been well documented, the exact circumstances of the portrait's commission remain a subject of scholarly debate. Some art historians propose that Potocki directly requested David to paint his portrait, paying 3,600 French livres for the piece.[6][9] Conversely, a collection catalogue published by the Potocki family in 1834 mentioned that "the portrait was completed in Paris after a sketch made from life in the Naples riding School".[10][Note 1]

This version of events was later confirmed by David's grandson, Jacques-Louis-Jules David, who in 1880 published an album titled Le peintre Louis David 1748–1825 celebrating the artist's oeuvre. He claimed that Ferdinand IV of Naples commissioned the painting in 1780 after Potocki had visited him in Naples.[11] According to Jacques-Louis-Jules, Potocki impressed the king and artist by taming a wild horse during a hunting trip, leading Ferdinand to request an equestrian portrait from David.[11] This led some scholars to believe that David had begun painting the work in Rome in 1780 before finishing it in Paris in 1781 and exhibiting it at the Salon of the same year.[10]

Jacques-Louis David, An Antique Sculpture of a Horse, 1780, graphite laid on paper (National Gallery of Art)

In the 1960s, Polish art historian Andrzej Ryszkiewicz contested this narrative, citing insufficient historical evidence.[12] While Ryszkiewicz's claim influenced art historical research into the origins of the work in the subsequent decades, a 2019 conservation report from the Museum of King Jan III's Palace in Wilanów lent credibility to the account of David's grandson.[13] The report analyzed contemporary x-rays of the original painting and an early modello of the composition—a preparatory study drawing initially believed to be a 19th-century sketch. The drawing portrays Potocki adorned with the Order of St. Stanislaus ribbon, awarded in 1780, rather than the Polish Order of the White Eagle, which he received in 1781. These findings led researchers to conclude that the 1780 drawing was an original work by David, created in Naples. Additionally, the x-rays exposed red paint beneath the existing blue ribbon, further substantiating the notion that the painting's initial design was meant to showcase the Order of St. Stanislaus.[13]

Anthony van Dyck, Equestrian Portrait of Thomas Francis, Prince of Carignano, 1634 (Galleria Sabauda, Turin)

Detail of the 1781 painting by David showing the artist's signature inscribed on the dog's collar

David depicts Potocki on horseback against a grey wall on top of which two classical columns are placed. While the "straw underneath the horse's hooves" might indicate that the scene takes place in a stable, "the stately architecture in the background suggests an imaginary scene".[10] Potocki is depicted with no coat. Only the blue sash of the Polish Order of the White Eagle, the country's highest civilian order, indicates his rank. He is dressed in "finest" clothes,[2] wearing yellow pants and a white shirt, and seen pulling off his hat to as a form of greeting as the horse bows down. In the lower left-hand corner, a dog is seen barking at the horse.[2] The background of a blank wall is unusual, but not unprecedented. Most of David's smaller portraits had solid backgrounds in brown or another darker color.[14]

The portrait has been described as one of David's masterpieces,[15] showing his "rapid response to a glamorous sitter"[16] and marking the return to equestrian portraiture in European late 18th-century painting.[17] Lorenz Eitner notes the influences of two 17th-century Flemish Baroque painters, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, in David's 1781 portrait and argues that the painting "offers a premonition of the manner in which [David] was later to treat modern, national subjects".[18] According to Antoine Schnapper, the painting recalls van Dyck's equestrian portrait of Thomas Francis, Prince of Carignano from 1634, a sketch of which David had completed prior to painting the Polish nobleman.[10][Note 2]

He also claims that the "horse's forequarters correspond to a tapestry fragment of Decius Mus, after Rubens", which had been copied by David and later exhibited at the Louvre.[10] This sentiment was partially echoed by the American art historian Robert Rosenblum who described the horse in Potocki's portrait as a "Rubensian stallion".[15] When the discussing the painting, scholar Charlotte Guichard points out the unusual signature of the artist in the Portrait of Count Stanislas Potocki, which is painted on the dog's golden collar in the lower left hand corner of the composition. She further suggests that by "breaking dynamically into the space of representation, David’s glittering name shines forth, catching the light and the viewer’s attention".[19]

According to scholar Allison Lee Palmer contends that the painting might symbolize the "prerevolutionary debate" of whether the nobility were "superior merely by blood or also of mind".[2] Also referencing the work's possible political iconography, this time in the context of Eastern European representation in late 18th-century Western art, historian Larry Wolff asserts that the Portrait of Count Stanislas Potocki invokes the concept of "horsemanship" to represent civilization.[20] He notes that the "the Polish nobleman astride a perfectly poised, intensely muscled horse, head bent in submission beneath a dramatic mane" is depicted with great discipline, illustrating the "taming and harnessing" of an Eastern European subject.[20] Moreover, the French art historian Philippe Bordes argues that David's painting of Count Stanislas Potocki is an example of a portrait illustrating a society icon by an artist "determined to climb the social ladder".[16]

David, Belisarius Begging for Alms, 1781 (Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille) was exhibited alongside Portrait of Count Stanislas Potocki at the Paris Salon in 1781

Historical records reveal that David started working on the Portrait of Count Stanislas Potocki in Rome and departed for Paris on July 17, 1780. In Paris, he finished the painting and displayed it at the 1781 Salon.[21] The exhibition was David's Salon debut, after he had been conditionally admitted to Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture.[9] Potocki's portrait was shown alongside Belisarius Begging for Alms, Saint Roch Interceding with the Virgin for the Plague-Stricken,The Funeral Games of Patroclus, and a composition titled A Woman suckling her child, all of which were praised by the French Enlightenment philosopher and prominent writer Denis Diderot.[22] When discussing Potocki's portrait, Diderot singled out David's light color palette, which stood in contrast to history paintings completed by the artist during the same period.[10]

[David] displays the grand manner in everything he does. He has soul, his heads have expression without affectation, his attitudes are noble and natural, he draws, he knows how to arrange drapery and make handsome folds, his color is beautiful (...)

— Denis Diderot, On David's paintings at the 1781 Paris Salon[23]

Although Belisarius Begging for Alms has been said to receive the highest amount of praise from contemporary critics,[24] Portrait of Count Stanislas Potocki has since been described as one of the paintings that "cemented David's success."[25] David's debut at the 1781 Salon proved to be an important artistic milestone and helped to establish him as "the most promising painter of the rising generation."[26] Following its display in Paris, the equestrian portrait of Stanisław Kostka Potocki was sent to Warsaw, although the precise timeline remains uncertain.[Note 3] Existing records indicate that it was transferred to Wilanów Palace, a former royal residence near Warsaw owned by Potocki, on December 5, 1801.[13] The Baroque palace and its accompanying gardens, originally built for king John III Sobieski and his wife Marie Casimire Louise de La Grange d'Arquien in 1681–1696, was inherited by Izabela Lubomirska, the sister of Potocki's wife Aleksandra, in 1778.[27]

Wincenty Kasprzycki, View of the Wilanów Palace from the Park, (National Museum in Warsaw) shows the wing of the palace in which David's painting was shown before 1834

The ownership of Wilanów was transferred to Potocki in 1799, who would amass a significant collection of European and East Asian art. David's portrait of Potocki was placed on the eastern wall of the Great Hall (now White Hall) of the palace. Four years later, the collection was officially opened to the public, becoming one of the first public art museums in Poland.[13][28] In 1831, fearing possible Russian looting as a result of the November Uprising, the portrait of Potocki was evacuated to Warsaw where it remained un 1834.[13] Placed on public display at the palace until 1864, it was then moved to private quarters to become part of the Potocki family portrait collection put together by August Potocki, Stanisław's grandson. In 1877, Aleksandra Potocka, August's widow, published an illustrated catalogue of the Wilanów collection, which included a reproduction of David's portrait of Stanisław Kostka Potocki.[13]

David's Portrait of Count Stanislas Kostka Potocki on display at Wilanów Palace in 2019 following conservation

The ownership of the palace and the collection was subsequently passed to the Branicki family in 1892.[10] In 1913, it was featured in David's retrospective titled David et ses Eleves at Petit Palais in Paris.[24] In 1932, the portrait, along with several other works by David, was shown at the Exhibition of French Art 1200–1900, an extensive and highly publicized survey show of French art across seven centuries, organized at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.[29] During the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Portrait of Count Stanislas Potocki was looted by the German forces, then passed into Soviet Russian hands after the war, before being repatriated to Poland (by then, the Soviet-aligned Polish People's Republic) in 1956.[10] Subsequently, the portrait was placed in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw.[7]

In 1990, after the fall of communism in Poland, the work was transferred back to Wilanów, then part of the National Museum in Warsaw, and placed on public display.[7] In 1995, the palace became an independent national museum and in 2013, it was renamed Museum of King John III's Palace at Wilanów, where David's painting remains on view. In 2016, after undergoing extensive conservation, the painting was moved from the North Hall to the White Hall, its original location during the early 1800s.[7]