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Lot 35
Description:
Polish School, late 18th/early 19th c., "Sarmatian - Portrait of a Noble Lady at Her Sewing", oil on canvas, unsigned, 42 in. x 32 in., in an antique giltwood frame, bearing the supplier's label of F.Karsch, Breslau (Wroclaw).
- Notes: Note: This is a classic-and very rare-Polish noble portrait in the "Sarmatian" taste, that is a regional (indeed self-consciously nationalistic) fashion purporting to reflect cultural values descending from the ancient Sarmatians, lionized as a local population who heroically withstood the military power of the Roman Empire. In this last stage of the two-century development of the style, Polish painters concentrated on large, decorative areas of bright color against dark grounds, within an overall linearity concentrating on expressiveness of features and hair, as well as splendor of costume. The more than usually accomplished treatment of this vivacious image may possibly suggest some relationship to the work of Johann Josef Karl Henrici (1737-1823), an artist native to ilesia-the province of which Wroclaw, or Breslau, is the capital-whose fashionable court scenes of 1787 in the Slovenian National Gallery display suggestive analogies of form and handling. A yet more intimate parallel is afforded by the 1792 "Portrait of Victoria Madalinska" (the wife of a general associated with Kosciuszko), by Józef Faworski (fl. 1790-1805), in the National Museum, Warsaw, with closely related costume, features, and coiffure. To judge from the Directoire or early Regency severity of this depicted furniture, however (whose chair reflects 1790s London types, while a precisely identical twin to this table's gilded rosette appears in an Austrian painting of "Countess von Auersperg" by Jožef Tominc of the late 1810s), this depiction may date from c. 1800, or the first years of the 19th century. References: Bozena Steinborn, "Poland: Painting and Graphic Arts," The Dictionary of Art (Grove, London, 1996), vol. 25, p. 105; Jan Bialostocki, "Sarmatism [Sarmatianism]," ibid., v. 27, pp. 842-3; Agni eszka Morawinska, et al., Nineteenth Century Polish Painting (Warsaw, 1988), pp. 34-35 no. 6 (Faworski); Federico Zeri and Ksenija Rozman, European Paintings: Catalogue of the ... National Gallery (Ljubljana, 2000), pp. 162-4, nos. 104-105 (Henrici); Barbara Jaki, et al., Jožef Tominc (Ljubljana, 2002), pp. 76-7, no. 2
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October 11, 2008 10:00 AM CDT
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