Jan Piotr Norblin

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Jan Piotr Norblin. Self-portrait.

Hanging of traitors at Warsaw's Old Town Market, a contemporary painting by Jan Piotr Norblin. The supporters of the Targowica Confederation, responsible for the second partition of Poland, became public enemies. If they could not be apprehanded, their portraits were hanged instead.

Jan Piotr Norblin de la Gourdaine (French: Jean Pierre) (15 July 1740 - 23 February 1830) was a French-born painter, draughtsman, engraver, drawing artist and caricaturist. From 1774 until 1804 he resided in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where he gained a citizenship. He is considered to be one of the most important painters of the Polish Enlightenment. His success in Poland was enormous, with great commissions from the finest families, and he did not return to Paris until early in the nineteenth century. In his style he showed the influence of Antoine Watteau, and combined the Rococo tradition of charming fêtes galantes and fêtes champêtres with a panorama of daily life and current political events captured with journalistic accuracy. He created a gallery of portraits of representatives of all social classes in the last years of the Commonwealth.

[edit] Biography

Born in Misy-Faut-Yonne in 1740. Norblin started his career in France, in the early sixties (his first known works date to 1763). Later he became influenced by Rembrandt and Watteau. Around 1769 he trained in the studio of Francesco Casanova, then around 1769–70 at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and in 1770–71 under Louis-Michel van Loo and Joseph-Marie Vien at the Ecole Royale des Elèves Protégés, all in Paris. Around 1771-72 he worked in Paris, London, Dresden and Spa, and possibly studied for a time under Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich. In 1772 he met Polish Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski, with whom he traveled for two years and by whom he was invited to Poland. From 1774 he worked for the magnate family of Czartoryski and became their court artist and tutor for the children. Among his early works the most prominent are his illustrations to Myszeida, a poem by Ignacy Krasicki. He worked in Puławy and at Powązki estates as painter and decorator of local Czartoryski's estates. Later he also worked for the Radziwiłł family in Arkadia (Nieborów) and for King Stanisław August Poniatowski.

In 1790 settled in Warsaw where he established his art school, and this move allowed him to witness and illustrate many important historical moments of the last years of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. His hurriedly sketched drawings illustrated the passing of the Constitution of the 3 May and soon he became famous as the eye-witness and painter-chronicler of the Kościuszko Uprising, immortalising many of the most famous events of that event in his paintings: from the Warsaw Uprising in April and the consequent hanging of Targowica traitors in the Old Market Square, through the battle of Racławice to Massacre of Praga. After his return to France in 1804 he still continued to paint based on some of his Poland-era drafts, but he also illustrated other contemporary events, among them the times of the Napoleon's wars. He died in Paris in 1830.

Among Norblin's studends in Poland were Aleksander Orłowski and Michał Płoński and Jan Rustem.

[edit] References

This article incorporates text translated from the corresponding Polish Wikipedia article as of 7 April 2006.
Biography at The Grove Dictionary of Art last accessed on 10 April, 2006
Biography (at the bottom of the page) last accessed on 10 April, 2006
(Polish) Long biography last accessed on 10 April, 2006