| Polish: Lisowczyk | |
| Artist | Rembrandt(?), Willem Drost(?)[1] |
|---|---|
| Year | 1655 |
| Location | The Frick Collection, New York |
The Polish Rider is a 1655 painting of a man traveling on horseback through a murky landscape, now in the Frick Collection in New York.[2] When the painting was bought by Henry Frick in 1910, there was consensus that the work was by 17th-century Dutch painter Rembrandt. However, this attribution has since been contested.
There has also been debate over whether the painting was intended as a portrait of a particular person, living or historical, and if so of whom, or if not, what it was intended to represent.[3] The quality of the painting is generally agreed as is its slight air of mystery.[1] Parts of the background are very sketchily painted or unfinished.
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In 1984, Josua Bruyn, then a member of the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) suggested that characteristics of the work of Willem Drost, a student of Rembrandt, could be observed in the painting.[2] The Polish Rider is unlike Rembrandt's other work in several ways. In particular, Rembrandt rarely worked on equestrian paintings, the only other known equestrian portrait in Rembrandt's work being the Portrait of Frederick Rihel, 1663 (National Gallery, London).[1] A 1998 study published by the RRP concluded that another artist's hand, besides that of Rembrandt, was involved in the work. Rembrandt started the painting in 1655; however, he left it unfinished and it was probably completed by someone else.[3]
The idealised, inscrutable character has encouraged various theories about who is represented, if the picture is a portrait. Candidates have included an ancestor of the Polish Oginski family, 18th-century owners of the painting and the Polish theologian, Jonasz Szlichtyng. There are contested claims that the outfit of the rider, the weapons and even the breed of horse are all Polish. Dutch equestrian portraits were infrequent in the 17th Century and traditionally showed a fashionably dressed rider on a well bred, spirited horse, as in Rembrandt's Frederick Rihel.
Historical characters have also been suggested, ranging Old Testament David through to The Prodigal Son and Mongolian warrior Tamerlane, to Dutch medieval hero, Gijsbrecht IV of Amstel. A “soldier of Christ”, an idealistic representation of mounted soldiers defending Eastern Europe against the Turks, or simply a foreign soldier have been suggested. The young rider appears to many people to face nameless danger in a bare mountainous landscape with a mysterious building, dark water and in the distance evidence of a fire.[4]
In a 1793 letter to King Stanislaus Augustus of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Michal Oginski, then owner of the work, identified the rider in the painting as "a Cossack on horseback", and the king himself recognized the subject as a Lisowczyk soldier.[3] In 1944, the American Rembrandt scholar Julius Held contested the claim that the subject was Polish, stating that the rider's costume could be Hungarian. Two Polish scholars suggested in 1912 that the model for the portrait was in fact Rembrandt's son Titus.[3]