File:Rembrandt - The Polish Rider - WGA19251.jpg

(b. 1606, Leiden, d. 1669, Amsterdam)

The Polish Rider 1655 Oil on canvas, 114,9 x 135 cm Frick Collection, New York

This portrait of a young man on horseback was discovered by the great Rembrandt scholar and Director of the Mauritshuis, Abraham Bredius, in the castle at Dzikow in Galicia in 1897. In his notebook he describes the intense excitement with which he first viewed the painting at the end of a long day's travelling. Bredius always considered it to be his greatest discovery: it was shown in Amsterdam at the Rembrandt exhibition in the following year and in 1910 was sold to the steel magnate Henry Frick for the enormous sum of £60,000. Since that time it has been one of the greatest treasures of the Frick Collection.

The precise subject has been a matter of debate. It has been interpreted both as an allegorical portrait of the Christian knight defending Christendom against the infidel and as a portrait of one of the young Polish aristocrats who studied at Dutch universities in the seventeenth century. Certainly the joupane (a three-quarter length coat buttoned from neck to waist), cap, tight-fitting red trousers and calf length boots, and the swords, bows and arrows and war hammer, are more or less consistent with his being a Polish (or even Hungarian) horseman. The horse itself has a flying kutaz, possibly made from horsehair, attached to the bridle. The background is very broadly painted in dark tones and is difficult to read but behind the figure is a hill surmounted by a large circular, domed building.

The problems surrounding the painting have been further deepened by the recent rejection of the attribution to Rembrandt by a senior member of the Rembrandt Research Project: an alternative attribution to Willem Drost has been proposed. There is nothing in the known oeuvre of Drost which possesses the imaginative power and bravura brushwork of The Polish Rider and the case for the reattribution of what is admittedly an unusual painting in Rembrandt's work must for the time being be considered unproven.

Comment by a Polish visitor of the Web Gallery of Art: The old Polish title of this picture is "Lisowczyk". Lisowczyk (plural Lisowczyczy) is a soldier (mercenary) from light cavalry squad under the command of Alexander Lisowski. Lisowczyczy were undisciplined party of poor noblemen, outlaws and soldiers, hired by Polish kings. They were not regularly paid and they had licence to robber and plunder. Their name was synonymous of terror in 17th-century Europe. They were picturesque, because they did not wear uniforms but furs, silks and robbed jewellery.

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Author: REMBRANDT Harmenszoon van Rijn Title: The Polish Rider Time-line: 1601-1650 School: Dutch Form: painting