Defined as “one of the great poems of the world” by the celebrated art historian Kenneth Clark, this painting is shrouded in mystery. We don’t know who commissioned it and for what reason. Nor do we know if this is a portrait or was instead meant to represent a biblical, historic, or fictional character. It is difficult to locate the landscape geographically and even harder to know the time of day. A large building looms in the distance, and a group of small figures gathers near a fire on the right.
Though the painting has been known as the “Polish Rider” since the late nineteenth century, its Polish connections only began in 1791, when the Polish aristocrat Michał Kazimierz Ogiński brought the painting to Poland, offering it to King Stanisław August Poniatowski in exchange for valuable orange trees. The painting was then kept at the Łazienki Palace—the king’s favorite residence, on the outskirts of Warsaw. In 1795, when the Kingdom of Poland was partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria—and effectively ceased to exist—the painting was sold to the Tarnowski family and then displayed at Dzików Castle in Galicia. Through the mediation of the English art critic Roger Fry, Zdzisław Tarnowski sold the painting in 1910 to Henry Clay Frick, in order to gain funds to buy back Polish land that had belonged to the family. This was a time when the Poles were longing for the recreation of their homeland.
The American poet Frank O’Hara, addressing his lover in the 1960 poem “Having a Coke with You,” wrote: “I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider, occasionally, and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time.”
The Polish Rider
The romantic and enigmatic character of this picture has inspired many theories about its subject, meaning, history, and even its attribution to Rembrandt.
Several portrait identifications have been proposed, including an ancestor of the Polish Oginski family, which owned the painting in the eighteenth century, and the Polish Socinian theologian Jonasz Szlichtyng. The rider’s costume, his weapons, and the breed of his horse have also been claimed as Polish. But if The Polish Rider is a portrait, it certainly breaks with tradition. Equestrian portraits are not common in seventeenth-century Dutch art, and furthermore, in the traditional equestrian portrait the rider is fashionably dressed and his mount is spirited and well-bred.
The painting may instead portray a character from history or literature, and many possibilities have been proposed. Candidates range from the Prodigal Son to Gysbrech van Amstel, a hero of Dutch medieval history, and from the Old Testament David to the Mongolian warrior Tamerlane.
It is possible that Rembrandt intended simply to represent a foreign soldier, a theme popular in his time in European art, especially in prints. Nevertheless, Rembrandt’s intentions in The Polish Rider seem clearly to transcend a simple expression of delight in the exotic. The painting has also been described as a latter-day Miles Christianus (Soldier of Christ), an apotheosis of the mounted soldiers who were still defending Eastern Europe against the Turks in the seventeenth century. Many have felt that the youthful rider faces unknown dangers in the strange and somber landscape, with its mountainous rocks crowned by a mysterious building, its dark water, and the distant flare of a fire.
Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Michael Casimir Oginski (1791). Stanislaus II Augustus Poniatowski, king of Poland, Warsaw (1793). Estate of Stanislaus. Countess Thérèse Tyszkiewicz, 1813. Prince F. Ksaweri Drucki-Lubecki, 1814. Count Hieronim Stroynowski (1815). Senator Valérien Stroynowski. Countess Valérie Stroynowska Tarnowska, of Dzików, Galicia, 1834. Frick, 1910.
Source: Paintings in The Frick Collection: American, British, Dutch, Flemish and German. Volume I. New York: The Frick Collection, 1968.
