Equestrian Portrait of Stanislas Kostka Potocki

A mounted portrait, a century and a half later

The equestrian portrait outlived the courts that invented it. This entry, from 1781, uses the same device the Habsburg and Spanish pictures in this register use: a named sitter, a horse beneath him, and no task in the picture other than being seen mounted. The title gives Stanislas Kostka Potocki, and the record attaches no battle, hunt or work to the scene. What has changed by this date is the style vocabulary around the device, not the device itself.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1781 as the date of creation and the National Museum in Warsaw as the location. The dimensions are 304 x 218 cm, over three metres in the larger direction and firmly in the scale range this register associates with state portraiture. The recorded style is Neoclassicism, the nationality attached to the painter is French, and the measured colour family of the image is brown. It is filed under portraiture, male portraiture and Animal Art > Horse.

An inference this entry will not make

Tack and conformation can narrow a picture's date, and this register says so on its about page. Narrowing of that kind requires looking closely at the object, and this entry is written from a catalogue record rather than from the painting. Nothing here should be read as a statement about the harness or the animal's build.