Kolekcja | 09.09.2015 The bust depicts Stanisław Kostka Potocki wearing a dress coat in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw style, decorated with a braiding, with a high collar, a Halsstuch neckerchief and a jabot; with a ribbon and star of the Order of the White Eagle, a star of the Order o St. Stanislas (?) and an order of the Legion d'Honneur received in 1807 (providing the earliest possible dating of the bust). The sculpture is a pendant to the bust of Potocki's mother-in-law, Izabela Lubomirska. Potocki's depiction may have been modelled on a lost painting by Bacciarelli dated 1809 or 1810, one in a series of eleven auxiliary sketches for a planned group scene depicting the granting of a constitution to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw by Napoleon I. A preliminary study of that work is currently held at the National Museum in Warsaw.
The sculpture was probably posthumous. The tentative identification of Jakub Tatarkiewicz as its author relies on the fact that he was commissioned in 1834-1836 to make statues of Stanisław Kostka Potocki and his wife Aleksandra for a monument in Wilanów. Existing sources attest that Potocki viewed Tatarkiewicz's works shortly before his own death in 1821 and spoke favourably of the artist's talent. Tatarkiewicz was arguably the greater Polish portrait sculptor of the day, and one of Bertel Thorvaldsen's finest students of portrait sculpture.
Dominika Walawender-Musz