The Potocki Palace in Lublin in the Light of Eighteenth-century Sources

Abstract

The Potocki palace in Lublin was for the first mentioned in the sources in 1734. It is not, however, on the plan of Chevalier d'Orxen of 1716, hence it was constructed between those years. It was built for Jerzy Potocki, and most probably was ready in 1730, when his sone, Eustachy, studied at the Lublin Jesuit college. There are no hints that the palace built in the times of Jerzy Potocki was something special with regard to its artistic class and scale. The magnate stayed mainly in Serniki, where he lived in a small wooden mansion of little artistic value. It is there where his sons were born. The fact that the Lublin seat was not a representative building, fit for a bigger event, is evidenced when Eustachy Potocki's wedding with Marianna née Kątska (December 1741) was organised in August Czartoryski's neighbouring palace. The construction and modernisation works in the Potocki palace, as evidenced by the sources, were conducted as late as the 1750s, already after Jerzy Potocki's death, when its owner was Eustachy. It follows from Eustachy's correspondence, now in the Main Archives of the Ancient Acts in Warszawa and in the State Archives in Kraków (the branch at Wawel), that some sentences about the Lublin palace can be found. Thus between January and the beginning of April 1755 the side pavilions were covered with a new shingle, mirrors were imported, curtains and upholstery were installed; glass, lead, calcium, and plaster were used for some unidentified works. They were all related to Eustachy's function of the marshal of the Crown Tribunal, which he took in 1754, and needed a seat appropriate to this rank. During the proceedings of the Tribunal in Potocki's palace there were festive receptions and balls: on the occasion of the king's, president's, the marshal's, or hetman Jan Klemens Branicki's nameday; another event was when a Turkish parliament member stayed in the palace, or the Tribunal's limit. Eustachy Potocki's son, Stanisław Kostka, was born in the Lublin palace.

There are only circumstantial evidences as to who could design and supervise modernisation works in the palace in the 1750s. They irrefutably point to Jakub Fontana who then worked at the construction of the palace in Radzyń Podlaski. Potocki himself thought that he should be consulted about the smallest steps. We do not know at present the inventory of the Lublin palace from the times of Eustachy Potocki. The only one we have comes from 1783. According to this inventory, the floors in the Lublin palace were made of timber (in the vestibules it was made of bricks). It follows that the whole building was rather poorer, in the spirit of a gentleman's residence. The inventory does not say anything about the upholstery of the rooms on the ground floor. The rooms on the first floor were crimson, red, yellow, and blue. The “big room” was whitened in 1783. It goes without saying that this white colour meant that its new owners had a neo-classical taste, that colour could not come from Eustachy's times. It seems that in 1755 the colour green was most likely.

The furniture mentioned in the inventory of 1783 is obviously a remnant of several sets from various interiors. The decisive majority of the then preserved was of similar colours: red, blue, and red-blue. We also know the other units of the yellow set. The inventory of 1783 mentions the “Big portrait of August II in golden frames.” It might have been the remaining part of a larger collection. We know that in the nineteenth century the royal portraits hang in another residence built by Eustachy Potocki – in Radzyń Podlaski, from where after the First World War they was conveyed to the National Museum in Warszawa. Most of them have been preserved up to date (the portraits of August III, Stanisław Leszczyński, August II, Sigismund I the Old, Sigismund August, Henry of Valois, Jan III Sobieski, and Władysław II Jagiełło). We have no evidential sources that there was a gallery of royal portraits in Lublin, but it goes without saying that in this type of residence there must have hung at least portraits of the then king and his wife. The portraits of August III and Maria Józefa, like August II the Strong, were among those that had been sent from Radzyń to Warszawa. Therefore it is likely that the portraits of kings in the eighteenth century hung in the Lublin palace. They were of a low artistic class that did not fit in the rococo decorations in Radzyń, but were fit for the Lublin seat of a tribunal's marshal, the seat often visited by the nobility for whom that type of works must have been uniquely dear.