Stanisław Chlebowski’s (1835-1884) Historical and Genre Compositions − within the Circle of the Inspiration of French Painting

Abstract

Through its artistic biography, Stanisław Chlebowski (1835-1884) was linked mainly with France and Turkey. He studied in Petersburg Art School. In 1859 he went abroad to continue his studies; he settled in Paris and studied with J.L. Gérôme. In 1864 he exposed the painting Joanna d'Arc in Prison in Amiens in a Salon. It was the painting that Napoleon had bought for the city of Bar-le-Duc. Being invited by sultan Abdülaziz in 1864, the artist left for Constantinople where he sojourned for twelve years. In the years of 1876-1881 he lived in Paris, and then returned to the country. This period meant work on his monumental canvass Mahomet II's Entry to Constantinople (1874-1884), the painting that was left incomplete.

Chlebowski's early works show his care about details and his love for genre. During his first visit to France the artist painted mainly anecdotic scenes from history, scenes that belonged to the genre historique, strongly inspired by P. Delaroche. This tendency is represented by Joanna d'Arc. The influence of Gérôme's painting in Chlebowski's works of that period can hardly be found. Both artists were characterised by their love for precise studies of accessories – the French scholar owed them also to Delaroche, who was his disciple.

In his later period, the Polish painter was under a strong impact of Gérôme's orientalist painting. He had taken over from him (like e.g. A. Pasini, F.A. Bridgman, and W. Vierieshtchagin), above all, the type of composition with one or several figures; they were of definite oriental traits of an ethnographic group “written in” the architectonic frame of a portal, gate, or gateway. Chlebowski painted such small works, owing to his earlier sketches, mainly after his return from Constantinople to Paris. They are characterised by more freedom in painting in relation to the French painter's veristic, almost photographic, paintings.

In 1876, the French orientalist Benjamin Constant exhibits his Mahomet's Entry to Constantinople in the Salon. In the same year Chlebowski returns to Paris with a view to paint a grand composite on the fall of the capital of Byzantium (he began working on it already in Turkey). Painting Mahomet's Entry to Constantinople, he obviously, like Constant, referred to J. von Hammer's Histoire de l'Empire Ottoman (that had been published in Paris in 1836). Inasmuch as the French painter's canvass is to a great extent an impressive illustration of the event, full of picturesque oriental accessories, Chlebowski in his monumental and historiosophic compositions – like earlier E. Delacroix and H. Regnault – managed to break the border between orientalist painting and peinture d'histoire.