The Polish Rider
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Polish Rider is a painting attributed to Rembrandt. It depicts a Lisowczyk on horseback. The subject of much discussion. It is possible that the person depicted was Grand Chancellor of Lithuania, Marcjan Aleksander Ogiński (1632-1690). The painting can be viewed at the Frick Collection, New York City.
It is in New York's Frick Collection. Its authenticity had been questioned years before by several scholars, led by Julius Held. Many, including Dr. Josua Bruyn of the Foundation Rembrandt Research Project, attributed the painting to one of Rembrandt's closest and most talented pupils, Willem Drost, about whom little is known. The Frick Museum itself never changed its own attribution, the label still reading "Rembrandt" and not "attributed to" or "school of". More recent opinion has shifted in favor of the Frick, with Simon Schama in his 1999 book Rembrandt's Eyes, and a Rembrandt Project scholar, Ernst van de Wetering (Melbourne Symposium, 1997) both arguing for attribution to the master. Many scholars feel that the execution is uneven, and favour different attributions for different parts of the work.
Related travesty picture
In 1993 the artist Russell Connor painted a portrait in the style of Rembrandt showing the Dutch master, palette in hand, standing in front of the incomplete Polish Rider. With a twist of dry irony, Connor attributed the painting to Rembrandt's pupil Carel Fabritius and submitted it to The New Yorker with a joke note saying that the painting had been found in a basement in Pinsk, Poland. The magazine published a reproduction of Connor's painting with a slightly reworked version of his comments, obviously not intending to pass it off as genuine but as a comment on the zeal of the Rembrandt Commission, who at the time were questioning the authenticity of the Polish Rider and many other paintings formerly known as genuine Rembrandt canvases.
