Polish Woman

A young woman stands alone in a landscape, wrapped in a long red gown with fur and a white bonnet. Nobody is sure who painted her, who she was, or when. Yet this small panel has crossed Paris, Saint Petersburg, Warsaw and the war.

The story behind the painting

Polish Woman is an oil on panel in the National Museum in Warsaw, historically attributed to Jean-Antoine Watteau. It matches a drawing by Watteau that is presumably lost and known today through an etching by Francois Boucher, published in 1726 in the Recueil Jullienne. Because the panel is not signed, its attribution and date remain uncertain: some authors accept it as Watteau, others reject it, and proposed dates run from the early 1710s to the early 1730s. Wikidata gives 1717.

What to look for

The panel is small, about 36.5 by 28.5 cm. A single young woman stands full length in a landscape, in somewhat exotic dress: a long red gown, a fur garment and a white bonnet. Let your eye rest on that red against the landscape, and on the way the fur frames her. The same kind of figure appears often in paintings and drawings by Watteau, such as The Coquettes and The Dreamer, which is part of why the panel has long been linked to his name.

Meaning and intent

Many authors connected the costume with a so called Polish fashion said to exist in France in Watteau's time, and the traditional title comes from that. There have also been attempts to name the sitter, notably as the Comedie-Francaise actress Charlotte Desmares, a contemporary of Watteau. None of this is certain. The picture leaves us with a woman whose name, painter and date are all open questions, and perhaps that uncertainty is part of her quiet appeal.

Legacy

By the mid eighteenth century the panel belonged to Louis Antoine Crozat, Baron de Thiers. After Empress Catherine the Great acquired the Crozat collection in 1772, it stayed in the Russian imperial collections for about a century and a half, in the Hermitage and the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, returning to the Hermitage in 1910. After the Polish-Soviet War it was ceded to Poland in 1923 under the Peace of Riga. In the Second World War Hermann Goring seized it, and after the war it returned to Polish ownership.