Wincenty Pol junior

Wincenty Ferreriusz Hugo Pol (1839-1915), the eldest of four progeny of Wincenty and Kornelia Pol, was born in the castle of Count Ksawery Krasicki in Lesko. He obtained a doctorate in administrative and political sciences at the University of Brussels. He held successive offices of the district commissioner in Brzozów, Brzeżany, Żydaczów and Stanisławów. He was first married to Jadwiga Zbrożkówna and after her death to Maria Michalina, née Łabowska, daughter of the mayor of Żydaczów, with whom he had seven children. He made a significant contribution as an editor of his father's writing legacy which, thanks to his efforts among others, was published in ten volumes in Lviv in 1875-1878 by F. H. Richter, under the title Dzieła zebrane wierszem i prozą [Works Collected in Verse and Prose]. Wincenty Ferreriusz Hugo Pol died in Lviv, where he rests in his family grave in the Łyczakowski Cemetery.

His photographic portrait was taken by Awit Szubert (1837-1919), a photographer and painter who had his atelier in Kraków on Krupnicza Street since 1867. He dealt mainly with portrait photography, but also with mountain photography (he was the author of one of the first pictures of the Tatra Mountains), scientific photography, photography of architectural monuments and works of art.

On the back of the photograph is a dedication: ‘To Stasia | brother widowed and father orphaned | 26 July 1882’. Wincenty junior, then forty-three years old, gave the picture to his younger brother Marek Stanisław (1847-1911) soon after the death of his first wife Jadwiga (and at the same time ten years after the death of their poet father). Looking at the youthful face of the man, one may think that the photograph was taken ten or even more than a dozen years earlier.

Worth noting is its format, called in French carte de visite, referring in size and shape (about 6 x 9 cm) to a traditional business card. The photograph was glued on a piece of stiff cardboard on the back of which was a decorative stamp of a photographic studio. Photographs of this type were cheaper, as more could be taken in a short amount of time. The fashion for them emerged in Paris in the middle of the 19th century and spread very quickly.