Medallion with the portrait of Klaudyna Potocka

The presented medallion features the likeness of Klaudyna Potocka (1801-1836), a Polish patriot, and social and national activist. The aristocrat was born in Kórnik into the distinguished Działyński family. During the November Uprising, she contributed to the organisation of aid and care for the wounded. After the fall of the uprising, she and her husband sold their estate and left for Dresden, in order to also help Polish emigrants living abroad (she supported the emigrant press, and maintained shelters and charity institutions). Her brief life ended in Geneva and she was eventually laid to rest in the Montmorency cemetery near Paris. The presented medallion is a replica of a bronze one authored by the French sculptor David d`Angers (1788-1856) and was probably made in Poland. The original, dated 1834, has a diameter of 149 mm and an imprint of the Parisian casting firm Eck et Durand on the reverse. It was Adam Mickiewicz himself, with whom the aristocrat was friends in the last years of her life, who strove to have Klaudyna Potocka immortalised in this form. The poet sent a pastel portrait of Klaudyna to the sculptor as a model for the bas-relief. Perhaps it was a portrait of Potocka by Joseph Bordes (1773-1838) painted in Paris in 1817, which is kept with her other keepsakes in the Kórnik Library. Genowefa Horoszko