Stable boy with saddle-horses in front of a manor house

Józef Brandt spent the summer months in Orońsko. During his holidays, he did not give up painting. As he did in Munich, he did not engage in that historical and epic tales that he had so brilliantly brought to life in his works. He took a break from them, devoting himself to a more intimate and personal work. The surroundings in which the estate was situated abounded in picturesque landscapes. With great sensitivity and tenderness, Brandtimmortalised fragments of the Radom land in small works. The artist's watchful eye was able to catch interesting scenes from everyday household life, which became the theme of small genre compositions. Fixed in a sketch or photograph, they often constituted the material used in later works.

For centuries, hunting was an inseparable element of the life and customs of the nobility. A motif connected with it is shown in the painting Stajenny przed dworem z wierzchowcami [Stableman in Front of the Manor with Mounts]. In the centre of this intimate composition, there is a figure of a stable boy (or a huntsman) with three horses of various colours and a dog (a greyhound) against the background of an idyllic landscape – a secluded manor house and low cottages immersed in lush bushes among large trees. The artist succeeded in rendering the atmosphere of an early morning bathed in sunlight, filled with silence and calm expectation in which the group depicted is frozen. When painting this scene, the artist used photography, flourishing since the middle of the 19th century. Like many other painters of the Munich school, Brandt appreciated the advantages and possibilities of the new medium. He gathered a substantial collection of photographs in his atelier, the earliest of which date from the 1860s (the preserved archive is now in the National Museum in Warsaw). In his painting practice, photographs became one of the elements of his painting workshop, a kind of substitute preparatory studies, taking the form of a fixed compositional pattern used in his work. In Orońsko, Brandt photographed groups of posed models, chosen from the employees of the estate and the animals bred there. The photograph of Stajenny [Stable Man] has been preserved in the Centre of Polish Sculpture located in the former estate. The painting was created in 1883 and is one of the artist's earliest works, reproducing the scene from the Orońsko photographs.

Bożena Kasperowicz