Wincenty Pol

At the age of 51, in the summer of 1858, Wincenty Pol (accompanied by Franciszek Wężyk, president of the Kraków Scientific Society) set off on a journey from Wawel to the Kingdom of Poland.

First, he visited Warsaw. Although at numerous meetings and receptions important and noble matters were probably discussed, the prosaic aim of the excursion was to recover from publishers the royalties due for published works.

A photograph of Wincenty Pol kept in the Dworek collection, taken at Karol Beyer's photography workshop on Krakowskie Przedmieście (on the corner of Karowa Street), may be regarded as a memento of this stay. The photograph is in the then-fashionable small format called a carte de visite, and is one of many prints. The factory reproduced and sold photographs with images of famous people.

Karol Beyer (1818-1877), Warsaw's first professional photographer (of German origin), mastered the art of daguerreotypes as early as in the 1840s, and a decade later the collodion technique. Shortly before opening his business he perfected his photographic craft in Paris. In his workshop, which he ran from 1844 to 1867, he made mainly portraits, both of Warsaw inhabitants and people coming from all over the country. They were mainly representatives of the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. He also immortalised views of cities. He went down in history not only as the ‘father of Polish photography’, but also as the co-founder of Tygodnik Ilustrowany and a keen numismatist andfounder of the Warsaw Numismatic Society.

Wincenty Pol was so enthusiastically welcomed and cordially hosted in Warsaw that the alarmed tsarist authorities issued a police order for him to leave the city. Invited out, he went to Lublin, to visit the city of his birth after an absence of almost half a century.