L'arbre de la S.te Vierge

At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries the Czartoryski family created in Puławy an outstanding cultural centre known as the New Athens. This magnificent family seat with a valuable library, a beautiful park with two unusual buildings - the Temple of Sybil and the Gothic House, treasuries of national memorabilia and masterpieces of art - was a great achievement of the enlightened and patriotic aristocracy of the last years of the free Polish state. The result of Duchess Isabella’s work was a park in the English style, considered one of the greatest realizations of garden art in Europe at that time. Old trees played a special role in the concept of the duchess, described in the book Various Thoughts on the Method of Establishing Gardens. One of them was immortalized in a mid-19th century drawing L'Arbre de la Vierge, showing a fragment of the Lower Garden by the Vistula, called Kępa. A huge poplar dominating over the meadow almost completely fills the representation. Inside the hollowed out trunk, in a secluded niche, there is a figure of the Virgin Mary. In the times of the Czartoryski family, there was a cross among the old trees where awards were given to peasants for good management. Many figures are depicted near the tree – haymaking is taking place in the foreground, several people are having a lively conversation sitting on the grass, a family is resting in the shade of the poplar, girls are walking in the park. The image of a summer day is filled with an idyllic mood.

The lithograph was based on a watercolour by Barbara Czernof née Groten, who taught drawing at the Alexandrian Institute for the Education of Ladies, which operated from 1844 in the Czartoryski estate confiscated by the Russians after 1831. In honour of the Institute's patron - Aleksandra Teodorowna, wife of Tsar Nicholas I, Puławy was renamed to New Alexandria. In the 1850s, Czernof created many works showing the residence and views of the surrounding areas. The leitmotif of some of them are old trees: oaks, poplars, lindens, characterized by dignity and picturesqueness. Twenty-four of the painter's works were collected in a lithographic album by Armand Théophile Cassagne, Album des vues de l'Institut Alexandra du jardin et des environs de Novo Alexandra (Pulawy), published in Paris in 1858 and dedicated to Tsar Alexander II, who visited New Alexandria several times.