Wincenty Pol

We know several photographic portraits of Wincenty Pol. All of them were taken during the last dozen or so years of his life, from the first half of the 1860s to the beginning of the 1870s, at a time when photographic technology was only just being perfected, becoming more widespread and when more and more photographic institutions were being established.

The photograph in question shows the author of Pieśń o ziemi naszej [Songs about Our Land] at an older age (if it had been taken in 1869 or later, he would have been a blind man, as it was in that year that an unsuccessful ophthalmological operation led to a complete loss of sight). We know that the photograph was taken between 1867 and 1870, from nature, in Kraków, at 17 Krupnicza Street, where at that time Awit Szubert (1837-1919) was starting his atelier. He was a landscape painter in his youth and later a photographer, first of all a portraitist (to whom we owe images of many famous personalities from the world of culture and politics), but also a photographer of Kraków, a pioneer of scientific photography and one of the first to record the Tatra Mountains on light-sensitive film.

The cardboard box with the poet's photograph on it was an insert to one of Dzieła Wincentego Pola wierszem i prozą [Wincenty Pol's Works in Verse and Prose] – the first complete edition, revised and arranged by the author himself. The complete set of ten volumes was published in Lviv in 1875-1878 (that is, several years after the author's death) by F. H. Richter in the printing house of W. Maniecki. A reproduction of the pasteboard was also included in the next edition of Pol's Works, which appeared in 1904 in Stanisławów, printed and published by E. Weidenfeld and Br.