Arcades Nommees Passage Anglais

A romantic view shows a corner of the Czartoryski Park in Puławy. The selected fragment includes the surroundings of the English Steps, located near the palace. Built around 1800, the stone passageway paved with cobblestones connected the upper garden surrounding the palace with the former lower garden located below, descending to the Vistula River. The crude arcade construction, overgrown with thicket of bushes, with a pointed arch, with two pillars flanking the entrance, is reminiscent of motifs from gothic horror or adventure novels. To the left of the entrance there is a stone plaque with the inscription: "O ye wind rustling oaks / Fashioning old age with grey moss respectable / The man who planted you with his own hand for his own sake. / He planted you with his own hand for his son / Our doyen, late of the Gediminas family".

The poetic stanza is related to the concept of a park in Puławy by Izabella Czartoryska, née Flemming. The Duchess collected a set of rules for the art of gardening and her personal experience in the book Myśli różne o sposobie zakładania ogrodów [Different Thoughts About How to Set Up Gardens] (1805). He devoted a lot of space to trees, giving the most important role to the oldest ones. Due to their size and beauty, they were key viewpoints in the landscape of the Puławy estate. For Izabella Czartoryska, apart from their aesthetic value, the symbolism that man gave to trees over the millennia was equally important. Some species have acquired mythical and religious meanings, and long-lived specimens, "pilgrimaging" through time, have unwittingly become witnesses of private, family and national history. The quoted verses were a kind of tribute of the then Czartoryski family to the noble oaks and an expression of pride in belonging to a family linked by its ancestors to the royal dynasty.

The card comes from the lithographic album Album des vues de l'Institut Alexandra du jardin et des environs de Novo Alexandra (Pulawy) published in Paris in 1858. The author of the twenty-four drawing and watercolour prototypes was Barbara Czernof, a drawing teacher at the Alexandria Institute for the Education of Ladies. The Tsarist educational establishment functioned in an estate confiscated by the Russians after 1831, located in Puławy, renamed New Alexandria by the tsarist authorities. In the 1850s the artist produced many works showing the corners of the Czartoryski family's former residence and views of the surrounding area: Parchatka, Janowiec, Kazimierz.

Bożena Kasperowicz