Wincenty Pol

Although the photograph is not dated, comparing it with other photographic portraits of the author of Pieśń o ziemi naszej [Songs about Our Land] we can state that it was taken around the mid-1860s, and taking into account the address of the photographer's shop on the reverse side, it must have been taken between 1863 and 1868.

Its author, Teodor Szajnok (1833-1894), a Polish photographer active in Lviv, ran an atelier taken over in 1863 from Hipolit Chołoniewski, the doyen of Lviv's daguerreotypy, on Pojezuicka Street (today Hnatiuka), opposite the former English Hotel (incidentally, in the hotel's courtyard there was an establishment of another famous Lviv photographer, Józef Eder, who also portrayed Wincenty Pol). After the construction of his own house, in 1868, Szajnok moved his business to it, thus changing its address.

It is worth mentioning that this artist-photographer not only dealt with photography himself (and he specialised in the field of architecture, landscape and portrait), but in later years he also became the founder and vice-president of the Club of Lovers of Photographic Art in Lviv, as well as the author of the manual Przewodnik fotograficzny dla użytku fotografów zawodowych i miłośników [A Photographic Guide for the Use of Professional Photographers and Enthusiasts] (1893).

Further copies were later made of this photograph. In our collection we have a heliogravure by the Viennese artist Josef Löwy (1834-1902). Szajnok's photograph came to the Wincenty Field Manor in 2006 through the ‘Placówka’ Book Information Bank in Krakow, a cooperative established two years earlier whose founder (together with pupils and students active in the Friends of the Krakow Focal Point Club of the Polish YMCA) was a historian of the Earth sciences and bibliophile, Doctor Stanisław Czarniecki, who also rendered great service to the Wincenty Field Manor in Lublin.