The Royal Łazienki Painting Collection and Its New Layout. A Curator’s Dilemmas

Abstract

The paper discussed the new arrangement of paintings in the historic interiors of the Palace on the Isle in Łazienki – the private summer residence of King Stanisław August (r. 1764–95). In around 1793, built in the palace was a Picture Gallery, envisioned as the location for the display of the most precious artworks in the royal collection. The arrangement reflected the art display trend in vogue in Paris from the mid-18th century, in which walls were filled densely with paintings from different schools and of different genres, arranged in symmetric compositions. On the basis of source material analysis, it was possible to determine which paintings resided in the gallery. The author attempted a hypothetical reconstruction of the painting layout in the Picture Gallery, which became the starting point in the creation of the gallery’s current look. This was no easy task as the most valuable paintings from the historic Łazienki collection had been incorporated into the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw after the Second World War. Successive Łazienki curators undertook efforts to have the royal paintings returned to Łazienki, which, unfortunately, proved only partly successful. The new arrangement (2023) in the Picture Gallery and other rooms relies on the bygone appearance of the interiors and on the principles for organising cabinets des tableaux described by Parisian theorists and art critics. Also undertaken was work to systematise the frames for the paintings on display. Since most of the original Stanisław-era frames do not survive to this day, work is currently underway to reconstruct the missing ones.