Collections in gentry manors of the Commonwealth in the time of partitions

Abstract

The article attempts a synthetic overview of art collecting in gentry families of the former Commonwealth. The 19th century saw the emergence of a myth concerning the development of old Polish culture in the provinces, independently of, or even in opposition to, the royal court and the capital, which Z. Ostrowska-Kębłowska identified as the ideological basis of the cul-tural activities of Polish magnate families, such as the Czartoryski family foundation of the museum in Puławy, or the museum-residences of Greater Poland (the Działyńskis’ Kórnik, the Raczyńskis’ Rogalin and Izabela Działyńska’s Gołuchów). This tradition was also cultivated by gentry, which sometimes turned their provincial manors into centres of local culture.In the 18th and early 19th c. collecting was part of the decorum of aristocracy but in gentry manors it was usually limited to hunting trophies, ancestors’ portraits (often of poor artistic quality) and weapons. Its popularity grew in the middle decades of the 19th c., when art collections in country manors started to be opened to the local and wider public as private museums, becoming centres of shaping the memory of national heritage. At the turn of the 20th c. and in the inter-war period art collections in country manors were less common, with their owners moving them to cities (Warsaw, Lviv, Cracow, Łódź, Vilnius). To illustrate the topic the author presents the collection of Marceli Żurowski gathered in his manor in Iwańkowce near Berdyczów, the rather unusual collection of Tomasz Zieliński in Kielce, of Władysław Syrokomla in Borejkowszczyzna in Lithuania and of Konstanty Świdziński w Sulgostów in the province of Radom, also referring to a number of other collections in various parts of the former Commonwealth. The last part of the paper presents a kind of museum made public after 1900 by the Mieczkowski family in Niedźwiedź near Wąbrzeźno, which can be considered a model example of the “collection in a country manor” featuring in the title — due to both the items exhib-ited (works of arts and crafts, weapons, historic memorabilia) and its educational and popularizing functions.