1800 -1855 · Krakow, Paris and Polish romanticism

Launched horses, brown dust and dazzling color make Piotr Michałowski the great romantic painter of the Polish cavalry.

Piotr Michałowski was born in Krakow in 1800 and died in 1855. A scholar, engineer, administrator, landowner and social reformer, he led an intense public life while for a long time considering painting as a private activity. After the November insurrection, he went into exile in Paris and returned fully to art. He studied with Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, close to Géricault, whose energy, horses and freedom of composition he admired. Michałowski refused academic rules: color took precedence over contour, the brush fragmented bodies and matter restored speed. Somosierra's theme occupied him for almost two decades. The charge of Polish light horses from November 30, 1808, which opened the road to Madrid to Napoleon, it became less a reconstruction than a collective heroic memory. In Somosierra and Charge à Somosierra, the horsemen are not portraits of commanders. They merge into a rising mass, crossed by reds, browns, whites, smoke and dust. The throat appears narrower and more vertical than in reality, but this distortion reflects the subjective experience of an incessant ascent. Michałowski also paints portraits, peasants, isolated horses and soldiers. Rarely dated or signed, often taken up or covered by the artist, his works remained outside the Polish market during his lifetime. Their independence makes it today a peak of European romanticism. The "Piotr Michałowski" selection notably compares Somosierra and Charge à Somosierra. His reading favors composition.

Michałowski does not describe the charge: he raises it in the paint, until horse, soldier, dust and color become a single collective impulse.