The Battle of Raszyn 19 April 1809

Suchodolski reaches for a panoramic compositional model whose creator and chief practitioner was General Louis-François Lejeune (1775–1848), a French soldier-painter, a veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns and the author of the bataille du tableau cycle. This model – in contrast to the heroic-apotheotic formula of Antoine-Jean Gros – conceives the battle as a total, multi-subject documentary panorama in which the commander is not the centre of a one-man drama but one of many structural elements of the field of battle.

The Raszyn canvas is organised into three legible planes of depth, separated by two horizontal bands: the band of the pond and the floodplain, and the band of powder smoke, which functions as a natural repoussoir. The compositional diagonal runs from the lower-right corner – where the figural staffage of the wounded, the baggage train and the encampment is concentrated – towards the upper-left part, where we find the most distant identifying feature: the mass of the Raszyn church with its gabled red roof and bell turret, and the burning buildings of the village.

Along this diagonal, roughly between the pond and the road leading to Falenty, the main figural masses are laid out: on the left – artillery on the move and a column of infantry, on the right – the rise with the staff, the camp and the dressing station.

The nearest part of the painting is a dense, dynamic group of riders and teams. In the left part of the foreground Suchodolski placed horse artillery heading for its firing positions – a four-horse team draws a gun carriage and an ammunition caisson, the gunners in uniforms with crimson facings have taken up poses of readiness; the horses are rendered in the foreshortenings proper to the French school, with a clear memory of the anatomical studies of Théodore Géricault, known to Suchodolski from Vernet's Paris studio.

On the right side of the foreground, near the camp and the dressing station, the painter set out a tonally different scene – a vivandière in white, a wounded infantryman with his torso bared, a doctor in a civilian frock coat bending over the patient, the ochre canvas of a tent, an overturned gun carriage with a broken wheel and scattered ammunition; in the lower-right corner a dead or fainting soldier is huddled, with a fallen horse nearby.

This whole passage, enriched by the presence of a dog, small items of camp equipment and a barely visible clergyman, functions as the moral and emotional weight of the painting – it shows war not as a parade of formations but as a biological catastrophe of bodies, matériel and horses.

The structural and semantic heart of the canvas remains the wayside shrine – a small brick turret crowned with a red-tiled roof, set precisely on the axis of the painting and at the same time at the geometric intersection of the lines of sight. Beneath it the central narrative episode plays out: the scene of the death of Col. Cyprian Godebski, commander of the 8th infantry regiment of the Duchy of Warsaw, around whom his comrades-in-arms have gathered and – something that will later prove historically doubtful – a military doctor.

The figure of the dying colonel, in white breeches and with a crimson sash, leans against the base of the shrine in a pose taken directly from the Classicist repertoire of mors heroica. To the left of the shrine, in the second plane of this passage, stand units of infantry with fixed bayonets and muskets at rest; to the right – baggage wagons with the wounded (a carriage with a crimson-pink body, the skittish horses of the team, the clearly accentuated movement of two drivers).

The staff of Prince Józef Poniatowski is located in the right, higher part of the middle plane, on a slight rise beyond the camp. The prince – recognisable by his pose as a commander-strategist, not a commander charging into battle – sits on a chestnut horse, accompanied by several staff officers in black bicornes with white plumes. One of the staff officers points with an outstretched arm towards the battlefield in the depth of the painting, which compositionally directs the viewer's gaze towards the far plane.

The most distant plane is organised around four identifying features: the Raszyn church (on the left, with a red roof and a simple bell turret), the burning buildings of the village (the bright-yellow wall of a building with a red roof, above it a ribbon of dark-grey smoke rising diagonally upwards), the Raszyn Pond stretching across the central part of the horizon, and a column of infantry advancing along the causeway towards Falenty.

Musket volleys are marked by small, sharp puffs of white smoke scattered in the depth of the field of battle; further off, on the very horizon, there is a thin line of cavalry on the move. The tonality of this passage – pale pink, ochre-ashen, pearl-grey – builds atmospheric distance in the manner proper to nineteenth-century panoramic battle painting.

On the right side of the far plane, on the first and most advanced hill of the camp, rises the tall poplar characteristic of the Raszyn landscape – a tree which, in the Polish iconography of the battle, became its identifying mark and a structural vertical accent of the composition.

The chromatics of the canvas belong to the type proper to French and Polish battle painting of the 1830s. Dominant are the earthy browns and ochres of the field of battle, the orange-red accents of shakos, plumes and facings, the crimson of officers' sashes, the white of breeches and leather belts. The sky, occupying the whole surface of the upper half of the painting, balances between the cool blue of the upper register and the warm pink of the horizontal light (the character of morning or early-evening light), with a dominant accent of a white cumulus cloud in the central part.

The ribbon of dark-grey smoke from the fire on the left and the white powder smoke in the central part of the horizon function as a natural compositional device – they hierarchise the tonal values and organise the directions of the gaze. The point of highest luminance is the bright wall of the shrine at the centre – which semantically reinforces its role as the axis of the painting.

The texture of the canvas, seen up close in the gigapixel HDR record, reveals the hand of a painter trained in the French discipline of Venetian fini: fine, smooth application of paint in the figural passages, a broader sweep of the brush in the sky and backgrounds. The uniforms and equipment are worked out with the meticulousness proper to the Lejeune tradition – every crimson facing, every white strap, every trouser stripe is recognisable as the mark of a specific formation.

Suchodolski's painting does not depict a single moment of the battle but is a synthesis of several of its phases, arranged into one legible microcosm: artillery on the move (preparing positions), infantry in battalion formation (the middle phase), the column on the causeway (the attack on Falenty), the death of Godebski (the emotional climax), the camp of the wounded (the aftermath of the battle).

This type of narrative construction – the so-called compressed time of panoramic battle painting – was in the nineteenth century the subject of a lively discussion about the limits of painterly truth. Stendhal, reviewing the Paris Salon of 1824, came out precisely in defence of Vernet and Lejeune against the champions of Gros's heroic unitarism: the journalistic polyphony of the field of battle – he wrote – is for modern battle painting a truer solution than the one-man gesture of the commander. In 1832 Suchodolski is a conscious participant in this debate, on the side of the French panoramists.

The figure of the commander-in-chief is captured in an iconographic formula familiar from the French imperial paintings of the Gros circle: the commander on a rise, with his staff, in the posture of an observer and strategist rather than a charging officer. This formula goes back to Napoleon on the Field of Eylau (1808) and Napoleon at Aboukir (1806) – in both, the Emperor remains raised above the immediate chaos of the field of battle, his body a figure of reason, not of battle passion.

In Suchodolski, Poniatowski fits into this tradition with an important modification: his compositional position is peripheral relative to the centre of the painting, which remains the shrine and the death of Godebski. This is the key iconographic solution – the shift of the emotional centre from the person of the commander to the person of the fallen officer. By 1832 the myth of Prince Józef is already living a life of its own (nineteen years have passed since his death at the Elster, and the monument by Bertel Thorvaldsen for Warsaw was commissioned in 1817), so Suchodolski need not emphasise him with heroic prominence – a recognisable and compositionally effective presence suffices.

The figure of the fallen colonel, commander of the 8th infantry regiment of the Duchy of Warsaw, is the central iconogram of the canvas. Cyprian Godebski (1765–1809) – poet, translator, author of the Verse to the Polish Legions (1805), an officer of the Danube Legion – functioned in Polish culture of the first half of the nineteenth century as a double figure: the soldier-poet and the sacrifice for the homeland.

Suchodolski inscribes his death into the iconographic tradition of mors heroica, whose European model is The Death of General Wolfe by Benjamin West (1770) – a composition in which the dying commander, arranged in a pietà pose among his comrades-in-arms, establishes a new paradigm of the historical depiction of heroic death, combining religious pathos with battle-scene factuality. A second model was The Death of Bayard by Jacques-Louis David (1776), a third – The Death of Latour-d'Auvergne in the popular versions of the early nineteenth century.

Suchodolski adapts the model to Polish conditions: instead of an open pietà composition by a tree or a cross, he chooses a compact composition around the wayside shrine – an element proper to the Polish sacred landscape. The presence of the military doctor functions as a Classicist civilising figure: medicine, civilian skill, rational care, are drawn into the scene of death as a counterpoint to the cruelty of war.

A symbolic element par excellence. The small brick turret with a tiled roof, set at the centre of the composition, fulfils at once a structural function (the vertical axis of the painting, the brightest tonal point) and a semantic one (the sacred in the field of battle, a sign of divine presence, a semantic link between the drama of Godebski's death and the Polish religious-patriotic landscape).

This motif belongs to the wider repertoire of post-partition Polish painting, in which wayside shrines, crosses and figures of the Virgin fulfil the function of implicit marks of Polishness – not so much religious as national. Suchodolski, for the first time in Polish battle painting, tied this motif to a specific episode of an officer's death, establishing an iconographic model that would recur in Juliusz and Wojciech Kossak and in the mass patriotic iconography of the twentieth century.

Suchodolski depicted the voltigeurs of the Kalisz Legion at the foot of the staff's rise – in uniforms recognisable by their crimson facings. Here a cautious uniform-related correction must be introduced: the details of the uniforms, which the painter reconstructed meticulously, correspond to the state of March 1810, not of April 1809.

The uniform regulations introduced in the Duchy of Warsaw on 30 March 1810 standardised the distinctions of the formations in a way that, at the time of the Battle of Raszyn itself, was still only partly in force. Bronisław Gembarzewski, in Wojsko Polskie. Księstwo Warszawskie 1807–1814 (1905), described in detail the transitional state of the uniforms of April 1809 – with a mixture of elements of the Danube, Warsaw, Kalisz and Poznań Legions, far from the order that Suchodolski painted.

Both artillery scenes – the mounted one in the foreground and the foot one in the middle plane – are worked out with a proficiency proper to a former artilleryman. Suchodolski recognises the ammunition caisson, the gun carriage, the coupling, the drawbar; he introduces a scene of changing position, known to him from the personal experience of the 1831 campaign.

The column of infantry on the causeway – the most synthetic iconogram of the Battle of Raszyn: a marching column of Polish infantry advancing along the pond causeway towards Falenty, covered by artillery. This attack, carried out on difficult floodplain terrain under enemy fire, became in Polish memory the identifying mark of the whole battle – and it is precisely the choice of this moment as the backdrop of the far plane that confirms that Suchodolski was painting not a tactical report but a narrative emblem.

Landscape as iconogram: the Raszyn pond, the church, the burning buildings of the village – all these elements fulfil an iconographic function on a par with the figural scene. The conflagration as a pan-European emblem of war, known from Albrecht Altdorfer's Battle of Issus, through Jacques Callot's Miseries of War and Goya's Desastres de la guerra, all the way to French battle painting of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

To understand the iconological stakes of the Raszyn canvas, it must be located within the long developmental line of French Napoleonic battle painting, whose two poles are established by Antoine-Jean Gros and Louis-François Lejeune.

Gros – a pupil of David – introduced into imperial painting the model of the heroic apotheosis of the commander: a single figure of Napoleon, surrounded by the dying, the sick or the triumphant, dominates the entire scene compositionally and semantically (Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa, 1804; Napoleon on the Field of Eylau, 1808).

Lejeune – a soldier, a veteran of the campaigns of 1796–1814 – proposes the opposite model: the battle as a total, documentarily precise panorama in which there is no single centre but dozens of legible micro-scenes distributed throughout the full depth of the field of battle (Bataille de Marengo, 1801; Bataille de Lodi, 1804; Bataille de Somosierra, 1810).

Suchodolski chooses the Lejeune model – both out of the personal preference of Vernet's pupil and out of thematic necessity: the Battle of Raszyn was not a one-man victory but a collective effort of the army, in which each formation, each unit and each element of the terrain (the pond, the causeway, the church, the shrine) had its own role in the moral narrative.

Yet in Suchodolski the choice of the Lejeune model is not entirely consistent. The central placing of the scene of Godebski's death – with all its mors heroica and its Classicist apparatus of iconographic quotations – introduces into the purely panoramic structure an element of the heroic condensation familiar from Gros and West.

This intermediate, hybrid solution is one of the most characteristic features of the nineteenth-century Polish battle-painting school – it combines the French panoramic order with the Polish need for a singular heroic embodiment. In 1832 Suchodolski is a conscious constructor of this solution; after him the same model – a panorama with a heroic core – will return in Juliusz Kossak and, in the third generation, in Wojciech Kossak and Jan Chełmiński.

The painting is created in 1832 – that is, literally a year after the fall of the November Uprising, in the first year of the Great Emigration, in the year when Polish culture begins its systematic work on the memory of the recent defeat and of the more distant but still living tradition of the Duchy of Warsaw. The Battle of Raszyn belongs to the founding acts of that work.

It fits into the chain of objects and texts that constitute the myth of Napoleonic Poland as a model of sovereign Polish statehood: Thorvaldsen's Poniatowski monument (commissioned 1817, completed 1832), Michał Stachowicz's Poniatowski's Farewell to Kraków (1810–1825), and the later depictions of the death at the Elster.

In Suchodolski, Poniatowski is still alive, still in command, still morally winning the Battle of Raszyn. The Battle of Raszyn of 1832 thus functions as an iconographic pendant to the later depictions of the prince's death in the Elster current. Together they form a closed narrative formula: the beginning of Poniatowski's command (Raszyn 1809) and its end (the Elster, 1813), both captured in Classicist idioms.

The discrepancy between the state of the uniforms shown in the painting and the actual state of April 1809 – already noted by Gembarzewski in 1905 – tends to be interpreted in two directions. The first: as a documentary error by the painter, who had no access to costume sources from the year of the battle itself. The second, more convincing, is iconological in character: Suchodolski was painting not a chronicle of April 1809 but an emblem of the entire Polish Army of the Duchy of Warsaw.

It is the same mechanism of Classicist idealisation that Thorvaldsen applied to Poniatowski, dressing him in the uniform of a Roman emperor beneath the Acropolis – the universalisation of the historical particular at the cost of documentary literalness. The 1810 uniforms in Suchodolski's painting are, for the Polish Army of the Duchy of Warsaw, what the all'antica dress is for Poniatowski in Thorvaldsen: an iconographic costume of the era, not a photograph of it.

In the terminology of Pierre Nora – author of the seven-volume Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–1992) – Suchodolski's Raszyn canvas is one of the founding acts of the Polish “Raszyniada”: a chain of texts, images and commemorations of the battle of 19 April 1809. In this context the fine inaccuracies of the painting – the 1810 uniforms, the place of Godebski's death, the presence of a doctor – lose significance; the memory-making function of the work precedes its documentary function.

The most surprising iconological paradox of this painting is that its emotional authenticity comes not from 1809 but from 1831. In April 1809 Suchodolski was twelve years old and did not witness the battle – which means that all the scenes of the wounded, the medical baggage trains, the fallen horses and the confusion of the camp, which grip the viewer in the Poznań canvas, are a transposition of the visual memory of the November Uprising.

At Grochów on 25 February 1831 the painter, serving as an officer of the horse artillery of the Polish Army of the Congress Kingdom, was wounded; in the ambulances, on the baggage trains and in the encampments of Grochów he saw what he would later transfer into the lower-right part of The Battle of Raszyn. The 1832 painting is therefore a palimpsest: its upper narrative layer belongs to April 1809, and its sensory and emotional layer – to February 1831. This doubleness is its iconological secret.

January Suchodolski (born 19 September 1797 in Grodno, died 27 March 1875 at Boimie near Siedlce) entered adult life by the double path of soldier and painter. In 1816 he entered the artillery cadet school of the Congress Kingdom, where he treated his first drawing studies as a natural complement to his military topographical education.

In 1828–1830 he attended, in Paris, the studio of Horace Vernet – the leading battle painter of the Restoration and the July Monarchy, son of Carle and grandson of Joseph Vernet, heir to a French dynasty of history painters. The Paris stay was decisive: there he learnt the Lejeune-Vernet battle formula, came to know Géricault's anatomy of the horse, the typology of the imperial uniform, and the discipline of panoramic composition.

After his return in 1830 he immediately joined the insurgent army (horse artillery) and took part in the Battle of Grochów on 25 February 1831, where he was wounded. The 1830s open his mature career as a battle painter – and it is precisely the 1832 Battle of Raszyn that inaugurates this period.

Suchodolski was one of Vernet's Polish pupils – alongside, among others, Piotr Michałowski, who also studied under him briefly in the 1830s. From Vernet's studio he carried over into Polish battle painting panoramic composition, documentary precision of detail, the dynamism of horse teams, the hierarchical use of light.

Yet a fundamental difference of scale remains: Vernet had the imperial army as his constant subject, Suchodolski – the heroic defeat of the Duchy of Warsaw and the distant Napoleonic epic as material for remembrance. This changes the tonality: Vernet paints a victorious war, Suchodolski – one remembered and symbolically reclaimed.

The Battle of Raszyn occupies, within the nineteenth-century Polish battle-painting school, the place of a pioneering work – it anticipates the whole set of concerns and the formula of Polish national battle painting of the second half of the century.

The line of continuity runs clearly: Suchodolski → Juliusz Kossak → Wojciech Kossak → Jan Chełmiński, with branches in Józef Brandt (borderland battle painting) and Piotr Michałowski (Napoleonic riders). Each of these painters would take up and transform elements already present in Suchodolski: the French Lejeune formula + a Polish heroic counterpoint + documentary uniform study + landscape as iconogram + the staffage of the wounded as the moral weight of the painting.

Suchodolski is the historical node of this tradition – its translator from French into Polish.

In the four-dimensional typology applied to national-heritage objects in the FWD cards, the 1832 Raszyn canvas should be characterised as follows:

The artistic dimension – one of the most outstanding examples of Polish battle painting of the Napoleonic era in the Lejeune type, a decisive link in the reception of the French battle-painting school in Poland.

The historical dimension – a first-rate testimony to the shaping of Polish memory of the Polish Army of the Duchy of Warsaw in the inter-uprising period, a document of the cultural work on the myth of Prince Józef Poniatowski.

The iconographic dimension – a founding act of the visual “Raszyniada”, establishing the model for depicting the Battle of Raszyn in Polish pictorial culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The museum dimension – one of the key objects in the collection of the Wielkopolskie Muzeum Wojskowe as a branch of the National Museum in Poznań, a reference object for the whole of nineteenth-century Polish battle painting.

January Suchodolski's The Battle of Raszyn of 1832 is a bridge between French Napoleonic painting and the nineteenth-century Polish battle-painting tradition – a work at once international and deeply Polish.

International, because it draws directly on Vernet's Paris school, on Lejeune's documentary formula, on the Classicist apparatus of mors heroica known from West and David. Polish – because its subject is the first great trial by combat of the army of the Duchy of Warsaw, its emotional centre the death of the soldier-poet Cyprian Godebski, and its structural axis the wayside shrine as a mark of the Polish sacred landscape.

Created in the year preceding the Great Emigration, founded on the painter's personal experience in the November Uprising, opening his mature Napoleonic cycle, the Raszyn canvas remains one of the founding images of Polish memory of the 1807–1815 era.

Its uniform-related and topographical inaccuracies, long noted in the specialist literature, do not diminish its significance – on the contrary, they reveal the iconological character of the work: this is not a chronicle but an emblem. And an emblem – unlike a chronicle – lives by the power of the sign, not the power of reference.

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