Portrait of Adam Mickiewicz on the Ayu-Dag Cliff – Walenty Wańkowicz | #visual arts

Portrait of Adam Mickiewicz on the Ayu-Dag Cliff – Walenty Wańkowicz

Walenty Wańkowicz went down in art history as the creator of Adam Mickiewicz’s most famous image. He had previously portrayed the poet several times during his studies in Vilnius, but these were private sketches and small drawings. Now he undertook a larger, more official work.

Mickiewicz began posing for Wańkowicz in December 1827 in St Petersburg. The painter was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, whereas the poet was exiled to Russia after the trial of the Philomaths and Filarets, a secret society to which he belonged. The two had met a few years earlier as students in Vilnius. Wańkowicz was taken under the wing of Jan Rustem, a valued portraitist of the Classical period. He himself belonged to a new generation: the Young Romantics.

Polish Romanticism was just taking shape – a shape largely drawn by the pen of Mickiewicz. The less-than 30-year-old writer was taking the literary world by storm. He had already published two volumes of Poetry, including Ballades and Romances, Grażyna and parts II and IV of Dziady. Konrad Wallenrod was soon to appear in print in St Petersburg.

Wańkowicz’s painting took inspiration from the Crimean Sonnets, published in 1826 in Moscow. Portrait of Adam Mickiewicz on the Ayu-Dag Cliff referred directly to the final, eighteenth sonnet entitled On Juda’s Cliff, after the name of a mountain located on the southern coast of Crimea. The work opens with the stanza:

On Juda's Cliff I love to lean and look

On waves that battling beat and break with might,

While farther seaward in a bland delight,

I see them shining where a rainbow shook.

Trans. Edna Worthley Underwood

Mickiewicz was inspired to write the Crimean Sonnets by an expedition he participated in between 29th August and 27th October 1825. The hero of the series is a lonely traveller, a melancholic exile, a restless pilgrim. Absorbed in his own deliberations and a longing that permeates his heart, he is tormented by various emotions, but at the same time sensitive to the beauty of the natural world around him.

Mickiewicz becomes a Byronic wanderer in Wańkowicz’s painting. He stands leaning against a rock, looking into the distance. He has put on his shoulders a hairy burqa with a white shirt, a red shawl and striped trousers underneath. His left hand is supporting his chin, his right hand slipped under his shirt, placing it over his heart. Next to him, we can see a lyre lying on a vine leaf – the classic symbol of the poet.

Thanks to the artist’s brush, the landscape has also taken on a romantic quality. In the distance, the rocky coastline is picturesque and jagged. The orange glow of the setting sun stretches across the horizon. Twilight is emerging – a moment on the borderline between day and night, light and darkness, daydreaming and sleep, filled with nostalgia for yet another day fading into the past. A lone traveller on a summit obscured by clouds, surrounded by the power of nature, evokes associations with another painting created a decade earlier, a painting regarded as the quintessence of Romanticism: Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

Mickiewicz’s pensive face is shown in profile. The painter subtly depicted a staring eye, a clear eyebrow arch, dark strands of hair, and sideburns growing on the cheeks. From the surviving accounts we know that contemporaries paid attention to the well-captured likeness. Mickiewicz and Wańkowicz’s acquaintances from their studies in Vilnius, members of the Filaret Society, were in St Petersburg at the time: Stanisław Morawski and Mikołaj Malinowski. ‘In this portrait, the artist managed to poetise, idealise, and beautify the face of our bard, and yet make him look most like him,’ Morawski admired in his memoirs.

Malinowski, however, wrote in a letter to the historian Joachim Lelewel:

Mickiewicz’s arrival in St Petersburg caused an unprecedented sensation. Russians and Poles alike compete in showing him respect. […] Mickiewicz has changed from the outside, he has grown sideburns, which makes him more serious. His complexion is healthier, he has grown slightly more robust, he has changed, but to his own advantage. In company, he is not as eccentric as before; instead he is very free and engaging.

Wańkowicz was regarded by his friends as a very conscientious person. Work on the portrait must have been progressing well, as in May 1828, the painting was shown at an exhibition at St Petersburg’s Academy of Fine Arts. The work was very popular, not only thanks to the painter’s talent, but also due to Mickiewicz’s fame. It was not simply a likeness of the writer, but an image of the great Romantic, harmonising with the writer’s own works. 'Wańkowicz penetrated the poet’s spirit', claimed the artist’s colleague, painter Wincenty Smokowski, noting that he captured not only 'the likeness of the face', but also 'the touching poetry'.

The painting soon became the most recognisable – and widespread – image of Mickiewicz. Already in June 1828 Wańkowicz created a lithograph based on it. The graphic reproduction was reproduced en masse, significantly contributing to the popularity of the original. Soon the artist also made several smaller replicas of the painting.

During this period, Wańkowicz established himself as a recognised portraitist. From the accounts of his friends, it is known that he also worked on a portrait of Alexander Pushkin (the work, however, remained unfinished; the canvas inherited by the painter’s son was lost during the January Uprising). He also liked to paint portraits of his Polish acquaintances, such as Maria Szymanowska – the first professional Polish pianist, and privately the mother of Celina, Mickiewicz’s future wife.

Mickiewicz soon left Petersburg, and Wańkowicz returned to his family estate in Ślepianka Mała near Minsk. Strongly influenced by Andrzej Towiański and his mystical visions, he began to paint allegorical compositions, often associated with the cult of Napoleon. However, they were not as good as his portraits, which are preserved in the National Museum in Warsaw – apart from the Portrait of Adam Mickiewicz on the Ayu-Dag Cliff, he captured the likenesses of violinist Karol Lipiński, Towiański and his wife Karolina, amongst others.

Wańkowicz and Mickiewicz met for the last time in Paris. The painter arrived there in the autumn of 1841, following Towiański, and stayed at the home of the poet’s friend. Soon Mickiewicz himself became an ardent follower of Towianism. And Wańkowicz? Weakened and exhausted by work, he seriously deteriorated in health. On 12th May 1842, the creator of the most famous portrait of Polish Romanticism died in the bard’s arms.

Originally written in Polish by Karolina Dzimira-Zarzycka, March 2021, translated into English by PG, April 2022

adam mickiewicz

portrait

19th century painting