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Jean-Pierre Norblin de La Gourdaine

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Jan Piotr Norblin de la Gourdaine (French: Jean Pierre) (15 July 1740 - 23 February 1830) was a French-born painter, draughtsman, engraver, drawing artist and caricaturis. From 1774 until 1804 he resided in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where he gained a citizenship. He is considered to be one of the most important painters of the Polish Enlightenment. In his style he combined the Rococo tradition of charming fetes galantes with a panorama of daily life and current political events captured with journalistic accuracy. He created a gallery of portraits of representatives of all social classes in the last years of the Commonwealth.

Hanging of traitors at Warsaw's Old Town Market, a contemporary painting by Jan Piotr Norblin. The supporters of the Targowica Confederation, responsible for the second partition of Poland, became public enemies. If they could not be apprehanded, their portraits were hanged instead.

Born in Misy-Faut-Yonne in 1740. He was invited to Poland by the magnate family of Czartoryski and became their court artist. Among his early works the most prominent are his illustrations to Myszeida, a poem by Ignacy Krasicki. He worked in Puławy and at Powązki as painter and decorator of local Czartoryski's estate. He also worked for the Radziwiłł family in Arkadia (Nieborów) and for King Stanisław August Poniatowski.

In 1790 settled in Warsaw where he established his art school, and this move allowed him to witness and illustrate many important historical moments of the last years of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. His hurriedly sketched drawings illustrated the passing of the Constitution of the 3 May and soon he became famous as the eye-witness and painter-chronicler of the Kościuszko Uprising, immortalising many of the most famous events of that event in his paintings: from the Warsaw Uprising in April and the consequent hanging of Targowica traitors in the Old Market Square, through the battle of Racławice to Massacre of Praga. After his return to France in 1804 he still continued to paint based on some of his Poland-era drafts, but he also illustrated other contemporary events, among them the times of the Napoleon's wars. He died in Paris in 1830.

Among Norblin's studends in Poland were Aleksander Orłowski and Michał Płoński and Jan Rustem.


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