Portrait of a Gentleman, bust-length, in a black jacket

The present work was formerly in the collection of Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (1770-1861), a member of one of the oldest and most distinguished Polish families. An active participant in public affairs, Adam was close to Alexander I (1777-1825), czar of Russia, whom he accompanied to the Congress of Vienna and from whom he obtained the Polish constitution of 1815 after Alexander was recognized as king of Poland by the congress. However, opposing the later Polish policy of Alexander and Nicholas I, he took part in the insurrection of 1830 and headed the provisional government (1830-1831). When it fell, he emigrated to Paris, where he was the leader of the Polish aristocratic party until his death in 1861. A man of culture, he was curator of the university at Vilnius (1803-1823) and a keen collector of the arts. During a trip to Venice in 1799, he acquired a number of paintings, probably including the present work. Among his purchases were two Renaissance masterpieces, Leonardo da Vinci's Portrait of a Lady with an Ermine and Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man, which were to become the principal pieces in the museum of European history that his mother, Princess Izabella (1746-1835), opened in Pulawy in 1809. At the time of the insurrection of 1830, the collections of the museum were dispersed and these two works were later secretly taken to Paris, where Adam, advised by Delacroix, had purchased the Hôtel Lambert in 1842 to exhibit his own collections. Upon his death in 1861, the collections passed to his son Prince Wladyslaw (1828-1894), who repatriated them in a new museum in Kraków that opened to the public in 1876. Both works were confiscated by the Nazis in 1939 and, although the Leonardo was returned to the family and now hangs in the National Museum in Kraków, the Raphael remains untraced.