Bildnis des Grafen Stanisław Kostka Potocki

Jacques-Louis David painted this in Rome in 1780, a young Frenchman finishing his years at the academy there, and it was the picture that first made his name. The Polish count Stanislaw Kostka Potocki sits on a rearing horse, one hand raised, wearing the sash of Poland's Order of the White Eagle. One story behind the commission says Potocki won the painter over by taming a wild, unbroken horse in front of a crowd, which would fit the animal reined back on its hind legs here. David showed the finished work at the Paris Salon of 1781, an early taste of the crisp, confident style he would soon turn on the French Revolution. The canvas hung in the Potocki palace at Wilanow near Warsaw until 1939, when the war carried it off to Germany and then the Soviet Union. It came home to Poland in 1956.