Equestrian Portrait of a Hussar Officer

In 1773, a year after Russia, Prussia and Austria had taken almost a third of Poland between them, Bellotto was court painter to King Stanisław August in Warsaw. That year he noted a delivery of four small pictures, as he put it, of invention, with horses taken from nature and with figures, for 200 ducats in all. This is one of them, painted for the king's own gallery, and it is an unusual subject for a man who had spent his working life on streets and squares. A hussar officer in red sits a grey horse while an attendant waits beside him, in front of an imagined backdrop with an equestrian statue and a waterfall. Nobody has put a name to the rider. On his sabretache, the flat leather pouch hanging from his belt, are the initials FBC under a crown, and they have never been explained.