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PAINTER ACTIVE IN GREAT POLAND
"Coffin Portrait of a Woman",
oil on tin plate, about 1670-1680, National Museum in Poznan
"Coffin Portrait of Sabina Hasa Radlic",
oil on tin plate, about 1676, National Museum in Poznan
"Coffin Portrait of Nobleman from the Region of Gostyn",
oil on tin plate, end of the seventeenth century, National Museum in Poznan
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UNKNOWN ARTIST
"Coffin Portrait of Zofia Walicka",
after mid-seventeenth century, Wilanow palace
"Coffin Portrait of Stanislaw Woysza",
1677, Wilanow palace
A unique version of the portrait, almost unknown outside Polish lands, was the coffin portrait,
connected with incredibly expanded funeral rites. Painted on tin and nailed onto the coffin for the
time of the burial, these likenesses showed the deceased as live sitters, and present a strikingly
realistic depiction, often verging on ruthless verism, which did not shy from ugliness. In contrast
to the representative portrait, they rendered concrete individuals whose expression is reinforced
by a gaze aimed directly at the viewer.
In the Sarmatian and coffin portrait Polish painting gained, for the second time, its unquestionably
own, specific form; the first such occasion took place in fifteenth-century altar painting.
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