Before I Proceed to the Main Topic of My Speech, I Would Like to Thank Very Much the Organisers for Inviting Me to Participate A

WARSAW – AN IMPORTANT CENTER OF CARRIAGE PRODUCTION ! FROM THE 18TH CENTURY TO THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY Before I proceed to the main topic of my speech, I would like to thank very much the organisers for inviting me to participate actively in the symposium in Williamsburg. I am the first Pole to give a speech at this world-renowned meeting. Admittedly, it is not the first case of a speech made by a Pole in America, as many years ago Dr. Teresa Żurawska from Łańcut Castle delivered a speech on King John III Sobieski’s carriages at an international museum conference in Washington. In his brilliant work “Kutschen Europas”, Andres Furger dedicated only two sentences to Polish carriage building, mentioning just one producer. Nowadays, Poland is a country extremely poor in material culture relics related to horse-drawn transport, unfortunately including archive sources, which are indispensable for thorough research into this subject. After the loss of independence at the end of the 18th century, the Napoleonic Wars, the national uprisings, the two World Wars, which swept through the Polish lands causing total destruction, the country saw a period of totalitarian oppression related to the new system, which in a way completed the act of destruction of historical evidence. For ages, the Polish culture had been marked by the landowning ethos, with a love for the land, tradition and a certain lifestyle, an important element of which was horse breeding and usage. Polish manor houses took more pride in possessing excellent horse-drawn vehicles and mounts than other material goods. When this world was gone for ever, very little material evidence of it was left. Relics from the early period in Polish collections only include remains of three King John III Sobieski’s carriages from the second half of the 17th century at the Wilanów Palace Museum, one chaise produced in Gdańsk in the first half of the 18th century and one side of the body of an elegant gala berlin belonging to the Counts Drohojowski family from the first quarter of the 18th century at the National Museum in Cracow, and there are only around 10 vehicles from the first half of the 19th century. From this period, a few sleighs for carnival sleigh rides have been preserved, many of which are incomplete. Polish collections include somewhat more items from the second half of the 19th century, but the most items date from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and from the first half of the 20th century. In these collections, there are rather few Polish-made vehicles, including items from the biggest production center, Warsaw. Relatively little is known about the beginnings of carriage building in Warsaw. The modest archive sources have not been thoroughly studied in this respect yet. Since the guild system consolidated, that is essentially since the reign of King Sigismund I, who issued legal acts formalising various crafts in the Polish lands, including Warsaw, we can search for archive information on the production of horse- drawn vehicles. In the case of this early period, it is difficult to determine the guild of the producers of finished carriages but I think that like in Western Europe they joined the guild of saddlers unlike bodymakers and wheelwrights, who organised themselves into a separate guild. The city archives of old Warsaw mention many saddlers operating there already since the end of the 15th century who owned their own masonry houses, which tells us that this occupation was fairly profitable. 2. An economic boom in Warsaw related to the presence of the royal court and other state institutions certainly started when King Sigismund III moved the capital city from Cracow to Warsaw in 1596. Unfortunately, Polish collections do not include any carriages from this period but only iconographic sources, most importantly the famous Stockholm Roll depicting the entry of the wedding procession of King Sigismund III and Archduchess Constance von Hapsburg of Austria into Cracow, on 4th December 1605. This excellent document of the period presents also several elegant vehicles used at that time by the upper classes. These items were probably not made by carriage builders from Warsaw but they presumably produced similar brozheks, landaus and coaches. The only Polish artefact from this period is Brańsk Starost (Mayor) Franciszek Leśnowolski’s coach from around 1640, possibly produced in craftsman’s workshops in Gdańsk. It can be found in the collection of the Moscow Kremlin, where it is deliberately attributed to Russian craftsmen, and the said Franciszek Leśnowolski is regarded as a Russian citizen and a Starost (Mayor) of the Russian city of Bryansk, although it is indisputably contradicted by a preserved Polish coat of arms on the front and hind part of the undercarriage. The vehicle was probably a piece of booty from the Muscovite invasion of Poland in 1660, when the town of Brańsk was plundered. Other Polish artefacts from this period remaining abroad are gilded coats of arms and buckles from a harness of King Sigismund III – currently it is in the Livrustkammaren collection in Stockholm. It was probably a piece of war booty from the Swedish invasion of Poland in 1656. The finish of all these royal carriages of John III Sobieski was made in Warsaw and its painting aspect is associated with the workshop of the court painter Jerzy Eleuter Siemiginowski (1660-1711). An interesting relic of the period is a work of the Italian painter Martino Altomonte (1657-1745), who was active in Warsaw since 1684. The painting depicting the election Sejm in 1687 on the fields of Wola near Warsaw presents a large group of equipages with vehicles typical of this period in the background. Those carriages brought deputies and senators of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as other dignitaries and diplomatic service to the Sejm session, but such vehicles drove around the streets of Warsaw at that time and it can be assumed that they included items produced by carriage builders from this city. There are a lot of iconographic and archival materials from the 17th and 18th centuries that have not been studied yet which could prove the existence of carriage building workshops in Warsaw but according to the brilliant memoirist of the period of the reign of the Saxon Wettin dynasty and of Stanislaus August, Reverend Jędrzej Kitowicz “domestic carriages, even the best ones, lost their high regard the moment their local origin was discovered.” As a result, carriages were often forged and domestic items were marked with signatures of foreign companies to make them easier to sell. But this practice was common in many European countries, in different crafts as well. The real history of carriage building in Warsaw began with the activity of Tomasz Michał Dangel (1742-1808), a saddler of German origin, who learned carriage building in London, came to Warsaw on foot in 1768 and set up his first workshop in Rymarska Street. After he had married Anna Zofia Krause, daughter of a 3. well-known carriage producer from Warsaw, he became an enterprising businessman who was able to take advantage of the favourable economic situation, the support of the king and eminent magnates to build one of the biggest carriage factories in Europe of the time. The workshops of the factory were located in Senatorska and Elektoralna Streets and in its prime they employed about three hundred workers. Thanks to the quality of his products, Tomasz Michał Dangel overcame the fashion for foreign carriages, as he built solid and durable items after the newest London fashion, and surpassed other significant producers in Warsaw, namely his father-in- law Krauze (Krause) and Szperl. He did not respect the guild system, looking for the most advantageous solutions in terms of employment, contacts and discounts. The golden age of the factory was in the 1780s, and it was crowned by the ennoblement of Tomasz Dangel in 1790. One of his major clients was the last king of Poland, Stanislaus August. It is evident from the fact that after the collapse of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth one of the biggest debts of the royal court was the one to Dangel’s factory. The prosperity continued in the 1790s, Tomasz Dangel made investments, acquired land estates, and after the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth he even became a Prussian baron, although the activity of the factory itself was reduced almost four times. After a few decades of Dangel’s activity and his death in 1808, his widow sold the company to her cousin Jan Bogumił Krauze. Unfortunately, neither any item produced by Dangel nor drawings, designs and production documentation have been preserved up to the present day. Probably the only trace of this activity can be found in the superb cityscapes of Warsaw painted by the Venetian artist Bernardo Belotto called Canaletto (1721-1780), who spent the last and best period of his life in Warsaw as a court painter of King Stanislaus August. The collection of 23 cityscapes of Warsaw of the 1770s, preserved at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, is a wonderful record of the life and road traffic of the capital, described in many memoirs of travellers visiting Warsaw. Fryderyk Schultz from Livonia recalls: “... in Warsaw, you can see more carriages in motion than in most other European cities” and Antoni Magier says in his notes: “the number of carriages in Warsaw is infinite”. You could find there all kinds of fashionable vehicles: Berlins, dress charriots, désobligeantes, vis-à-vis, calashes, caravans, carts, wagons similar to those that could be seen at that time in the streets of London, Paris, Berlin or Vienna.

Load more