Charge of Poznań cavalry during November Uprising (1830)

Charge of Poznań Cavalry during the November Uprising (1830), painted in 1850 and now lost to an unknown collection, depicts one of the cavalry actions of the November Uprising — the Polish insurrection against Russian rule that lasted from late 1830 to 1831. The Poznań cavalry — from the Duchy of Posen, then under Prussian partition — sent volunteers to fight alongside the insurrection's forces, an act of pan-Polish solidarity across partition borders. In 1850 the memory of the November Uprising was only twenty years old, and Kossak, then in his late twenties, was engaging with events within living memory. The cavalry charge is the compositional form that would define his career, and this early treatment of an uprising subject placed him squarely within the Romantic tradition of patriotic military painting that Jan Nepomucen Głowacki, Piotr Michałowski, and others had established. The work demonstrates Kossak's ambition to claim the historical painting genre as his primary territory from the outset of his career.

An early work of 1850, this canvas would show Kossak's compositional instincts not yet fully developed but already directed toward the cavalry charge as his characteristic form. The organisation of multiple horses at the gallop, the communication of speed and violence, and the differentiation of individual figures within a mass action are the technical challenges the subject poses.