Portrait of a Turkish dignitary

Portrait of a Turkish nobleman A small painting from the collection of the Lubomirscy family, most likely ordered by the marshal’s wife for the Turkish Apartment (later given to Henryk Lubomirski, her adopted son). The painting depicts a young man sitting in an armchair, against the backdrop of a pillar and the sky, quite schematically handled. The man’s right hand rests upon a pillow on the arm rest, the left rests on his knee. The armchair is upholstered in burgundy velvet. The man is wearing a white jellabiya in a delicate (embroidered) pattern, with a broad, soft belt of a golden decorated fabric, the ends falling loosely. A golden-woven piece of cloth covers his right arm. In the background, on the right, a fragment of a column, on the left is a navy, clouded sky. We know nothing of the depicted man or the author of the painting – the painter was most likely French, the painting originates from the 18th/ 19th centuries. It has a wooden, gilded and profiled frame, with a bead ornament band along the inner edge, the outer edge decorated in a repeating pattern of a pair of styled acanthus leaves, rolling towards the inside, arranged symmetrically on both sides of a shell volute; it is displayed in the Turkish Apartment on the ground floor of the Castle of Łańcut.