Lublin Castle

Leon Urmowski was probably born in Lviv around 1794, from where he moved to Zamość, and then, around 1809, settled in Lublin. Urmowski received a military education; in 1810 he entered the Elementary Artillery and Engineer School in Warsaw. Already at that time he showed outstanding artistic abilities, which were confirmed by the drawings he submitted with his application for admission to the school. Although he did not receive an artistic education, at school he had the opportunity to improve his skills in drawing and topography. In 1812, he participated in the activities of Napoleon's Russian campaign as a soldier and adjutant of the main staff of the 17th Division commanded by General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski. Urmowski reported on the first stage of military operations in a diary he kept, in which, besides the route, there were descriptions of towns and architectural monuments. Urmowski's developing military career came to an end with his premature death; he died in 1814 at the age of 20 from pulmonary tuberculosis, only ten months after his return to Lublin. The artist's young age was probably one of the main reasons why few of his works survived. After his return to Lublin, the artist painted two views of the city; one of them depicts the Krakowskie Przedmieście Street, the other is a realistically reconstructed landscape with staffage, where the artist captured the Castle Hill from the south with the ruined buildings of the southern wing of the castle, the donjon and the Chapel of the Holy Trinity, as well as the buildings of the post-Franciscan complex in the distance (now the Salesian Church). Both views belong to the type of nineteenth-century representations of Polish architecture connected with the desire to preserve the mementoes of the past, to document their condition to spread knowledge about the monuments of national architecture. The landscape refers to an earlier drawing sketch, created before he left Lublin. However, in this picture, Urmowski departs from the previously developed iconographic scheme and does not focus exclusively on architecture, combining it with a complex landscape background. A steep, tree-lined escarpment, from which one of the men observes the ruined castle buildings, gives the realistic landscape a romantic mood.

Anna Hałata