Festive Celebration on Ice

Jean-Pierre Norblin de La Gourdaine [Polish: Jan Piotr Norblin] was born into a French bourgeois family in 1745. Little is known about his early youth, but he certainly travelled around Europe, learning art from the greatest painting masters. His talent was noticed by the Czartoryskis, who offered him a joint trip to Poland and the position of a court painter and teacher of the ducal children.
Poland was a rather exotic country for the artist, but it soon became his second homeland and a source of inspiration. His art clearly illustrates the distance he had as a foreigner and an observer. Among the most popular forms are genre paintings, which perfectly capture the Polish specificity presented through the prism of European painting patterns.
A festive celebration on ice belongs to a series of representations from the 1780s, showing the entertainments of the magnates in Powązki Park Warsaw. It bears great resemblance to paintings by artists such as Antoine Watteau or Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
This drawing shows an ice rink on the Vistula River. There are mostly women in sledges and men pushing the sledges on the ice. Some men are skatig themselves. One of them, shown in the foreground, loses his balance, thus drawing the attention of his companions. Illuminated buildings and a group of people are visible in the background.
The drawing was made in 1788, but a similar composition was made a few years earlier, along with an oil painting. There are slight differences between the pieces in the staffage and on the right side of the composition.