“Shadows of the Lost World”

For nearly a century the name of this artist, musician, and composer, who came, according to Adam Mickiewicz, “from our Lithuania,” was ignored, although it always belonged only to Polish culture. In recent decades Belarusians also recognized his contribution to the national art of Beresteishchyna. During his travels around the lands of the Russian and Austrian Empires Napoleon Orda also drew Ukrainian landscapes.

“For some time in Warsaw circulates an album of a large format with landscapes of the Grodno, Vilna, Minsk, Kaunas, Volhynia, Podillia, and Kyiv provinces sketched from life in pencil by Napoleon Orda and printed at his own expense in two series as of today with 80 landscapes. This is the painted history of the land,” this was the press review on the newly released Album of Historical Landscapes of Poland (1875), which became a significant phenomenon in Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian lands of the Russian Empire.

In a rather difficult time of the first half of the 19th century, when the history of Ukraine, like that of Poland and Belarus being a part of the Russian Empire, was banned or, at best, distorted and the monuments of the past were nearly all destroyed, Napoleon Orda began systematic documentation of these monuments in 1860. He traveled with the drawing album and pencil “from ruins to tombs and from tombs to ruins.” Many of his sketches eventually became the only images of the architectural and natural monuments of the Ukrainian “ancient and magnificent past” destroyed by time and human greediness.

Napoleon Orda was born on February 11, 1807 in the Varacevicy estate near Janow Poleski in the Pinsk district of Minsk guberniya (now the village is a part of Ivanava raion in Brest oblast, Belarus) to the noble family of fortification engineer Michal Orda. He received decent primary home education and at the age of 12 the young man entered the Svislach gymnasium, popular among young people at that time, and graduated from it in 1823. That year he entered the Department of Physics and Mathematics of Vilnius University. Orda was fascinated by romantic ideas of the Polish-Lithuanian national liberation movement and was actively engaged in the work of the secret student society “Zarane.” For being a member of the organization in 1827 he was expelled from the university, arrested and sentenced to 15 months in prison. After returning to Varacevicy he externally completed studies at the university under police supervision. During the November Uprising he took an active part in the liberation movement as a lieutenant of the fourth Regiment of the Lithuanian Corps of Horse Guards. In May of 1831 Orda as a captain was awarded the highest Polish honors – the Order of the Golden Cross Virtuti Militari for courage “shown in the battles for the freedom of his people.”

After the uprising in order to avoid deportation to Siberia, he had secretly emigrated through Austria and Switzerland to Italy. Family estate in Varacevicy was confiscated by royal authorities “in favor of Russian State.”

In 1833 Orda came to Paris – the true center of cultural and artistic life of romantic Europe and, at the same time, the center of Lithuanian and Polish emigration. In Paris Orda joined the “golden circle” of such outstanding composers, musicians, and writers as Adam Mickiewicz and Frederic Chopin, Ferenc Liszt and Charles Gounod, Gioachino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi, Honore de Balzac and Stendhal.

Orda initially studied music composition from Frederic Chopin and created a number of his own musical compositions. At that time he published Album of Music Works by Polish Composers and Cycle of Lectures on Slavic Literatures by Adam Mickiewicz, became a member of the Historical and Literary Society. On the advice of Chopin, talented Orda starts painting in the studio of renowned master of architectural landscape Pierre Girard, which to some extent determined his future.

In 1840-44 he created the first series of sketches and watercolors “Views of the Cities and Castles on Rhine, Cathedrals and Monasteries” during his romantic journeys around France and Germany, Spain and Portugal. At that time the artist married a French woman Irene Bougle and during the period from 1844 to 1848 he worked as a director of the Theater of Italian Opera in Paris, compiled and published Polish Grammar in Paris (1856).

After Emperor Alexander II issued a decree “On Royal Amnesty for Political Exiles” of the Polish uprising, Orda returned to his home in Varacevicy in 1856. However, after his mother’s death Orda had to leave the family estate. He moved to Grodno and then to Pinsk. For some time he worked as private teacher and home tutor of music at the estate of General Adam Rzewuski in Volhynia. In 1860 he began traveling around Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, creating a series of sketches of monuments of masonry construction and architectural landscapes of the land. The artist was inspired to do this after the publication of the album of lithographs Picturesque Poland in the 1840s in Paris and album of etchings Picturesque Ukraine by Taras Shevchenko, printed in Saint Petersburg.

The result of the exciting trips and intense creative work were the eight albums published in the period between 1873 and 1883 in lithographic studio of Maksymilian Fajans under the general title Album of Historical Views of Poland, Devoted to Fellow Countrymen. Sketched from Nature by Napoleon Orda that included 260 autolithographs – landscape sketches from all corners of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Traveling around Ukraine, Orda created a series of sketches with views of architectural monuments. They are now preserved in the Krakow National Museum, grouped into series “Podolsk Region,” “Kyiv Region,” “Volyn Region.” Most of the sketches are dated 1873 or 1874. These landscapes show a peculiar style of Orda – passionate promoter of historical monuments. In every composition the artist sought to maximize accuracy, bringing out every detail. For three years the artist collected materials, faithfully documented with the pencil everything that could be of interest for future generations. He traveled all over Polissia and Volyn, Podillia, Galicia, and Dnipro Ukraine. The result of these trips were numerous sketches of Iziaslav, Ostroh, Kremenets, Klevan, Monastyrsk, Terebovlia, Zhovkva, Olesko, Pidhirtsi, Oleksandria, Bila Tserkva, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Korsun, Lutsk, Lviv, Golden Gates and Saint Andrew’s Church in Kyiv.

Towers, castles, palaces, cathedrals, tombs, rivers, ruins – Orda looked intensely at the panorama of the land trying not to miss any slightest detail of the landscape or architecture.

Orda’s landscapes convey artistic pleasure the artist received from contact with nature, reflect the joy and admiration of the beauty of the land. Artist’s lithographs have soft gray-yellowish substrate, sometimes it is complimented with white spots of clouds, walls of houses, palaces, and towers. In his sketches there are practically no straight lines, beautifully modeled contours create atmosphere of comfort and poetic mood. Lithography enables rich tonal gradation, gentle transitions without sharp contrasts. The artist loved the land. That’s why the monuments he drew always fit into the environment related to them, they live their own lives often hiding poetry of antiquity somewhere deep inside. In 1878, as if summing up his creative research, the artist noted that “during his travels he had been to nine provinces and made over 800 sketches of relics of the past.”

But 20 years of wandering affected Orda’s health. At the age of 75 he went to Warsaw to receive some treatment. On April 14/26, 1883 the artist died in one of the hospitals of Warsaw. According to his last will, Orda was buried in Janow Poleski at the parish cemetery.

In the posthumous memories of Adam Plug about Napoleon Orda published in the weekly Klosy he stressed that “he was a worthy citizen who sincerely loved his land.” Worthy, but quickly forgotten by those for whom he served so faithfully, guarding the memory of the glorious past of Poland and Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine in his art.