Dzieje obrazu „Opłakiwanie” z kościoła wizytek w Warszawie

The paper presents the history, primarily the twentieth-century history, of a painting titled Lamentation [Opłakiwanie], at the present moment displayed on the northern wall of the presbytery of the Church of the Visitation Order in Warsaw. The study is based primarily on documents held in the Archives of the Convent of the Visitation Order in Warsaw. The painting, created by Jan Reisner, in 1698 was donated by his wife to the convent of the Sisters of the Visitation in Warsaw. According to the preserved inventories, it decorated the main altar in one of the chapels and was later kept in the sacristy, while in the nineteenth century it hung on the northern wall of the presbytery, opposite the cloister choir. This was its location until the outbreak of the Second World War. Shortly after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising, it was removed from the church and disappeared in unclear circumstances. At the end of 1947 and in early 1948, one of the nuns came across it in the Church of the Holy Saviour in Warsaw. Extant correspondence records how the nuns attempted to recover the painting and reveals the dramatic fortunes of the work in the final months of the war and after its end. The painting, found shortly after the entry of the Red Army to Warsaw on 17 January 1945, was handed over to Father Wacław Majewski, the then parish priest in the arch-cathedral of St. John the Baptist. He commissioned its conservation and decided to place the work in the church. Eventually, the painting returned to the Church of the Visitation Order in October 1948. In 1968, it underwent thorough conservation which not only made it possible to determine the scale of damage, but also revealed the preserved original sections. Shortly after its completion, a paper by Mariusz Karpowicz was published; the author attributed the painting to Jan Reisner, a court painter of King Jan III, who at that time was quite unknown.