A Pole in the Country of Boxers. On the Donation of Col. Jagniątkowski to the National Museum in Warsaw

The paper presents the results of provenance studies related to the donation of Władysław Jagniątkowski (1856–1930) and his wife to the National Museum in Warsaw. Presented to the Museum in 1930, the collection of heritage pieces contains objects from China and Vietnam where the donor was based as a soldier of France’s colonial troops fighting to suppress the Boxer Rebellion. Based on untypical sources: texts written by Jagniątkowski, the Authors analyse the circumstances under which the collection was amassed. The many-sided contextualization of the donation grounded in the investigated texts yields the hypotheses on the impact of the donor’s personal experiences and colonial conditioning on the provenance of the historic pieces. The research into the provenance of the Jagniątkowskis’ donation serves as a good example of potential challenges faced by individuals aiming at conducting investigation to present a full provenance of museum objects. It also forms part of the increasingly more popular research into and verification of Western collections of Chinese art amassed during the Boxer Rebellion.