Three days ago one of London’s most beautiful small museums was reopened by the Queen after nearly two years of renovation and building work. The Dulwich Picture Gallery, designed by Sir John Soane in 1811, houses a rich collection including Rembrandt’s Girl Leaning on a Windowsill, Claude Lorrain’s Jacob with Laban and His Daughters and Watteau’s Les Plaisirs du Bal. So this week’s choice of picture – which is none of the above but, instead, Marcello Bacciarelli’s portrait of Stanislaus II of Poland, currently to be found about a thousand miles east of Dulwich in the National Museum in Warsaw – requires some explanation.

The man in the fur-trimmed robe with the apprehensive expression on his face was Poland’s last King – “a man of extraordinary merit,” according to Voltaire, “who at every turn in his life and in every dangerous situation, always moved quickly, and well, and with success.” Voltaire was not entirely right on that last point (see below) but Stanislaus was certainly a brave and extraordinary man. He was also, as his portrait-painter saw, something of a dreamer; and it was out of the wreckage of Stanislaus’s fondest dream, of creating a strong and independent Poland, that, in a roundabout sort of way, the Dulwich Picture Gallery was born.

He was born in 1732, the sixth child of a distinguished aristocrat and military commander. His mother was a religious nonconformist, to whose influence he later ascribed his own intellectual restlessness and proneness to melancholy. Relentlessly schooled in his youth, he later said that “I was, you might say, never allowed the time to be a child; it is as if one took the month of April out of the year”. Sent on the Grand Tour to complete his education, he visited Paris, Versailles and England, where...

To read the full article please either login or register .