Mounted Cossacks & Mounted Cossacks Discovering a Landscape
Mounted Cossacks
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Ludwig Gedlek ( Austrian 1847 - 1904 )
The central theme of Ludwig Gedlek’s work is similar to the work of Joseph Brandt, who painted genre scenes from the life of the Cossacks, in particular the Ukrainian Zaporozhian Cossacks. In the nineteenth century numerous Polish painters took on Cossacks as their subject matter and they became a picturesque part of the iconography of European Romanticism. The history of Ivan Mazepa, the Cossack Hetman of the Hetmanate, for example, inspired Lord Byron’s poem Mazeppa (1818), Tchaikovsky’s opera of the same name (1881-1883) and Alexander Pushkin’s poem Poltava (1828-1829). For Polish artists, however, the Cossacks, in particular Zaporozhian Cossacks, assumed a special, symbolic significance |