Authors

Discussion

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire had expanded its territories to the west 

due to the annexation of a significant portion of the federal state, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The partitions (1771, 1792 and 1794) resulted in devastating many private and monastic libraries and collections of art and artifacts by selling, separating and transporting their treasures to the imperial capitals, Moscow and St Petersburg. The private collection of Anna Jabłonowska had a similar fate. 

The proposed paper will examine the collecting practices of Anna Paulina Jabłonowska (née Sapieha, 1728-1800, born in Wołpa, today Belarus), a politician, economist, scientist and collector. Jabłonowska’s collection embodied cultural values and encyclopedic knowledge of the Enlightenment-era woman who exhibited remarkable civic responsibilities to her people. Her incredible collection of ethnographic artifacts, art objects, archeological rarities, gems, scientific items and tools was one of the most notable collections in Europe. However, the fate of her collection was devastating due to the tumultuous geopolitical situation in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The paper explores Anna Jabłonowska as a collector and fighter against the partitions. It investigates her collecting practices against a complex socio-historical background in which a female collector of her scope could emerge. It also reflects on collecting practices in the eighteenth century and traces the fates of private collections in the territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the nineteenth century.