Hello Historians.
A friend sent me a picture of this painting: https://imgur.com/a/3wXq3W8
We want to know who the people in the painting are, or rather, from. In my view, I'd say it's an imperial Russian cavalryman and a French dragoon. The setting, the clothes, and equipment suggest Napoleon's Russian campaign. But this is just my guess.
On the back of the painting, there's a bearly readable text where you can see it says "Krakow".
Hopefully, you can help me with this. Thanks!
This is a painting by Jerzy Kossak. This looks to be a copy of one of his father‘s paintings (Wojciech Kossak). The picture I saw was from 1917 (I think) though I cannot find it again for the life of me. There is another copy from 1947 titled “brief rest”. There was a whole bunch of pictures of this type about Napoleon’s army and retreat so it’s likely this was part of that.
Source: Kossak’s paintings found through google and on auction sites.
Both cavalrymen seem to be French. The steel colour of the helmet on the man on the right suggests cuirassier rather than dragoon, although the red horse hair would normally be black. Potentially this is a bugler but theirs would normally be white. The red colour would normally suggest carabinier but this is not the helmet they used. The man on the left appears to be a chasseur de cheval of the Guard, although the trousers (again, the red colour) complicates things. My guess is that these aren't reflecting any specific uniforms and are more a case of artistic license being used. Based on this, the snow and the notoriety of the invasion, Russia 1812 seems right.