Czapski family

It is a common opinion that Podlasie has been a culturally backward, peripheral region without any great works and outstanding figures. The review of different Polish regions’ saturation with monuments (castles, manor houses and palaces) per 1,000 square km shows that the leaders are Dolnośląskie and Wielkopolskie voivodeships. There are more monuments in the western part of Poland than in the eastern one. The highest numbers are in Wielkopolska (695 objects) and Dolny Śląsk (660), while Podlaskie Voivodeship has ten times fewer monuments (64). Castles, palaces and mansions are a significant part of the cultural heritage in material and symbolic spheres. The character of the preserved monuments (the sparce magnates’ estates such as the most famous “Versailles of Podlasie”and the small wooden manors) reflects the social structure characteristic of the historical Podlasie and the division into a few extremely rich magnate’s estates and many poor manors of the petty nobility. Nowadays, the most well-known magnates and art patrons related to Podlasie are Jan Klemens Branicki and his wife, at whose request a great many works of art were created. Due to history turbulences, the collections have been dispersed or lost, just like the castles and palaces in Choroszcz, Kodeń, Mielnik, Orla, Siemiatycze and Tykocin, to mention just a few out of the long list of non-existing monuments. Branicki is the most famous patron, but not the only one. Earlier, excellent collections had been gathered in Tykocin by Sigismund Augustus, later by Bogusław Radziwiłł, and some of them were surely used in the gallery of paintings in Nesvizh. With the current state of research we do not know how many such collections were created in Podlasie, although we can be sure that all of them were lost just like the furnishings from the Bialystok palace. The Knyszyn starost Tomasz Czapski, the owner of a magnate fortune and a great gallery, a bibliophile and a cruel troublemaker at the same time, had disputes with the Grand Hetman of the Crown Jan Klemens Branicki for many years. Around 1519, Mikołaj Radziwiłł, the owner of the Goniądz and Rajgród estates, established the first estate in Dobrzyniewo as part of settling in the royal primeval forests illegally occupied when building a road from Vilnius to Podlasie and farther to Krakow. After 1530, Dobrzyniewo became a part of the three estates of the very rich Knyszyn starosty owned by the king, and until the mid-19th century, it had belonged to or been leased by outstanding historical figures, such as: Queen Bona, king Sigismund Augustus, Aleksander Chodkiewicz, Piotr Chwalczewski, Jan and Tomasz Zamoyski, Mikołaj Ossoliński, Franciszek, Wilhelm and Mikołaj Orsetti, Stanisław Nałęcz-Małachowski, Maria Radziwiłł-Krasińska, Wincenty Krasiński and Zygmunt Krasiński.
The article is an attempt to present on the basis of the inventory from
1749 the non-existent palace in Dobrzyniewo with its rich furnishings and a huge collection of works of art whose history has not yet been studied.