Portrait of a boy and his rocking horse - Stanislaw Seweryn Potocki

 Salvete Omnes,

New Year has started - lets pray it will be not worse than the 2022 - fingers crossed - :)

ad rem,
Polish National Museum in Warsaw has among his collections this painting -

 

and a closeup of this splendid equestrian figure

According to the Museum information it was painted circa 1788, our boy (most likely this boy, whose father was Stanislaw Szczesny Potocki ) in the most splendid daily costume of the Sarmatians (Polish patriotic nobility of those times and also of the conservatives- so to speak) - zupan, kontusz sash, sabre, a kolpak, red riding boots.
His rocking horse - looking very much like an  Oriental- Eastern- stallion or even the Old  Polish one - has a splendid bridle made in the fashion of old Polish with Ottoman styles of the previous 200 years, give it or take - eg Beliotto's Stanislaw Poniatowski Wola Election 1776 - two versions:  Warsaw NM & Poznan NM.

This was the swan song of the Old Polish horse tack as the army regulation soon forbade the ornate bridles and shabraques/czaprak for the officer's horse 1789 and 1791. And then in 1795 Poland was partitioned by Prussia, Austria and Russian empire, and thus ceased to exist until 1806, when our state resurfaced as Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw etc, in the wake of Napoleonic armies crushing victories over the  Prussians.
ps
A presentation of children fashion as evidenced  in the National Museum collection - a file for download (in Polish)
Last year my friend Radoslaw Sikora authored  three articles about children games and plays in Old Poland - 1, 2, and 3.

Valete