Trained as a painter of battle scenes, an admirer of Rembrandt, and by vocation a decorator depicting courtly and idyllic scenes. He is considered the father of Polish genre painting and one of the leading artists of the Stanislavian era. Although Jean-Pierre Norblin de la Gourdaine was French, it was in Warsaw that he cultivated his talents to the full. To this day, his works charm viewers with the skilfulness and lightness of lines and attractive colouring. At the same time they are a valuable source of knowledge about political events and the everyday life of the various social classes in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the eighteenth century.