{"id":890055,"date":"2009-07-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/archives.gov.by\/en\/?page_id=890055"},"modified":"2009-07-14T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-14T00:00:00","slug":"overview","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/archives.gov.by\/en\/welcome-to-the-archives-of-belarus-website\/subject-guides-to-archival-records\/famous-people\/napoleon-orda\/overview","title":{"rendered":"Overview"},"content":{"rendered":"
\r\nList of archival documents<\/a>
\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

Overview<\/h2>\r\n\r\n

\"Napoleon <\/p>\r\n\r\n

Napoleon Orda (11 February 1807 – 26 April 1883), a well-known painter, composer and\r\npianist, whose life and creativity was associated with Belarus. He was born in the village\r\nof Vorotsevichi, Pinsk district, Minsk province (now Ivanovo district, Brest region) into\r\nthe family of a military engineer, Mikhail Orda. In 1823, he graduated from the Svisloch\r\nHigh School and was admitted to Vilnius University to study physics and mathematics. When\r\na student, Orda joined an illegal students’ organization called “Zoryane”\r\n(Dawnbreakers), for participation in which he was expelled from the fourth course and was\r\narrested in 1827. After a fifteen-month imprisonment, he returned to his native village of\r\nVorotsevichi, where he remained under police supervision.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Napoleon Orda took part in the uprising of 1830-1831. After the revolt had been put\r\ndown, the future painter was forced to flee abroad in order to avoid being imprisoned and\r\nsent to Siberia. In exile he travelled extensively across Europe, lived in Austria,\r\nSwitzerland and Italy, and in September 1833 he received the status of an emigrant in\r\nFrance and remained in Paris. At this time music and painting began to get shaped as his\r\nmain priorities. He got acquainted with many prominent figures in European culture – \u0410.\r\nMitskevich, F. Chopen, F. List, G. Rossini, G. Verdi, G. Gounod, G. Berlioz, H. Balzac, A.\r\nStendhal, P. Viardo, I. Turgenev – who had great impact on his creative work. <\/p>\r\n\r\n

The life in Paris brought Orda popularity in the wide circles of the European\r\nintelligentsia. Together with Fryderyk Chopin, he played music at the home of the Pliaters\r\nand Czartoryskis. He participated in literary salons, accompanying the poetical\r\nimprovisations of Adam Mitskevich on the piano. From 1847, he was the director of the\r\nItalian Opera in Paris. He also composed and taught music. <\/p>\r\n\r\n

Napoleon Orda studied painting in the studio of Pierre Girard, a master of\r\narchitectural landscape. The first series of his drawings appeared after his trip to\r\nFrance and in the Rheinland in 1840-1842. The series devoted to Spain, Portugal and\r\nAlgeria were created a little later, in the years 1842-1844.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In 1856, after the Russian Tsar Alexander II had announced amnesty to political\r\nimmigrants, Orda left his family and his stable life and successful career in Paris to\r\nreturn home at the age of fourty-nine. Upon his mother’s death in 1859, in view of his\r\nparticipation in the uprising of 1830-1831, the family estate was confiscated\u00a0 The\r\npainter was allowed only to rent it. Returning from emigration, he lived in Vorotsevichi\r\nand in Grodno (1862-1863), and later moved to Volhynia, where he worked as a teacher of\r\nmusic for the family of General Adam Rzewuski.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In 1866, Orda was arrested on charges of participation in the uprising of 1863-1864 and\r\nwas put into the Kobrin castle prison. In 1867, the military court sentenced him to exile\r\nin Russia’s remote provinces. Later, thanks to his wife’s intervention and with the\r\nassistance of the French ambassador this sentence was cancelled. Yet, the tsarist\r\nauthorities refused Orda the right to rent and live on his family estate. He was only\r\nallowed to live with his relatives on their estate of Molodovo in the Kobrin\r\ndistrict.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\r\n\r\n

Napoleon Orda frequently travelled, making pencil sketches with water-colour, gouache\r\nand sepia, depicting landscapes and architecture in Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and\r\nUkraine. His drawings, which are remarkable for their documentary precision, provide an\r\ninvaluable source of information for the history of architecture, for many of the\r\nmonuments and sites he had depicted no longer exist or considerably changed. Orda’s\r\nartistic legacy includes over 1,115 water-colours and graphic works. Among these are over\r\n200 sketches with views of towns in Belarus associated with the life of famous people and\r\narchitectural monuments, such as Kamenets Tower, the Gory-Gorki Agricultural Institute,\r\ncastles, monasteries, manors and palaces at Mir, Novogrudok, Nesvizh and Grodno, and more.\r\nIn 1886, most of his works (in all, 977) were donated by his relatives to the National\r\nMuseum in Cracow, Poland. Part of his drawings are now held at the National Museum in\r\nWarsaw; and the album of his water-colours are at the Stefanik Library in Lviv, Ukraine. A\r\nlarge collection of lithographs made from Orda’s drawings are kept at the National Library\r\nof Belarus.\u00a0 <\/p>\r\n\r\n

Napoleon Orda systematized and arranged his drawings into separate folders spanning the\r\nyears 1840-1880. The Belarusian material is located in the folders for Grodno\r\nProvince\u00a0(1860-1877, 144 plates), Minsk Province (1864-1876, 64 plates), Vitebsk\r\nProvince (1875-1876, 35 plates), Vilnius Province (1875-1877, 50 plates) and Mogilev\r\nProvince (1877, 15 plates). In addition, he created portfolios of drawings for the\r\nVolhynia, Kiev, Podolsk and Kovno (Kaunas) provinces, the Duchy of Posen, West Prussia and\r\nGalicia, France and Germany, Spain and Portugal. Orda’s drawings are widely used in\r\nnumerous historical and regional publications. <\/p>\r\n\r\n

As a composer, Orda authored many melodious and exquisite dance pieces – over 20\r\npolonaises, mazurkas, waltzes, polkas, serenades and nocturnes, as well as several\r\nromances and songs with lyrics by S. Witnicki and A. Plougue. His works were performed on\r\nmany stages in France, Germany, Poland and Russia. His texbook titled “The Grammar of\r\nMusic”, printed in Warsaw in 1873, was higly appreciated by Stanislav Moniushko and\r\nfor tens of years it remained the best book on the theory of music.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Napoleon Orda died in Warsaw. According to his testament, he was buried in Janov (now\r\nIvanovo, Brest Region) in his family crypt. <\/p>\r\n\r\n

In 2007, the whole world celebrated Napoleon Orda’s 200th birth anniversary, the event\r\nbeing included in the calendar of UNESCO’s memorable dates.\u00a0 <\/p>\r\n\r\n

Our website offers a list of documents relating to Napoleon Orda, which are held at the\r\nNational Historical Archives of Belarus in Grodno. In all,\u00a0twenty archival documents\r\nhave been selected from the ten files distributed among four collections. The language of\r\ndocuments is Russian and Polish; the dates they were created are\u00a01826-1827,\r\n1832-1833, 1835, 1838, 1846, 1856-1857, 1859, 1866-1867.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"List of archival documents Overview Napoleon Orda (11 February 1807 – 26 April 1883), a well-known painter, composer and pianist, whose life and creativity was associated with Belarus. He was…","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":238510,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-890055","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archives.gov.by\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/890055"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archives.gov.by\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archives.gov.by\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archives.gov.by\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archives.gov.by\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archives.gov.by\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/890055\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archives.gov.by\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/238510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archives.gov.by\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}