The palace and park complex at Dobrzyca was created at the end of the 18th cent. Its owner at that time was General Augustyn Gorzeński (1742-1816), Aide-de-Camp, head of the King´s Military Office, and at the same time a friend of King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, member of Parliament from the Poznań region in the „Four-years´ Seym” (Parliament), member of the Society of Friends of the 3rd of May Constitution, member of the King’s War-Council in 1792, collector and patron of the arts. At the end of his life, he attained the position of Senator-Voivod (Governor). He was a cousin of Tymoteusz Gorzeński, the Archbishop of Gniezno and Poznań, who also visited Dobrzyca from time to time. A Freemason, he belonged to the National Grand Orient of Poland and held the degree of the Rose Cross. He was on friendly terms with the author of the Polish national anthem, among others. He greeted Napoleon in Poznań in 1806 as a member of a six-man delegation, four members of which were outstanding Polish Freemasons. After the decline of the Polish State, he devoted the last twenty years of his life entirely to Dobrzyca.
The palace and park complex at Dobrzyca was designed by Stanisław Zawadzki (1743-1806), an architect who created the palace and park complexes at Lubostroń and Śmiełów in Great Poland (Wielkopolska), among others.
The Dobrzyca complex was completed in 1800, and the present shape of the palace was created in the place of a 15th century fortified castle. The paintings of its interior are the work of Gorzeński’s friends (also Freemasons), the brothers Antoni and Franciszek Smuglewicz, and Jan Bogumił Plersch. The beautiful stucco work in one of the drawing-rooms was done by Italian stucco workers. Gorzeński sumptuously furnished his „Bononia” (as he called Dobrzyca in his letters) with paintings by the Smuglewicz brothers and Kazimierz Wojniakowski, with a collection of copies of portraits of the King, by Bacciarelli and Plersch, sculptures by Canova (among others), and also with furniture. The palace is one of the very few historical monuments remaining in Poland, which are ornamented with „al secco” wall paintings.
Undoubtedly, an important role in the construction, ornamentation and furnishing of Dobrzyca was also played by Gorzeński´s wife Aleksandra, born Skórzewska.
Gorzeński also carried out a thorough modernisation of his estate. He drained marshes, built and hardened roads, planted trees along the road, regulated the course of the little river Patoka, made fish ponds, and united his scattered plots of land. He brought in settlers to the drained farms and introduced the tenancy for his peasants. In 1783, he obtained from the King a new town charter that allowed tiny Dobrzyca to have 11 fairs per year, and in 1796 a license from the Prussian authorities to build 10 windmills. The result of those enterprises was the creation at the end of the 18th century of a new economic infrastructure in the area of Dobrzyca. His economic plans were not limited to Dobrzyca, as he was also busy with his estates near Warsaw, Helenów and Nadarzyn, of which he was the owner for a dozen years.
He bequeathed the Dobrzyca estate to his nephew, General Kazimierz Turno, a participant in the Napoleonic campaigns. In 1838, it fell by auction into the hands of the German family of Baron von Kottwitz, and in the mid-19th century it became the property of the Baron’s daughter, married to a Bandelow. The rich collections of the Gorzeński’s were dispersed then. After 1879, Dobrzyca was bought by Count Zygmunt Czarnecki who gathered the largest bibliophilic collection of the Masonica in Poland (apart from Krzeszowice) there.
The Czarneckis were the owners of Dobrzyca till 1939. During World War II, it was a rehabilitation centre for German officers. After 1945 the building became the property of the State Treasury. It was used for family flats, day-rooms, offices, kindergartens and schools, and was gradually destroyed.
In the mid-seventies, the palace itself was the be managed by the National Museum in Poznań, and according to the plan of the Director at that time, Professor Kazimierz Malinowski, a collection of portrait and landscape paintings from Great Poland (Wielkopolska) was to be placed there, but this did not take place because of insurmountable problems.
In 1988, following an agreement between the Voivod of Kalisz, the Ministry of Culture and the National Museum in Poznań, the entire complex was taken over by the latter, which is now going to organise a museum of palace interiors and a museum of Masonic relics there.
The Dobrzyca park complex is one of the few in Poland (according to some historians of art, it is the only one) that have such clearly readable Masonic symbolic representation. Not only the architecture (the shape of the palace building, of the pantheon, the monopteral building and the non-existent now artificial ruins) but also the decoration of the palace interior (wall paintings with the motifs of illusion), and the composition of the park complex refer to Masonism.
The palace building consists of two wings in the shape of a T-square. T-square, one of the three „mobile jewels” of the lodge, symbolizes the Law and Obligation in Freemasonry. The aptness of this interpretation in also pointed out by the quotation from Horace, above the door: „Ille Terrarum Mihi Praxeter Omnes Angulus Ridet.” The word „angulus” means not only a recess, but also a symbolic T-square.
One can find many associations with the basic Masonic symbols in the Dobrzyca complex, since the monopteral building on the island can be treated as a peculiar miniature of the Temple of Salomon. One can interpret similarly the buildings of the park – the artificial ruins, a grotto with water, a hill with a view, or a group of American trees. The latter surely symbolise the New World – America, where the Masonic ideals have sunk their roots most deeply.
The devastated park complex is no longer readable today, but an analysis of the style of the garden composition justifies the above conclusions. All of the features of the Dobrzyca Palace and park complex, (although only briefly), indicate that Górzeński carried into effect a monument of Masonic ideas and that he found in the architect Zawadzki a perfect executor of his ideological designs.
Yet another characteristic feature of this complex is worth special attention, and that is that the Masonic symbols have been set into the early Romantic style of European architecture of that time. The palace in Dobrzyca combines after all stylistic features of the late baroque, neoclassic and romantic styles.
The National Museum´s plan at Dobrzyca includes on the first floor, rich with wall paintings, according to the tradition of the times of Górzeński and the Czarneckis, an exhibition of painting, palace furniture and sculpture, while the Masonic museum will be placed on the ground floor.
Masonic relics, dispersed in various Polish museums, are rarely exhibited, and there is no permanent exhibition of those things in any of the Polish museums. In recent years, small, temporary exhibitions of objects from the collections of some institutions have been occasionally organised, e.g. in the National Museum in Cracow, in the Archives in Warsaw or in the Museum in Łańcut (on the occasion of the musical festival). There is a small, permanent exhibition of Masonica at the Śmiełów Department of the National Museum (Kalisz voivodship). However, the largest collections of Masonic relics are in the possession of the museums in Cracow (the collection of Emeryk Hutten-Czapski), Warsaw, Toruń and Poznań. Individual objects are also in Jelenia Góra and Koszalin, among other places.
There are a few dozen Masonic museums in Europe and America but there is none in Eastern Europe. The nearest ones are in Bayreuth (Germany) and Rosenau (Austria).
A pennanent exhibition of Masonic relics, devoted also to the Masonic tradition in the world, together with a library and information centre on Polish Masonica, placed in the 18th and 19th century place interiors, may prove a great tourist attraction. This may also contribute to creation of an interesting tourist route within the triangle of the departments of the National Museum in Poznań: Dobrzyca, Gołuchów and Śmiełów.