Józef Alfred Potocki

Count Józef Alfred Henryk Potocki (8 April 1895 – 12 September 1968) was a Polish nobleman and diplomat who served as the Polish government-in-exile's Ambassador to Spain.

Early life Count Potocki was born on 8 April 1895 in Szepetowka, a city located on the Huska River in Zaslavsky Uyezd, one of the subdivisions of the Volhynian Governorate of the Russian Empire (today in Khmelnytskyi Oblast in western Ukraine). He was the second (and youngest) son of Count Józef Mikołaj Potocki (1862–1922) and Princess Helena Augusta Radziwiłł (1874–1958). His elder brother was Count Roman Potocki (who married Princess Anna Maria Światopełk-Czetwertynska). was the Polish ambassador to the United States from 1936 to 1940. His maternal grandparents were General Prince Antoni Wilhelm Radziwiłł and Marie de Castellane (daughter of French aristocrats Henri de Castellane and Pauline de Talleyrand-Périgord).

He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford and a military school in Saint Petersburg. Potocki held the mission in Madrid until November 1955.

Awards He was awarded the Order of the Revival of Poland, the Commander's Cross of the French Legion of Honour, the Portuguese Order of Christ, the Brazilian Order of the Southern Cross, 3rd class (1934), the Order of Orange-Nassau, the Decade of Independence Regained. He was twice awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland and the Grand Cross of the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. His wife's brother, Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł, married Caroline Lee Bouvier (sister to First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis). Together, they were the parents of four children: Countess Isabella Potocki (b. 1937), who married Count Hubert d'Ornano, the owner of Sisley who was a son of Guillaume d'Ornano, a co-founder of Lancôme, in 1963. Count Peter Stanislav Jozef Potocki (b. 1940), who married Maria Teresa Roca de Togores de Bejar, daughter of the Duke of Béjar, in 1969.

Family estates In 1913, his father received permission from the Royal Court to establish two ordynats for his sons: Antoninskaya ha (62,000 acres), for his elder brother Roman, and Koretskaya ha (60,000 acres), for Józef. In August 1919, the family's a Neo-baroque palace at Antoniny (which had been built in the 1870s by Austrian architects Fellner & Helmer) was burned to the ground in a fire set by Bolsheviks. After the death of his father in 1922, Józef inherited the Korets ordynat. Under the terms of the March 1921 Peace of Riga (which ended the Polish–Soviet War), the Potocki brothers did not receive the ordynats promised to them.