 In his spare time he sketched the scenes of soldiers and made portraits of his colleagues.Following the defeat of the uprising — in which his brother died — he went to Rome where he became a pupil of Horace Vernet from 1832 to 1837.Here he socialised with Zygmunt Krasinski, Wincenty's son, Juliusz Słowacki, Thorwaldsen, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Peter von Cornelius, and Louis Léopold Robert.