Jan Matejko was a Polish painter, born in Kraków in 1838 and dead there in 1893, who spent his career painting the history of a country that was not on the map. Poland had been divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and Matejko filled huge canvases with its battles and defeats. He is remembered above all for the Battle of Grunwald, which the Nazis hunted during the Second World War.
In Poland he is something close to a national institution, the painter who gave the country's past a face while the country itself had none. His own aim, he said, was to show "an era condensed in one moment."
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On 7 September 1939, a week into the German invasion, a horse-drawn cart left the Zachęta gallery in Warsaw with the Battle of Grunwald rolled up on board. The gallery's administrator, Stanisław Radecki-Mikulicz, and the painter Stanisław Ejsmond led the convoy toward Lublin, under attack from German planes. They arrived before dawn on 9 September, in the middle of an air raid.
Ejsmond was killed when the building came down on him. Radecki-Mikulicz and the museum's intendant broke open the 1.5 tonne crate with axes, hid the canvas inside the building and left the empty crate to be dumped outside town, so that people would think the painting had gone to Romania. Goebbels offered a reward of millions of marks. The Germans never found it.
Yet the picture they wanted so badly is not quite the Polish triumph its reputation suggests. King Władysław Jagiełło, whose victory it was, appears only as a small figure on a hill in the background. The painter behind it had spent his whole life learning how to make a crowd say what a country could not say aloud. undefined
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