Jan Matejko was a Polish history painter. He was born in Kraków on June 24, 1838, and died there on November 1, 1893, and his huge canvases of battles and kings still shape how Poles picture their past.
Matejko painted that history while Poland did not exist. Long before his birth, Russia, Prussia and Austria had divided the old Polish state among themselves. During the Second World War, the Nazis hunted his best-known picture, the Battle of Grunwald.
His own aim, he said, was to show "an era condensed in one moment." On his canvases, events that happened hours or years apart share a single scene, and Matejko bent historical fact whenever the message needed it.
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Matejko grew up in the Free City of Kraków, a tiny state around the city, set up after Napoleon's wars and watched over by the three powers that had divided Poland.
His father, Franciszek, was a music teacher from Bohemia, and the boy was the ninth of eleven children. When his mother died, an aunt, Anna Zamojska, looked after the family.
School did not suit him. He left St. Anne's high school in 1851 with poor grades, and he never fully mastered a foreign language. Drawing was another matter. At fourteen he entered the Kraków School of Fine Arts, where he stayed until 1858 and stood out as one of its most diligent and gifted students.
His older brother Franciszek, a historian at the Jagiellonian University, the old university of Kraków, steered his reading toward the Polish past.
Since childhood Matejko had been copying armor, costumes and portraits from old engravings. Every later canvas began the same way, with close study of documents and a pile of sketches.
In December 1858 a scholarship took him to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he studied for seven months. A second grant sent him to the academy in Vienna in 1860.
He left Vienna after a few days, following a bitter quarrel with the professor Christian Ruben, and went home to Kraków. He never lived anywhere else again.
In 1862, two years after that quarrel, Matejko painted a royal jester, and he did not have to look far for the man's face.
A jester with his own face
The picture is called Stańczyk, after the jester of the Polish kings in the early sixteenth century…
What You'll Discover
Whose face the jester wears.
Who wanted Rejtan destroyed.
What Grunwald gets wrong.
Who painted the church ceiling.
How Grunwald escaped the Nazis.