Kościuszko at Racławice
Jan Matejko (1838 to 1893) · 1888
Nearly nine metres of canvas fill the end wall of the room, and at its centre, on a white horse and in a peasant's russet coat, Tadeusz Kosciuszko raises his hat in salute. Around him a crowd of scythemen, peasants who have armed themselves with scythes fixed upright on poles, drag captured Russian cannon through the mud. Officers, priests and townspeople press in, a wounded man is carried past, and in the background the battlefield stretches under a cloudy spring sky. The date is April seventeen ninety four, and the Polish uprising against the partitioning powers has just won its first victory.
Jan Matejko was the great painter of Polish history, and by the time he painted this in eighteen eighty eight he had already produced the Battle of Grunwald and the Prussian Homage. Here he chose a moment of hope rather than tragedy. Look at how he packs the picture with portraits: every face is individual, and many were painted from friends and Kraków citizens. Find the scytheman Wojciech Bartos, who was ennobled for capturing a cannon with his bare hands, and the standard bearer with the flag of Racławice. Kosciuszko's peasant coat was a deliberate choice, a sign that the nation included its farmers.
Matejko gave the painting to the city of Kraków, and it has hung in the Sukiennice since the gallery opened. In the nineteenth century, when Poland did not exist on the map, pictures like this were how Poles remembered who they were. The uprising was crushed within months, but the painting is not about that. Stand back to the far wall to take it all in, then go close to the faces.
Did You Know? Matejko painted the scythemen from real Kraków workmen who posed in the studio holding borrowed scythes.
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