Wernyhora
Jan Matejko (1838 to 1893) · 1883 to 1884
An old man with wild white hair and a long beard sits with his eyes raised to the sky, one hand on the strings of a lyre, the other flung out as if in a trance. He is Wernyhora, a legendary Ukrainian bard of the eighteenth century who was said to have foretold the fall of Poland and its rebirth. Around him crowd the figures of his prophecy: a scribe writing down his words, a Cossack, a Polish nobleman, a child, a woman covering her ears, and behind them a red glow that might be dawn or fire. A church and a cross rise in the smoky background.
Matejko painted this in eighteen eighty three and eighteen eighty four, at the height of his powers, and it is different from his crowded history paintings. It is a vision, not an event. Look at the bard's face, painted with intense concentration, and at the way the surrounding figures each react to his words differently. The scribe's page and the sheet of paper in the foreground carry fragments of the prophecy. Colours are deep reds, blues and golds, and the composition rises like a flame from the lower left to the outstretched hand.
The legend of Wernyhora had already been used by Polish poets, and Matejko's picture in turn inspired Stanislaw Wyspianski, who made the bard a ghost in his play The Wedding. The painting came to the museum from the collection of Matejko's patron and has long hung in the Sukiennice, near Kosciuszko at Racławice. Nineteenth century viewers read it as a promise that Poland would return; twentieth century ones knew it had.
Did You Know? Wyspiański borrowed this figure for his play The Wedding, where Wernyhora appears as a ghost and gives the hero a golden horn.
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