The Constitution of 3 May 1791
Jan Matejko (1838 to 1893) · 1891
A crowd surges through the streets of Warsaw carrying the king on their shoulders towards Saint John's Cathedral, where the new constitution is about to be sworn. Banners wave, soldiers hold back the throng, and dozens of faces press towards you from a canvas more than four metres wide. Jan Matejko painted the scene in eighteen ninety one for the centenary of the Constitution of the Third of May, and it is the last of the great history paintings with which he set out to tell the story of Poland to a nation that no longer existed on the map.
Look for the portraits. Stanisław August is at the centre, carried by the people; the marshal of the Sejm, Stanisław Małachowski, is borne aloft with the text of the constitution in his hand; Hugo Kołłątaj and Ignacy Potocki, its authors, walk nearby, and Tadeusz Kościuszko appears in uniform. Matejko crowded the picture with figures from different moments and even different years, and he put the cathedral in the wrong place, but accuracy was never his aim. He wanted an image of a nation reforming itself, a moment of hope before the partitions, painted at a time when Poles lived under three empires. The colours are dense and warm, the brushwork tight, and every face is individual.
Matejko gave the painting to the Sejm of Galicia in Lwów, and it hung there until the war, then survived hidden. After the reconstruction it was placed here, in the castle where the constitution was actually passed, together with its companion Rejtan, which shows the despair of the first partition. The two canvases hang in rooms that were once the apartment of the royal princes, and they form the emotional climax of the visit.
Did You Know? Matejko painted the Cathedral door in the wrong street so that the procession could be seen leaving the castle and entering the church in one view.
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