Die Macht der Adelsrepublik auf ihrem Höhepunkt, aus der Serie „Geschichte der Zivilisation in Polen“

Matejko painted this in 1889, when there was no Polish state to hang it in. The Commonwealth had been partitioned out of existence in 1795, he worked in Kraków under Austrian rule, and Warsaw, where the sketch is now, was governed from St Petersburg. The subject is the moment he took to be the summit of the old republic, the election field of 1573, where the assembled nobility chose a king by vote after the last Jagiellon died childless. That same year they signed a confederation guaranteeing peace between the religions, which was not the direction Europe was travelling in the 1570s. It is one of 12 small oil sketches in a cycle he called the history of civilisation in Poland, each with a commentary he wrote himself, meant as designs for full-size canvases that mostly never got painted.