Der Tod Leszeks des Weißen

On 24 November 1227 the Polish dukes gathered at Gąsawa to settle who held what. Armed men broke into the meeting. Leszek the White, duke of Kraków, was surprised at the bath house and cut down as he rode away half-dressed, and Henry the Bearded was badly wounded but survived. Matejko painted that chase in 1880 on a canvas about 30 centimetres high and twice as wide, so the riders run flat across it with nowhere to turn. He was working in a country that had not existed as a state for 85 years, divided between three empires, and Polish history painting of those decades kept returning to the moments when the dukes destroyed one another. The chronicles blame Świętopełk, duke of Gdańsk, and that is the man Matejko puts at the head of the attack. The picture has been in the National Museum in Gdańsk since 1948.