Jacek Malczewski

Jacek Malczewski painted a Poland that did not exist on any map. For most of his life the country was partitioned among Russia, Prussia and Austria, and his early pictures show the grey misery of Poles exiled to Siberia for rebelling.

Then he turned that grief into strange symbolist theatre. Death arrives in his paintings as a calm woman with a scythe, angels and fauns wander Polish fields, and the artist himself appears again and again in armour or peasant dress. Homeland, captivity and art tangle together in scene after scene.

He helped make Kraków a centre of the movement called Young Poland and taught at its academy. He lived just long enough to see Poland independent again, dying in 1929, nearly blind at the end.