Jan Styka

Jan Styka worked at a scale almost no other painter attempted. Born in Lwów in 1858, when southern Poland was ruled from Vienna, he trained in the grand academic manner and then made his name on canvases so large they needed purpose-built rotundas to be seen. With the battle-painter Wojciech Kossak he produced the Racławice Panorama in 1894, a picture about 15 metres tall and 114 metres around that sets the viewer inside a peasant victory of 1794 during the Kościuszko Uprising, Poland's revolt against foreign partition. It still turns on its rotunda in Wrocław.

His most travelled work went much further from home. The pianist and future Polish premier Ignacy Jan Paderewski commissioned him to paint the Crucifixion, an enormous Golgotha begun in the 1890s. Shown across the United States, it ended as the centrepiece of a memorial park at Forest Lawn, in Glendale near Los Angeles, where it still hangs.

Styka also wrote poetry and painted scenes from Nero's Rome and from the Polish national epics. He left Poland for Italy and then France, and died in Rome in 1925.