Constitution of May 3, 1791

Matejko painted this over ten months in 1891, for the hundredth anniversary of the day it shows, and by then Poland itself had vanished from the map, carved up among Russia, Prussia and Austria. The scene is the afternoon of the third of May 1791, when deputies stream out of the Royal Castle in Warsaw, having just passed Europe's first written national constitution, and process toward St John's church to sing a Te Deum. The street is packed with cheering townspeople. For a country that no longer legally existed, painting that one hopeful afternoon was a way of keeping the memory of self-rule alive. It was among Matejko's last works, finished two years before he died. During the Second World War the Polish resistance hid it from the German occupation.