Ivan the Terrible

Jan Matejko spent his life painting the Polish past, and he did it for a reason. By 1875 Poland had not existed as a state for 80 years, carved up between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and Matejko worked in Kraków, under Austrian rule, keeping the nation's memory alive on canvas. So this subject is a striking turn away from home, the Russian tsar Ivan the Fourth, called the Terrible, who ruled to 1584 and whose reign is remembered for a private army that terrorised his own nobles. Matejko lays the scene out wide, more than two metres across and shallow, like a procession filing past you. The painter who usually gave his country its kings here fixed his eye on the ruler of the empire that held the largest share of his partitioned homeland.