Painter's inspiration

A painter's studio in 1897. On the left the artist sits folded over on his chair beside the easel, face in his hand. On the right a barefoot young woman walks in, head thrown back, eyes closed like a sleepwalker. The National Museum in Kraków reads her as Polonia, Poland itself, rising out of the painter's imagination. Shackles close around her ankles. A crown of straw hangs down her back instead of sitting on her head. Around her hips she wears a Russian army greatcoat, and in its folds floats a soap bubble. At the table behind the easel sit three men, whom the museum takes to be the three powers that had partitioned Poland, lost in despair or indifference. This was one of the first pictures in a Polonia cycle Malczewski kept adding to until 1918, when Poland became independent again.