Portrait of Helena Matejko with a Sparrowhawk

Matejko painted this in 1882 and 1883 at Krzesławice, his country estate just outside Kraków, where he stayed with his children. Helena, his second child, was about 15. The bird on her raised right hand was her own pet, a tame sparrowhawk given to her by an uncle, Edmund. Her outfit is partly dressing up. Over a loose white shirt she wears an embroidered bodice of the kind worn around Cieszyn in Silesia, and that bodice itself survives in the Jan Matejko House in Kraków. After the painter's death the picture passed to Helena, and later it moved through collections in Kraków and Warsaw. In December 2022 it sold at auction for more than 15 million złoty, and the buyer placed it on long-term deposit at the National Museum in Warsaw. It hangs there beside his portrait of her younger sister Beata with a canary.