Portrait of Józef Ciechoński

By 1873 Poland had not appeared on a map for nearly 80 years, carved up between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and Matejko had spent his career keeping the vanished nation alive in paint. That same year he took over the Kraków School of Fine Arts. This sitter, Józef Ciechoński, was a wealthy landowner from the Russian-ruled part of the old country, and he chose to be shown not in the frock coat of his own century but in the full dress of the old Polish nobility: a white żupan trimmed with sable, an embroidered delia over it, with a fur kołpak, books and a curved karabela sabre laid on the chair beside him. The open book carries the title of a novel that had just come out. Matejko reached back further still for the picture itself, borrowing the warm Venetian colour of Titian and a pose out of Van Dyck. Ciechoński later lost his fortune and had to sell the portrait to a priest.