Portrait of Karol Podlewski

In 1882 Matejko was the towering figure of Polish painting, turning out vast history canvases full of kings and battles, and that same year he finished the enormous Prussian Homage. This small portrait came from the opposite impulse. He was walking on the Planty, the ring of gardens around Kraków's old town, when he passed a man whose face struck him, and asked this stranger on the spot to sit. When Podlewski said he could never afford such a picture, Matejko answered that it would be an honour to paint him for nothing, and afterwards gave him the finished work. He painted it for no fee, simply because he wanted to keep that face. The picture then had a hard century. The National Museum in Warsaw bought it from the family in 1925. During the Second World War it was taken to a castle in Austria, later passed into a private collection in the United States, and only returned to Warsaw in 2006.