Portrait of the Artist's Son on Horseback

In 1882 Jan Matejko was Poland's great painter of national history, turning out enormous crowded canvases of battles and coronations for a country that, at that moment, did not exist on any map, having been carved up between Russia, Prussia and Austria. That same year he finished one of those public works, the Prussian Homage. This is its private opposite: his own son, Jerzy, sitting on a horse, painted on a small wooden panel rather than a room-sized canvas. No crowds, no history, just a boy, his mount and a father who usually worked on an epic scale. Today the panel hangs in the Museum of Art in Łódź, while the big history pictures from those same years fill the national museums in Kraków and Warsaw.