The Oath of Bohdan Khmelnytsky at Zboriv

Matejko was about 21 when he made this, still a student at the School of Fine Arts in Krakow, decades before he became the painter every Polish schoolchild would know for his vast canvases of the national past. It is a modest thing on paper, a young man's sketch, but the subject already points where he was going. Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the Cossack leader whose 1649 uprising against the Polish crown reached a tense settlement near Zboriv, and Matejko was drawn all his life to exactly these turning points, the treaties and oaths and defeats. He was working at a time when Poland itself had vanished from the map, partitioned among its neighbours. On this small sheet the whole interest lies in the crowd of faces, each already given its own character.