Retrato de Adam Mickiewicz en la roca de Ayu-Dag

Wankowicz painted his friend Adam Mickiewicz in Saint Petersburg in 1828. Mickiewicz was the great Polish Romantic poet, and he was in Russia not by choice but under a kind of exile, sent away from his homeland by the authorities after a student case. Out of that came his Crimean Sonnets, written after a journey south to the Black Sea. One of them, called Ayu-Dag, opens with the poet leaning on the rocks of that mountain and gazing at the water. Wankowicz builds the whole portrait from that line. He wraps Mickiewicz in a highlander's felt cloak, sets him against the cliff, and lays a lyre on vine leaves beside him for the poetry. It became the image of Mickiewicz that Poland has carried ever since, copied and reprinted for nearly two centuries.