La Mort de Przemysł II

Przemysl II wore the Polish crown for only a few months. Crowned in 1295, the first king to reunite the long-fractured Polish lands, he was ambushed and killed early in 1296. Matejko painted the scene in 1875, at a time when Poland itself had vanished from the map, carved up among three empires, and he spent his life turning its old kings and defeats into images that kept the nation's memory alive. This is one of his smaller works, an oil on a wood panel not much wider than a briefcase, showing the murdered king laid among his people. It ended up far from home, in the modern-art museum in Zagreb, where it hangs today.