Ritratto di Teodora Matejko (nata Giebułtowska) in abito da sposa

Jan Matejko married Teodora Giebułtowska in 1864 and designed her wedding dress himself, a white satin gown under an ecru cashmere cloak cut like an old Polish kontusik, made up by a tailor named Rypark in Bochnia. He painted her in it the year after the wedding. In 1876 Teodora took a knife to that canvas and cut it to pieces. She had found out that her teenage niece had posed for another of his paintings, and the marriage by then was not a calm one. Three years later he painted the whole thing over again, working from a photograph of the destroyed picture, and that is the version in Warsaw. At her throat the cloak is fastened with a brooch holding a miniature of Tadeusz Kościuszko, who had led the last rising before Poland vanished from the map.