Repubblica di Babin

Matejko was Poland's great painter of solemn national history, vast canvases of coronations, battles and defeats. This is a rare turn to comedy. It shows the Babin Republic, a real 16th-century society near Lublin whose members played at running a pretend state. They handed out mock offices as a joke, making a man their bishop or their judge for telling the tallest, funniest tale on a chosen subject. Its founders were Protestants who prized wit and an easy tolerance in matters of faith. Matejko set the scene in a sunlit orchard, figures in old costume feasting, drinking, playing chess and the lute, the landscape modelled on his own country manor. He painted it in 1881, when Poland itself had been partitioned out of existence among its neighbours.