Veduta di Bebek presso Costantinopoli

Matejko painted Polish history at enormous scale, battles and coronations with dozens of figures in them, and this is the one landscape in his work. He made it in 1872 at Bebek, a village on the Bosphorus just outside Constantinople, where he and his wife Teodora spent several weeks with his cousin Henryk Groppler. The Groppler house was a gathering point for Polish exiles in the Ottoman capital, and people called it the Polish embassy, a joke with an edge to it, since Poland had been partitioned out of existence and had no embassies anywhere. What Matejko did there was paint sunlight on water and a hillside of houses, on a canvas about 60 centimetres wide. He went home to Kraków and to the history pictures, and painted no other landscape.