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The uprising was already lost when Grottger painted this in 1866. Two years earlier Polish fighters had risen against Russian rule in the January Uprising, and by 1864 it had been crushed, with executions, hangings and mass deportations to Siberia. Grottger became the great recorder of that defeat, working mostly in charcoal cycles that circulated as the memory of a banned cause. Here a returning insurgent is met and greeted, a small human moment set against everything that had gone wrong around it. He kept coming back to these scenes of Polish loss from outside the country, unable to live safely at home. He did not have long himself. Grottger died the next year, in 1867, at 30, of tuberculosis in the French Pyrenees.