아유다그 절벽 위의 아담 미츠키에비치 초상

Wankowicz painted his friend Adam Mickiewicz in Saint Petersburg in 1828. Mickiewicz was the great Polish Romantic poet, and he was in Russia not by choice but under a kind of exile, sent away from his homeland by the authorities after a student case. Out of that came his Crimean Sonnets, written after a journey south to the Black Sea. One of them, called Ayu-Dag, opens with the poet leaning on the rocks of that mountain and gazing at the water. Wankowicz builds the whole portrait from that line. He wraps Mickiewicz in a highlander's felt cloak, sets him against the cliff, and lays a lyre on vine leaves beside him for the poetry. It became the image of Mickiewicz that Poland has carried ever since, copied and reprinted for nearly two centuries.