A União de Lublin

Matejko finished this in 1869, exactly 300 years after the event it shows, the 1569 act that bound the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into a single state. The timing mattered, because when he painted it that state no longer existed. Poland had been partitioned off the map by its neighbours, and a huge canvas of the moment two nations chose to unite was a way of holding on to a past the present had taken away. He packs more than 30 figures into the hall of Lublin castle around King Sigismund Augustus, several of them raising a cross or crossed swords to seal the oath. When the picture traveled to Paris the next year, it helped win Matejko the Legion of Honour.