Сигизмунд Август и Барбара при дворе Радзивиллов в Вильно

Matejko painted this in 1867, four years after the January Uprising against Russian rule was crushed and its survivors were marched east. Vilnius, the city in the title, was governed from Saint Petersburg by then. What he chose to show there is a private evening of about 1547. Sigismund Augustus, ruler of Poland and Lithuania, is with Barbara Radziwiłł, whom he had married in secret and whom the Polish nobility and his mother, Queen Bona, spent years demanding he give up. He refused, had Barbara crowned in 1550, and she died a few months later. Through the open window at the back there is a pond with a swan on it, and above the trees a comet, which in the language of the picture means trouble coming to the kingdom.