奥尔良的少女

This is the largest canvas Matejko ever painted, about five metres high and nearly ten across, and it has almost nothing to do with Poland. He meant it as a gift to France. Polish exiles had commanded troops for the Paris Commune in 1871, and Matejko, a conservative, wanted to offer the French something in recompense for that.

The scene is Joan of Arc riding into Reims in 1429 for the coronation of Charles VII, with Dunois carrying the regalia and the king beside his mistress Agnès Sorel. It did not go well. Stanisław Witkiewicz took the picture apart in print in 1887, the year it was shown at the Paris Salon, and France never accepted it. Edward Raczyński bought it in 1897 and built a gallery for it at his palace at Rogalin, finished in 1912, where the National Museum in Poznań still shows it.