Galeria Sztuki Polskiej XIX wieku, Kraków

Galeria Sztuki Polskiej XIX wieku occupies the upper floor of the Sukiennice Cloth Hall, directly on Kraków’s Main Market Square. It is a branch of the National Museum in Kraków and its oldest branch. Here you enter Poland’s largest permanent display of nineteenth-century Polish painting and sculpture.

The collection is arranged across four large rooms in the manner of a nineteenth-century salon, with each room following a period or artistic current. Henryk Siemiradzki gave the project its decisive beginning by donating his vast painting Nero’s Torches. The National Museum was founded on the seventh of October eighteen seventy-nine, and the first permanent exhibition in the Cloth Hall opened in eighteen eighty-four.

The rooms carry you from Enlightenment portraits and history paintings to Romantic images of uprisings, then to later academic art and realism, Impressionism, and Symbolism. Among the central works are Siemiradzki’s Nero’s Torches and Jan Matejko’s Prussian Homage. The gallery was thoroughly renewed between two thousand six and two thousand ten, when new facilities and a clearer thematic display reshaped the visit.