Jan Matejko, Kraków

Jan Matejko is the bronze figure seated in an armchair inside the picture-frame structure before you: this is Kraków’s monument to the painter. The sculpture rises from a red-granite base bearing his name and the dates 1838 to 1893. Notice the deliberately open part of the frame beside him, where the Planty’s trees become the monument’s changing painted background.

Matejko was born in Kraków in 1838 and became the great Polish painter of historical scenes in the nineteenth century. He began studying art here at only fourteen, later returned from Munich and Vienna, and established his studio in Kraków. His vast canvases gave episodes from Poland’s past an emotional public life when the country was partitioned and had no political independence.

Stańczyk, Rejtan, the Union of Lublin, Copernicus in conversation with God, and the Battle of Grunwald are among the works that made him Poland’s best-known painter. This monument was unveiled on the twelfth of November 2013, marking 175 years since his birth and 120 since his death. It stands beside Basztowa Street, west of the Barbican and opposite the Academy of Fine Arts, on ground occupied until 1997 by a Soviet Army soldiers’ monument.