On entering the National Museum of Poland in Warsaw, one walks through galleries of foreign art before entering a vast suite of skylit rooms that chart the national history of Polish painting. Any non-Polish visitor feels that the national character of Polish painting is difficult to define, and that it is actually the imagery rather than the representational strategies employed by the painters that makes their work Polish. But, on entering the largest gallery devoted to nineteenth-century painting, one confronts a truly epic canvas by Jan Matejko (1838-1893) called The Battle of Grunwald (1878). Matejko's masterpiece defies description: it is too large and bombastic to fit into the avant-garde; it is too absorbed with the past to be truly Realist; it is too finished to be associated with any of the forms of action painting that litter the history of modern art. Indeed, no great nineteenth-century nation produced any truly comparable painting. Instead, it was the new nations, such as Switzerland and Hungary, often with complex and politically unstable pasts, that specialized in vast representational epics. They produced the nationalist icons that continue to this day to exercise powerful authority in their own countries.

Let us return to Matejko, the beloved patriarch of self-consciously Polish painting. A native of the earliest capital of Poland, Cracow, Matejko learned German, the language common to educated Poles of that city, and traveled as a young artist to Munich and Vienna. When he returned to Poland, he became consumed with the nationalist fervor of that troubled country and worked in Cracow. His national museum in Warsaw had been closed for two years when his Grunwald painting was exhibited, and exhibition facilities in Cracow were not of international standard. Matejko flew in the face of all odds by painting a canvas of dimensions so epic that few rooms in the world could receive it. He therefore sent it to Paris, where it was shown as the Polish painting at the International Exhibition in the art capital of the world.

What Matejko did was to seize a moment in the troubled history of Poland, a battle that took place in 1410, and to represent it in such a way that the viewer seems literally immersed in history. One feels sweat, blood, and raw aggression in ways that are simply unexplainable in words. Few pages of prose in any language (maybe only Caesar's Gallic Wars) have its breadth and majesty. Even today, as Poland attains another independence, schoolchildren sit in front of it for hours, their teachers identifying the figures and explaining the historical significance of the moment evoked by Matejko.