Chelmonski. Henry Rodakowski (1823-1894), an eminent portrait-painter, who mostly lived abroad, obtained the first-class gold medal at Paris in 1852 for his portrait of General Dembinski (a leading figure both in the Polish national war of 1831, and in the Hungarian insurrection of 1849); besides the excellence of harmonious and subtle colouring, he had an effective way of bringing out the psychological expression of a face. After Ladislaus Luszczkiewicz, known both as painter and historian of art, the Mastership of the Cracow School of Arts passed into the hands of the illustrious John matejko(1838-1893), one of the greatest historical painters of modern, Europe. In the Paris Salon of 1865 he first exhibited a picture called The Sermon of Peter Skarga,[1] which won for him the gold medal. In this his very first work the character of his genius is already made manifest; it is the pathetic proemium to the great historical epic of his nation's political existence, which he has left to posterity in the grand series of his paintings. Historiosopher and psychologist, he shows a truly Shakespearian power in plastically embodying the chief moments in the development of Polish civilization, such as the final union of Poland and Lithuania in 1569; the defeat of the German Knights of the Cross (the rising monarchy's most dangerous enemy) in 1410; the homage done by the Duke of Prussia to the King of Poland in the market-place at Cracow in 1525 (illustration 87), the surrender of the Austrian Pretender, Archduke Maximilian, to the Polish army under Zamoyski in 1588; the intrepid vindication of Poland's parliamentary freedom by Thaddaeus Reytan on the Russian ambassador's forcing from the Diet a sanction of the first division of Poland in 1773 (Kunst-historisches Hof-Museum, Vienna); the proclamation of a Constitution based on social equality and abolishing serfdom, on May
- ↑ A famous Jesuit preacher of the seventeenth century (d. 1612), who, in his sermons before King Sigismund III and the Parliament, foretold the ruin of the Kingdom by the apathetic indifference and foul corruption of the nobility. It is such a moment of prophetic inspiration that Matejko's picture represents.
—Translator's Note.
