In 1863, Jan Matejko began to create a painting Polonia 1863. The work was never completed.
It is an allegorical image of the fall of the January Uprising (1863-1864).
Young woman in a funeral dress, with her hands laid on the anvil visible in the middle , personifies Poland. The woman in white torn away by violence is a personification of Rus.
Lying in a pool of blood at the feet of tsarist officers, the corpse of a partially exposed woman is the embodiment of Lithuania.
Polonia is Matejko's only painting touching the subject of contemporary events for the artist, but treating them in a symbolic-allegorical way.
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