Melancholia

Down the front of Malczewski's Melancholia, a crowd surges forward carrying scythes. The scythes are re-forged: bent and welded straight so they can be used as pikes. These are Kosynierzy, the Polish peasant militiamen who marched under Kosciuszko in 1794 with no rifles. They famously took a Russian battery at Racławice with those straightened scythes. Behind them, Malczewski painted three more generations of Polish resistance: Napoleon's Polish soldiers, the insurgents of 1863, later exiles to Siberia. At the far end of the studio the artist himself sits with his back to us, painting. All of it is pouring out of his canvas. Now at National Museum, Poznań @muzeum_narodowe_poznan