MATEYKO, Jan. – Polish painter, b. in Kraków on 30 June 1838, d. there on 1 October 1893. He studied in Kraków, in Munich (1859–60) and in Vienna (1860), then returned to Kraków where he spent the rest of his life.
He painted sacred subjects and scenes from Polish history, well interpreting the taste of his milieu and generation and displaying excellent representational faculties rendered in a serious chromatic language that sometimes seems to link up with the models of the Venetian masters of the 16th century. M. was also a portraitist. Among his works are remembered the frescoes in the church of the Virgin Mary in Kraków (1889–93). Of his grand paintings the best known are: The Battle of Grunwald (1878), in the Łaźnia in Warsaw, Homage of the Duke of Prussia to King Sigismund of Poland (1882), in the National Museum in Kraków, and John III Sobieski at the Battle of Vienna (1883), in the Vatican Museums in Rome.