After the January Uprising of 1863.

"After the January Uprising of 1863" (1864) is Grottger's retrospective summation of the catastrophe that had consumed Polish political and cultural life for the preceding year. By 1864 the uprising was definitively suppressed: mass executions had been carried out, thousands had been deported to Siberia, Polish property had been confiscated, and the surviving participants were in exile or prison. Grottger painted the aftermath rather than the action — a scene of desolation and reckoning — using the reduced scale of paperboard to create something intimate and devastating. The National Museum in Wrocław holds this work within a collection that preserves significant Polish Romantic works. The paperboard medium gives the image a material modesty appropriate to the grief it depicts.

Paperboard as support gives Grottger a firm, slightly textured ground suited to restrained, careful handling. The muted palette appropriate to aftermath imagery — grey, brown, dirty white — suits both the emotional content and the medium's absorbent character. Figures in desolate settings require Grottger to balance human presence against the emptiness that surrounds them: the emptiness is part of the meaning.