Battle of Raszyn.

The Battle of Raszyn (April 19, 1809) was a significant engagement of the Austro-Polish War in which Polish forces under Prince Józef Poniatowski fought Austrian troops to a draw before making a tactical withdrawal from Warsaw — a withdrawal that allowed Poniatowski to continue the campaign and eventually enter Kraków and Galicia in triumph. Though tactically inconclusive, Raszyn was celebrated in Polish memory as a demonstration of the new Polish army's fighting spirit and Poniatowski's leadership. Kossak made this pencil study in 1884, held now in the National Museum in Warsaw, as part of his extensive engagement with Napoleonic-era Polish military subjects. The pencil medium suggests either a preparatory study for a larger work or an independent drawing, and its sharp linear quality reflects the precise drawing skills that underpinned all of Kossak's painted compositions.

Pencil studies gave Kossak the freedom to work quickly and revise easily, making them ideal vehicles for working out compositional problems. The battle scene in pencil demands confident linear shorthand for horses, figures, and landscape — a vocabulary Kossak had developed through thousands of studies. Tonal range is achieved through hatching and pressure variation rather than colour.