The visit of Emperor Franz Joseph in the house of Jan Matejko on 2 September 1880.

Juliusz Kossak's 1881 paper work records the visit of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria to the Kraków house of Jan Matejko on September 2, 1880 — a culturally loaded event whose significance was immediately understood by Polish audiences. Matejko was the pre-eminent Polish historical painter, whose monumental canvases of medieval and Baroque Polish triumphs were acts of national assertion as much as artistic achievement. Franz Joseph's personal visit to Matejko's studio acknowledged the painter's European stature and, implicitly, the survival of Polish cultural life within the Austrian partition. The emperor is said to have awarded Matejko the Order of the Iron Crown during the visit. Kossak's record of the event, painted the following year, preserves a moment of cultural diplomacy charged with unspoken meaning: the Habsburg emperor paying homage to the painter of Polish greatness.

The intimate, documentary character of the subject required a different approach from Kossak's equestrian and battle subjects — here the focus is on figures in a specific interior space. Paper and mixed media allowed a relatively swift, observational record of the event's spatial and social dynamics. The hierarchical arrangement of emperor, painter, and entourage must be managed without either figure dominating at the other's expense.