Year 1863 – Leave-Taking

Year 1863 – Leave-Taking, painted in 1866 on panel, belongs to the body of work Grottger devoted to the January Uprising, the doomed Polish insurrection against Russian imperial rule that broke out in January 1863. The uprising had been suppressed with brutal efficiency by 1864, but its emotional aftermath permeated Polish culture for decades. Grottger's cycle drawings — Lithuania, Warsaw, Poland, and War — gave visual form to the suffering of a generation, and this painting extends those themes into an intimate domestic register: the moment of departure before battle, when the private world of family must yield to the demands of national struggle. The leave-taking subject was charged with enormous feeling in post-insurrectional Polish consciousness, representing the last threshold between ordinary life and the violence of armed resistance. Painted on panel, the work's small, precious quality aligns it with the intimate character of the scene. Now held in the National Museum in Kraków, it is one of several paintings through which Grottger translated the emotional vocabulary of his graphic cycles into colour.

Working on panel rather than canvas allowed Grottger precise control of surface texture and fine detail. The intimate scale suits the quiet drama of a domestic parting: figures are close together, the composition compressed to intensify emotional charge. Warm interior light contrasts with darker passages suggesting the world outside, reinforcing the threshold quality of the moment depicted.