Canvas by Polish painter Matejko to be shown at London’s National Gallery

A work by the famous 19th-century Polish painter Jan Matejko is to be displayed at the National Gallery in London next year.

Jan Matejko's 'Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God'

Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Entitled “Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God”, it depicts Nicolaus Copernicus observing the heavens from a balcony, near or at the cathedral in Frombork, surrounded by  astronomical tools.

The work dates from 1872 and was painted in the run-up to celebrations of the 400th anniversary of Copernicus’s birth.

It part of a collection of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, southern Poland, adorning its Senate Chamber.

It will go on show at the National Gallery in London between July 29 and November 15, 2020, alongside a 1543 copy of the Polish astronomer’s ground-breaking treatise “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium” (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). 

(mk/pk)