Raclawice Panorama

The Panorama isn't only a work of art, it's a journey. The 140m-long canvas delineates the incredible General Tadeusz Kosciuszko's triumph over the Russian powers at Raclawice in 1794 and took a little more than nine months to finish.

Workers employing grass shearers surge the positions of Russian hussars in a chivalrous offer for autonomy. They win the fight, yet the uprising comes to nothing. Poland won't be genuinely self-representing until the mid-twentieth century.

The work of art was conceived in a blasted of energetic intensity in Lwów now Lviv, Ukraine a hundred years after the fight. Painters Jan Styka and Wojciech Kossak needed to make a landmark to Polish national soul. Their work, showed in a rotunda manufactured particularly for it, was a famous - and budgetary - achievement.