Wojciech Kossak

Wojciech Horacy Kossak (1856–1942) was the central figure of a three-generation dynasty of Polish battle painters: son of Juliusz Kossak, father of Jerzy Kossak.

He trained in Kraków and at the Munich Academy and specialised in military and equestrian subjects, above all the Napoleonic Wars and the Polish struggle for independence, in which Poles fought under Napoleon's eagles. Where Jan Matejko painted monumental symbolic history, Kossak's manner is looser and more reportorial, carried by an exceptional command of the horse in movement.

He painted the Berezina panorama together with Julian Fałat and four other artists; it opened in Berlin in 1896. The panorama was later cut into pieces, and from 1907 Kossak repainted Fałat's landscape passages himself so that he could sign and sell the fragments as entirely his own work. The two men fell out over it. He kept painting through the German occupation but refused commissions from Nazi officials.