When Jan Matejko unveiled his Sketch for Skarga's Sermon in 1861, he was just twenty-three years old, yet already daring to tackle one of Polish history’s most charged episodes. The painting’s subject, the legendary 1573 sermon by Jesuit priest Piotr Skarga, was a rallying cry for national conscience during a period of political turmoil. Skarga’s fiery words, warning the Polish nobility of the dangers of internal division and foreign influence, would later be mythologized as prophetic, especially during the 19th-century partitions of Poland.

Matejko’s early sketch signaled his lifelong commitment to history painting, and the work quickly became a touchstone for Polish national identity. The scene captures the moment Skarga, standing in the pulpit, gestures forcefully toward the assembled senators and nobles, his face alight with conviction. Around him, the Polish elite sit in varying attitudes—some attentive, others indifferent or hostile—each figure a study in character and political stance. The composition’s diagonal sweep draws the eye from Skarga’s raised hand down to the richly dressed magnates, whose ornate chains and fur-trimmed robes signal both their rank and the complacency Skarga decried.

The interplay of light and shadow isolates Skarga as the moral center, much as Rembrandt did with his biblical orators. This sketch, though less polished than Matejko’s later finished canvas, already pulses with drama and the tension between conscience and power. As a preparatory work for his later, monumental Skarga's Sermon (1864), this sketch offers a rare glimpse into Matejko’s creative process at a formative moment in his career. The medium is uncertain, but the energetic handling and quick notation of gesture suggest oil or gouache on paper or board.

While the finished painting now hangs in Kraków’s Wawel Royal Castle, the sketch itself has circulated among private collections and is prized for its immediacy and historical insight. For Matejko, this subject marked the beginning of his lifelong project: to paint the moral and political lessons of Polish history for his own turbulent times.