The biography and oeuvre of Jan Lebenstein are closely interwoven with the history of Poland in the twentieth century. The artist's life is one of the thousands of Polish biographies whose comprehension is outright impossible without a closer acquaiintance with recent history. In 1795 the Polish state, which only a century earlier was one of the European powers, ceased to exist. Divided among three partitioners - Austria, Prussia and Russia, which pledged that Poland would never reemerge - the Commonwealth left behind a rich legacy of Sarmatian culture and a democracy of the gentry, which serves the Poles as a source of inspiration up to this day. Echoes of this tradition are discernible also in some of the later woks by Jan Lebenstein.