Jan Matejko epic ‘Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God,’ is to go on display at the National Gallery in London from May 21.

This will be the National Gallery’s first presentation of a painting by a Polish artist.

The exhibition was initially planned from the end of July to mid-November 2020, but has been postponed twice because of the pandemic.

Matejko painted the enormous canvas (225 cm by 315 cm) in 1873 to mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

The painting will be on loan from Krakow’s (southern Poland) historic Jagiellonian University, one of Europe’s oldest, founded in the 14th century.

The gallery will also display a 1543 copy of Copernicus’s ‘De revolutionibus orbium coelestium,’ (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres).

The National Gallery in London is the most important gallery in Great Britain and one of the most visited museums in the world. 

Its collections include around 2,300 paintings, mainly of Western European painters, from the mid-thirteenth century to 1900.

Artists whose works are exhibited there include: Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh, Titian, Sandro Botticelli, Jan van Eyck, Claude Monet, Diego Velazquez and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The exhibition will run until August 22, 2021.