10 Zlotys 150 Years of the National Museum in Warsaw

The National Museum in Warsaw traces its origins to 1862, when it was founded as the Fine Arts Museum under the Russian imperial administration — a concession wrung from a reluctant tsarist bureaucracy during a brief period of relative Polish autonomy that collapsed entirely with the January Uprising the following year. The institution survived partition, two world wars, and deliberate Nazi looting campaigns that stripped it of thousands of works, many never recovered.

This commemorative was issued at the 150-year mark, though the museum's actual continuity across that span required several institutional reinventions.