[2] Jacek Malczewski, similarly to fellow painter Józef Chełmoński, witnessed the January Uprising as a child, which had exerted a lasting impact on the artist as an adult.

He created many paintings forming a significant part of Poland's rich iconography portraying the country's fight for independence during the Age of Partitions and The Prisoners is one of the artist's works directly referring to the fate of Poles sentenced to resettlement in Siberia.

The foreground presents members of the intelligentsia and students with the figure of a despairing youth wearing a shackle on his ankle and sitting on a chair covering his face in his arms.

This realistic juxtaposition of well-educated, noble patriots with commoners, some of whom were petty criminals, leads to the demythologization of the popular image of sybiraks in Polish culture.

A sense of isolation between the two groups depicted in the painting serves the purpose of demonstrating that the willingness to accept the sacrifice for the nation's independence was not shared by all members of the Polish society.