The many versions of The Sword Dance, each slightly different (as we can conclude from the pencil-made study held in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw, the artist resolved fundamental composition dilemmas at the drafting stage), are flagship examples of Siemiradzki's idyllic paintings. On the one hand, they wholly fall into the academic canons, but on the other they display his realistic tendencies. It is, after all, symptomatic that this very painting became the star of an auction scandal – idyllic paintings intensively produced by Siemiradzki since the 1870s were the artist's response to the needs of the art market of the time. They were a compilation of all the motifs which his audience – especially the wealthier part which originated from the rising-in-power bourgeoise – appreciated the most. In their time, they made a spectacular commercial success. To meet the viewers' expectations, Siemiradzki often repeated particular motifs, and even complete compositions (his most esteemed ones), which is why there are four versions of the painting.
The scene depicts a nude girl dancing amidst Roman swords stuck upright into the ground, accompanied by three women playing on instruments. A group of patricians sitting in the shade observes the dancers. Thus, the anecdote is a little more complex than in idylls which usually depict merely scenes of repose next to a fountain or wine-drinking in the open air. The architectural background is relatively modest but not devoid of eye-catching decorations typical to Siemiradzki – meticulously reproduced colourful ornaments, fragments of Pompeian-style paintings, and tiger skin spread out on a stone step. There is a lot of open space in the painting and the foreground is dominated by lush, Mediterranean flora through which rays of sun seep in. In the background, a bay stretches out together with sun-bathed hills. Thanks to notes left by the artist's son, Leon, we know that the scene is located somewhere around Taormina in Sicily.
Stanisław Witkiewicz, a theorist and practitioner of realism who vehemently fought off all manifestations of stick-in-the-mud academism, commented: