Lot 143

Josef Lada (1887 - 1957) CHRISTMAS

This work from the Christmas series, showing Czech holiday traditions, presents icon of Czech painting and illustration Josef Lada’s typical style of strong lines and rounded figures. Lada’s White Christmas has become a mainstay of the traditional Christmas holiday, and every year Czechs celebrate his work on calendars, Christmas cards and postcards featuring reproductions of Lada’s paintings. From the assessment by PhDr. Pavla Pečinková, CSc.: “This work represents the original used to print the full-page newspaper illustration published in the Christmas issue of Lidové noviny in 1937. This work is the first version of Christmas motifs arranged in this manner, and it contains a number of scenes that Lada expounded on in his work as separate gouaches or developed into Christmas cards. He repeated the same motifs and composition with only partial changes in a colored illustration with the same format and same name (Christmas – New Year’s Day), which was published as a poster in 1938. Lada drew a third version in 1941, again with the same name and partial changes; his fourth version is from 1948 (the illustration was also printed on canvas as a visual aid for national history class in schools). Only the two later versions of the same composition, from 1938 and 1941, are reproduced in Jiří Olič’s monograph Lada (Slovart, 2008). Color reproductions of the drawing presented here have not been recorded. Nor do I have any evidence that the presented work has been represented at an exhibition. The artistic interpretation of this work is remarkable for the second half of the 1930s, when Lada departed from his successful caricature style known from the first book illustrations for The Good Soldier Švejk and he advanced to masterful linear stylization that convincingly captures reality.”