Lot 37

Alois Kalvoda (1875 - 1934) SUMMER LANDSCAPE

This lightly toned painting of a summer landscape in an Art Nouveau square format is a prestigious work by Alois Kalvoda, a student of Mařák's landscape painting class. In this composition featuring a low horizon, Kalvoda amplifies the expansiveness of the field by using harmonious pastel colors. Clouds with alternating areas of light and shadow arch over the entire plain.

After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, he went on study trips to Paris and Munich. He eventually departed from Mařák’s school of painting melancholic landscapes, moving instead towards a more decorative interpretation of the landscape through both colors and motifs. He painted simple motifs of the Bohemian countryside: meadows, hillsides, birches, glimpses of the landscape through the trunks of trees standing in the foreground or on the background of a hill. His work from the areas around Rohatce, Strážnice, and the Břeclav area are superb. Kalvoda also taught. Following the untimely death of Luděk Marold, he took over his studio and took on many of his pupils. From 1897 he continuously exhibited in Prague and Brno as well as Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Warsaw, Munich and even Russia, Italy and the United States.