Mánes Quido (1828–1880)

Chickens, 1845–1855

oil, canvas on pasteboard, frame
16 x 22 cm
sign. PD M.


valuation price 40 000–60 000 CZK. Attached expert opinion by PhDr. Michael Zachař. From the opinion: Included among the so-called manesiana are works by all the five members of the Mánes family. Quido Mánes (1828–1880) was a younger brother of the famous Josef and pursued an independent path of genre painting, in which he excelled even within the Central European context of his time. He naturally received an all-round education within his academic studies, which he started as a child prodigy while still 10 years old under the old Professor Tkadlík and finished under the feared Professor Ruben. This allowed him to paint historical events, scenes of war, battles, he published illustrations, created occasional portraits, but specialized primarily in horses and other animals, as the publication by Jan Loriš from 1937 confirms. His immaculate drawings of cats, dogs, forest wildlife and birds, in diffused light and with photographic precision, are painted with minute attention to detail and smoothness. This group also embraces the evaluated intimately sized painting, strikingly reminding us of the painting the Billeting of the Cuirassiers from 1845, where the first plane is created by the terrain of a country road with a group of fowl rendered using the same technique and the same colour palette. Similar rendering can be found in an oil with roughly the same theme from the collections of the Kooperativa insurance company. The evaluated technically well-preserved painting, as exemplary evidence of period genre painting, will captivate with its fine brushwork, soft colouring and is a rare, newly discovered example of painting by the Mánes clan falling into the context of the work of his brother Josef, whose watercolour of poultry from 1851 was sold at auction in Prague shortly after 2000. The two brothers painted together mainly after Josef’s return from Munich, in particular between 1848 and 1853. I date the painting under valuation to the period between 1845 and 1855, and with the decorative stylish mounting it provides an impressive example of Biedermeyer art in Prague at that time.