Mařák Julius Eduard 1832–1899

Forest in a Pool

oil on canvas, frame, 73 × 92 cm
From the opinion of PhDr. Michael Zachar Julius Edvard Mařák is one of the most outstanding representatives of landscape of Professor Maximilian Haushofer's school at the Prague Academy, although at he studied there only briefly and then headed to Munich to Professor Leopold Rottmann. His main source of inspiration, however, was not any school, but nature in its greatness, grandeur and abundance, which he had learned in his his years of vagrancy throughout central Europe. From 1860 he lived in Vienna, where where he taught in various families and gradually won smaller and larger commissions, especially illustrations. He did not completely break off contact with Prague, and his drawings of Czech landscapes He sent his works to Květy or Světozor. Over the years he concentrated his interest in on forest interiors, which he created not only in oil painting, but also and above all in endlessly visually stunning drawings and prints. After 1887 he worked in Prague as a professor at the newly established Landscape specialty at the Academy and educated the entire founding generation of landscape painters with Antonín Slavíček at its head. His last major work in Prague was paintings of the monumental places of the Czech Kingdom for the building of the National Museum, where for the National Museum, where he was ably assisted by his pupils and his daughter Pepa. The large-format painting under consideration is a distinguished one, in the tradition of anchored in the established tradition of artistic presentation is the work of a young artist from around 1870. Mařák worked in Vienna from 1860, where he had the opportunity to study the classical landscape paintings of the old Dutch in the collection of of the local Academy. He was inspired by Ruysdael, whose heroic yet strangely civilian paintings of exquisite golden brown and developed. In the course of the 1960s, such paintings declined and Mařák moved towards realism. However, his paintings always stood out for their spirituality, admiration for the majesty of nature and perfection of form. Captivating motif, as is evident from the works catalogued in the in the publication "Julius Mařák and His Pupils" published by the National Gallery in Prague in 1999 - Moonrise in a Pine Forest (1869), oil on wood 35 × 47 cm (NG), Fox on a Chihana (1869), oil on canvas 84.5 × 97.5 cm (NG). painting, refined coloring and overall arrangement are imported even in the absence of the absence of a signature, the authorship of Julius Mařák. Copies of such paintings have never stood out artistic conviction, and therefore I confirm the authenticity of Julius Mařák's painting.