Václav Jansa's Old Prague - Pavla Státníková and Ondřej Polák

Product detailed description

Narrative publication of comparative picture pairs, where the starting point is a series of legendary watercolors by Václav Jansa, mainly from the 1890s, and the current state of photographs of the same places after a hundred years. Václav Jansa was already involved in painting Prague views in the early 1880s, when he was at the Prague Academy and devoted himself intensively to it after returning from his studies in Vienna in 1891. He traveled a lot and liked landscape painting. During the great rebuilding of Prague at the end of the nineteenth century, he focused on images of Prague houses and streets. At that time, the Prague ghetto was being cleaned up, houses and entire streets were being demolished and new buildings were being built. Many of the monuments he captured no longer exist today. It is thanks to the mind of this Czech painter, landscape artist and illustrator that we have preserved "documents" about the changes that Prague went through.

Since the first half of the 1890s, there has generally been a targeted effort to preserve the appearance of Prague's monuments threatened by destruction, at least in visual form - in photographs, drawings, paintings, plans, etc. This effort culminated precisely in connection with the issuance of the Sanitation Act in 1893 The city underwent far-reaching urban and architectural changes in the last years of the 19th and early 20th centuries. On the basis of the Sanitation Act, the unique original development of the Prague Jewish ghetto, part of the Old Town of Prague and a smaller part of the New Town of Prague, definitively and almost completely disappeared from the map of Prague. Prague in 1890 looked completely different from the same city twenty years later. Jans' paintings, capturing the city at the very end of the 19th century, are therefore not only a valuable document of the form of Prague, but also of its atmosphere and the life of its inhabitants.

The interest of all supporters of our painter, landscape artist and illustrator continues to this day. The publication presents both hitherto known watercolors and watercolors hitherto more or less secret to the public, known only from occasional exhibitions or random publications. Their confrontation of the sensitive capture of the painter with the work of our contemporary, who captured the same places with a photographic camera, increases the comprehensibility and attractiveness of the presented works. It is precisely the comparison of the painter's work with photographs that reveals not only the degree of architectural and construction changes of the city, but also the change in the lifestyle and pace of its inhabitants.