Czech Painter Antonín Chittussi 1847 – 1891 "landscape With A Pond" Significant And Gallery Art

Czech prominent painter Antonín Chittussi (1847 – 1891)
Landscape with a pond and forest in the background
Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 62 x 83 cm
Signed lower right Chittussi
Framed.
Numbered on the back.

The date of creation of this significant work is in the period of 1885 – 1886)

This work is supplemented by an expert opinion by Professor Roman Prahl, CSc.
and a restoration report and color analysis by Academician painter Pavel Blattný. Painter.

At the age of eighteen, Antonín Chittussi went to Prague, where he initially began studying at the Technical College (1865–1866). Two years later, however, he entered the Prague Academy of Fine Arts (prof. Emanuel Rom, Antonín Lhota), where Mikoláš Aleš, Jakub Schikaneder, Josef Tulka, Josef Václav Myslbek, and František Ženíšek were also studying at the time. However, the level of the academy did not suit him, so he left it and studied at art schools in Munich (1869, prof. Hermann Anschütz) and Vienna. In Vienna, he also entered military service. However, he found there, just like at home, only routine, academically oriented professors, so he returned to Prague to study with prof. Josef Matyáš Trenkwald (1870–1872). In 1872, he went on a study trip to Hungary and then returned to the Prague Academy for the third time, this time to the studio of historical painting by Jan Sweerts.

Antonín Chittussi arrived in Paris in the spring of 1879, a few weeks before the opening of the 4th Impressionist exhibition. He was not prepared for the clash with this artistic movement. For a painter coming from Prague, which, in terms of art, was engaged in the decoration of the National Theatre, it was too much of an onslaught. In Paris, he mainly wanted to get acquainted with the works of the masters of the Barbizon School and study them thoroughly. He soon understood that in order to follow the French landscape, he would have to forget his own past as a painter. This meant freeing himself from genre subjects and starting over from scratch, as he wrote in a letter to Augusta Braunerová, “my previous work was in vain.”[7] He decided to go to Barbizon, a place that painters such as Théodore Rousseau, Charles Daubigny, Jules Dupré and Camille Corot had already discovered before him and created their works there. The effort of these painters was to depict the landscape as a bearer of a mental mood. This required a thorough study of nature and its changes in the hours of the day and seasons. This suited Chittussi very well, as he could apply his southern sensory perception, Slavic pensiveness and ability to empathize, and add French lightness and a modern way of depicting reality. He painted his Autumns at Fontainebleau, Heaths, and Sunsets in these places. Through diligent work and studying the work of similarly focused painters, Chittussi achieved a high level of landscape realism in a very short time. The Czech painter Chittussi became an artist in France.