Landscape art forms a major component of the oeuvre of Josef
Navrátil. The artist’s specialty, which soon gained popularity with collectors,
were his small-sized gouaches showing mostly mountain motifs. These images
attest not only to his skill at composing impressive landscape sceneries but
above all to the clear painterly character of his work. In his treatment of
colour and light, through which he expressed the pictures’ overall atmosphere,
Navrátil drew on the tradition of colourist painting of the Rococo period. A
painterly quality also appears in his pencil studies that move away from the
academic practice of strictly linear drawing and links his creative output with
artists of European Romanticism.
Curator: Markéta Dlábková
