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1879-1956 | Czech
Josef Syrový, J. Syrovy
Czech Painter of Venice, Brittany and the École de Paris
Josef Syrový was born in Přerov nad Labem in 1879 and studied at the School of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague under Václav Brožík and Vojtěch Hynais. At twenty he left for Italy, living for a time in San Marino, studied in Munich from 1901 to 1903, and in 1911 settled in Paris, where he remained for twenty-eight years.
He married the singer Lola Jelen and moved in the cosmopolitan world of the Paris salons, exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne.
Syrový’s best-known works are his Venetian genre pictures — water-carriers, girls with jugs, market scenes against the lagoon — and his Breton subjects: fishing boats, fishermen at work, women in coiffes, painted in short, bright, mosaic-like strokes. Parisian critics praised his Breton watercolours and his oils of Itteville and Montmartre.
He first exhibited in Prague in 1928 and returned there in 1939, devoting his last years to views of the Czech capital. He died in Prague in 1956.
