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Signed ‘J. Syrovy’ (lower left).
Sizes:
Frame: 42 × 37 cm | 16.5 × 14.6 in
Artwork: 26.5 × 21.5 cm | 10.4 × 8.5 in
A dark-eyed girl in a red blouse and a green fringed shawl looks straight at us, a glazed yellow jug on her shoulder; behind her, the lagoon, orange sails and a campanile place the scene in Venice. The paint is laid in short, thick, parallel strokes of pure colour that give the small board the glow of a mosaic.
Josef Syrový (1879–1956), a Czech painter trained under Brožík and Hynais at the Prague Academy, left for Italy at twenty and lived for years in San Marino and Munich before settling in Paris in 1911, where he stayed for twenty-eight years. Venetian and Breton genre subjects — water-carriers, fisherwomen, market girls — painted in this bright divisionist manner made his reputation in the Paris salons.
Signed ‘J. Syrový’ at the lower left.
Private Collection, Spain.
Oil on cardboard, framed. Good condition; the impasto is intact and the board flat; minor wear at the corners under the frame. Please contact us to request a detailed Condition Report.
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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.
Highlights of the Aurora & Athena autumn sale on 17 October 2026: Bridget Tichenor, Nicholas Roerich, Konstantin Korovin, Gerard Sekoto, Jan Zrzavý, Pan Yuliang, a Miró lithograph and the painters of the École de Paris.
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