Preisler Jan 1872–1918

Portrait, 1894-95

oil on canvas, board, frame, 40 × 33 cm, signed in pencil on the reverse "Stará work by my husband B. Preislerová" Expertly consulted with PhDr. Petr Wittlich, CSc., PhDr. Šárka Leubnerová.
Although the portrait appears in the artistic legacy of Jan Preisler from his juvenilia to his late family paintings, this key artist is not is listed among the discipline's major players. Yet the head, the face and the brooding expression of the creatures in his works are a true emblem of Symbolism. When, at the age of 15, he was a recognized talent, he entered the School of Arts and Crafts in Prague to Professor František Ženíšek, he had no idea that he would one day be in the same leadership position. The first Prague years were a comparison of strengths with, for example, his classmate Karel Špillar, with whom later on, he professed a similar aesthetics of painting in the juxtaposition of influences of the late Neo-Romanticism, Art Nouveau and Symbolism, from which he was strongly influenced by Hans Marées and Puvis de Chavannes. Early portraits of fellow painters Bořivoj Müller or Josef Petr are painted with realistic precision, in muted academic colouring, but with a certain indefinable aura of the fate of the artist. They were created during the ferment of the first exhibitions of the Mánes Society and even before. Perhaps none of the portraits is dated, but the developmental series can be deduced according to the chosen means of expression, brushwork, colouring and arrangement. I judge that this somewhat sentimental painting, with its posthumous stamp dates back to the mid-1990s, probably the years 1895-96, no longer ascetically dark as the previous ones, but it has not yet the certainty of paintings of the period around 1900, as shown, for example, by the Portrait Mrs. Preisler from the Moravian Gallery in Brno or self-portraits. Still more modern conception of the likeness was applied in his austerely civilian portrait of a young architect Josef Gočár, anticipating the New Materiality. An extraordinary The portrait of his son, a painting on a par with Renoir or Manet, is an extraordinary work, where we really see the worldliness of the great Czech painter. These paintings were born, of course, from a good sound foundation of craft and a shrewd judgment psychology of the sitter's personality, as we finally see convincingly here.