Ploughing

Spring, here enriched by the motif of ploughing, was a theme to which Lada repeatedly returned, as to an inexhaustible wellspring of his visual memory. The composition unfolds from the foreground, with its white stone wayside shrine, upwards across the spacious courtyard of a farmhouse with blue shutters and a substantial entry gate, all the way to a small white church with an onion dome crowning the ridge of the hill – derived from the Church of St Wenceslas in Hrusice, which for Lada became a visual synonym for the idea of “home”.

The strong contour line, acquired through decades of work as an illustrator, clearly reveals an affinity with folk graphic art. The flattened perspective – fields and paths arranged in horizontal bands without recession into depth – is rather a sign of Lada’s deeply established artistic language than his one-sidedness. Blossoming apple trees, set out along the slopes in a rhythmic sequence, lend the painting a decorative lightness, which is further emphasised by the gouache technique with its dense, light-absorbing surface. Lada’s idyllic vision of the countryside speaks in two voices: as a living memory of a specific childhood landscape, and as an artistic statement addressed to an age that has almost forgotten such a world. The work is presented in its original mounting and framing. Assessed in consultation with Prof. J. Zemina and PhDr. R. Michalová, PhD. An expert opinion of PhDr. P. Pečinková, CSc., is attached (quoted: “[…] Lada often developed motifs that had proved successful for him in a series of related variations. The theme of fieldwork, and ploughing in particular, is not especially frequent in his work, but it appears several times in the 1940s. […]”).