Still Life with Apples and Oranges

After the Second World War, the work was restretched onto a different, reused stretcher, as evidenced by visible holes from the canvas’s original attachment. Jan Špála, the artist’s son, used the stretcher from another work, the inventory number on the stretcher therefore belongs to a different painting and is unrelated to the present work. For this reason, the present work could not be traced in the artist’s catalogues.
The absence of a record may also be explained by Václav Špála’s method of cataloguing his works: he considered a painting definitively completed only once it had been mounted on a stretcher, at which point he also assigned it an inventory number. Although the present canvas was fully completed as a painting, it had not been mounted on a stretcher and was therefore never entered into the artist’s records.