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In the painting Ballad (Joys of Life) Kupka depicted his two loves riding horses along the seashore - the prematurely deceased Danish Marie Brühn and the French Gabrielle. In January 1902 he wrote about it to his friend, the poet Josef Svatopluk Machar: "You ask me in the note there, what am I doing now? I want to express in a rather refined way, in simple means, the feelings I used to have when I was sitting pretty alone on the seashore. They are two women rather ugly on horseback, trotting there on the sea-shore, and looking out in the warm glow of the setting sun, while all the sea-shore and the clouds are murmuring a note of some unknown joys to it, and in the clouds a thousand leprechauns seem to be dancing and leaping about somehow joyfully. We all have a longing for some kind of joy - a pure immaterial feeling of well-being, and I would like everyone who sees this thing to have a similar feeling aroused in him." On the back of the painting is the inscription "Epona ballade des joies". Epona was a favourite goddess of Celtic mythology, associated with horses ("epic" in Old Gaelic meant horse) and used to be depicted riding a mare. In this painting Kupka has thus intertwined his personal story with Celtic mythology.
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https://sbirky.ngprague.cz/dielo/CZE:NG.O_17323?collection=5
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