"Schikaneder is, first and foremost, a painter of poor people and poor destinies, a painter of loneliness, misery, hardship and misery." wrote about him a hundred years ago in the fortnightly Czech World.
In any case, they include Jakub Schikaneder one of the most outstanding personalities of Czech painting at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. His work is still recognised and sought after by collectors - at auctions at home and abroad, paintings by this Czech painter are now selling for millions of crowns. Although he was well-known as an artist, relatively little is known about his private life; he lived most of his life in seclusion.
"His name has never made much noise; he belonged to the quiet, unpretentious artists who see the content of their lives in hard work. He was a slender, handsome man of kind, amiable features, leaving everywhere the trace of his thoughtful, noble soul." the editor wrote about him Viktor Shuman in the magazine Zlatá Praha shortly after his death. "Evening Twilight" became the basis of his moody compositions. In almost every one of his paintings we find a wistful play of colour, quivering in the dying streams of silent light. And this art has remained its own, not succumbing to change under the onslaught of foreign influences. Meanwhile, a colourful band of new directions and sonorous slogans has passed by, but Schikaneder remained until his death a painter of wistful poetry and brooding melancholy, which in the course of time acquired even more intensity."
Jakub Bedřich Schikaneder was born on 27 February 1855 in Masná Street in Prague's Old Town as the second-born son of a customs official Karl Friedrich Schikaneder, originally from Vienna, and Leokadia, née Běhava, a native of Prague. The Schikaneder family had artistic roots. Jakub's grandfather, Carl Schikaneder, was a singer and actor in the German theatre in Brno and Prague. His great-grandfather Urban was also a singer and his older brother, playwright Emanuel Schikaneder, was the author of the libretto of Mozart's Magic Flutes. Jakub's older brother Karel became an actor in the Pilsen theatre.
Jakub was also gifted in acting and music from his youth, but he preferred to paint, and his family, although poor, supported him in this. At the age of fifteen, he began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. His classmates were Mikoláš Aleš, František Ženíšek, Václav Hynais, Václav Brožík and Emanuel Krescenc Liška, later referred to by historians as the "National Theatre generation". During his student days, he was considered a cheerful fellow, and even formed a circle of friends around him called "Kubo's Brotherhood". When Jakub's father died in 1871, the family's financial situation worsened and they had to move to a slum on the edge of the Jewish ghetto. This experience foreshadowed his lifelong interest in social and existential themes, as evidenced by his first painting depicting a dying painter, entitled The last work, exhibited at the 1876 Zofino Salon. He finished his studies in 1878 with his graduation painting Monastery soup. The contemporary edition of the magazine Květy described Schikaneder as "the most gifted of academics".
After a year's military service in the Austro-Hungarian army, he went to Paris to gain experience and then continued his studies at the Munich Academy with Professor Gabriel Max, a Prague native and renowned painter. In the first half of the 1980s he lived alternately in Prague and Munich.
When a competition for the decoration of the National Theatre was announced in 1880, he entered. He was unsuccessful with the curtain design, but together with Emanuel Krescenec Liška he won the commission for the frieze decoration of the royal box with the theme The Premyslid Age, the Age of Charles IV. a The time of Rudolf II. Although their work survived the devastating fire at the National Theatre in 1881, it was replaced by paintings by Václav Brožík in the new building. Schikaneder took it quite hard. He then travelled around Europe, visiting Germany, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy and France, and in 1890 he even attended the World Exhibition in Paris. From the early 1980s his works began to appear in illustrated magazines such as Světozor, Ruch and Zlatá Praha.
In July 1884 Schikaneder married Emilie Nevol, the daughter of a railway clerk. In May 1885, their son Lev Jan was born, but died six days later. They had no more children. It was also the sadness of this loss that he later embodied in his paintings. Around the same time, he became an assistant in the studio of František Ženíšek at the Prague School of Arts. In 1892 and 1896 he was acting director there, and in 1894 he was appointed professor in the studio of decorative painting. In 1913 he was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts. He held the post of professor until 1922. After his teaching career ended, he returned repeatedly to the island of Heligoland in northern Germany.
In addition to realistic, socially oriented paintings in the early years of his work, after 1900 he devoted himself to nostalgic paintings depicting the disappearing old Prague, which he loved. His favourite motifs were autumn and winter, Prague's nooks and crannies or the banks of the Vltava River (often in the evening light of gas lamps or shrouded in fog). The Prague Nocturnes form the best known part of Schikaneder's work. In his first period, he often depicted poor and lonely figures, women in difficult living conditions, such as those experienced by his mother.
His most famous and internationally acclaimed work of his time is Murder in the house from 1890, measuring 203×321 centimetres, depicts a group of Old Town residents who discovered the corpse of a young girl.
After 1910 he retired into seclusion and did not exhibit his works publicly. Only a small circle of collectors and friends had access to his studio. Among the greatest of these was the physician Josef Thomayer, with whom he travelled to the North Sea and the island of Heligoland. Paintings of abandoned interiors were made at this time, and after 1922 his trips to Helgoland inspired the paintings of the seashore, the pier with lighthouses and the harbour streets that form the last stage of his work.
Jakub Schikaneder died a hundred years ago, on 15 November 1924, in his apartment in Prague-Vinohrady of arteriosclerosis. He was cremated, which was still uncommon at that time. His wife Emilie survived him by almost seven years. Their urns are placed in a grave in the Vinohrady Cemetery, next to the first Švejk, the actor Karel Noll, the writer Jaroslav Foglar and Jan Karafiát, the author of The Beetles.
The largest collection of paintings and drawings by Jakub Schikaneder in the Czech Republic is managed by the National Gallery in Prague and forms part of its permanent exhibition.
Wikipedia / Gnews.cz - Jana Černá
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