We wish all schoolchildren and students a happy start to the new school year and good luck with their studies. May all first graders enjoy school, find new friends, have a good teacher and the joy of mastering reading every new letter, word, sentence..., but also writing and counting.

For this important day, we have selected from the collections of the gallery the painting "Reading Girl" from 1954, by the academic painter Jiří Hruška (February 10, 1921 – August 29, 2016), who captured just such a small schoolgirl on his canvas. Jiří Hruška was born in Paris, where his father, the sculptor Jaroslav Hruška, was working at the time (among other things, the author of the monumental monument to the Czechoslovak legions in Arras and the monuments to T. G. Masaryk in Kolín and Pilsen), but since 1926 he lived with his parents in Prague. In 1940, he was admitted to the School of Art in Zlín, majoring in sculpture, where he studied under Vincenc Makovský. During the 1942-1944 war, he was fully deployed in Kapfenberg, Austria. After the war, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1945–1950), majoring in figure painting under Vlastimil Rada, where he was also his assistant in the years 1950–1955. In 1950, he married the painter Vendula Truhlářová, the niece of the painter Jan Zrzavý. His daughter Vendula Císařovská is a painter, restorer and book illustrator. Hruška was a member of the Umělecká beseda group, devoted himself to visual arts and occasionally to restoration. In his work he was influenced by Impressionism and Expressionism, he mainly devoted himself to classical landscape painting, where he was mainly interested in Prague and French motifs, the landscapes of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands and the Bohemian Central Highlands, which he captured in their authentic form at the time. Later, at the end of his life, he focused on studio still lifes.

Jiří Hruška painted a rather unusual figural motif on the aforementioned painting from our collections – a portrait of a little girl sitting by an open window and reading from a book placed on a table with a white tablecloth. The girl in typical period clothing and a short hairstyle with a distinctive red bow is engrossed in reading a favorite book or is she perhaps concentrating on the text in the textbook?

Jana Bojanovská, September 2, 2024