Feast-Day

The life of the middle-class society in his native Litomyšl and of the common people in the near-by villages provided Antonín Dvořák with a wealth of motifs for his paintings. The personages in his pictures have their counterparts in contemporaneous literature, e.g. in Božena Němcová’s novels and stories. Their modesty, simplicity, industry and self-sacrifice made them the ideal of intellectuals in the 1850s. In his religious and moralizing genres Dvořák painted scenes from everyday life, often with a touch of humour. He arranged ordinary objects into small, artistically convincing still-lifes, depicted in a matter-of-fact manner and with a pronounced sense for a temperate colour scheme.