Village Fair

The setting of Gareis’s genre scene of a village fair, exhibited immediately in 1863 at the annual exhibition of the association Krasoumná jednota, is the idyllic Czech countryside. For the painter, however, the fair was only a background - the central figures of the scene were children, in the 1860s a very appreciated motif, with their old teacher. This lends a certain didactic element to the picture. Contemporaneous art critics highly appreciated the faithful rendering of various village types and, in the first place, of children. Well-balanced composition, careful brushwork and an idealized topic were fully in line with the demands made on art by contemporaneous art critics, e.g. Jan Neruda.