Emptying the Ash

The study Emptying the Ash is probably related to the large sized canvas Dustmen (presently in a private collection) which Bartoněk showed at the Fine Arts Union exhibition in 1887. The painter portrayed a group of women expecting the arrival of a dustcart, a very common scene in the streets of Prague where early in the morning the housewives took out ashbins and other rubbish to wait for a dustcart to carry it away. This system existed in Prague after the Great War; it was not until 1922 that an “exchange system” replaced it where full standardised rubbish bins replaced empty ones.