Winter Night

Although his entire work was produced in a short period of time, Adolf Kosárek is the most outstanding representative of Czech romantic landscape painting. The painter first put his work on display in 1853, dying of tuberculosis six years later at the age of twenty-nine. The Winter Night of 1857 is Kosárek’s most famous painting. This large canvas depicts the magic of Christmas Eve where the villagers walk in the snowy landscape lit by the moonlight for the midnight service in church. It is a fictitious landscape yet the artist may have been inspired by the reminiscences from his childhood which was spent in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands.