Eliška Bridge

Antonín Slavíček is the most remarkable representative of landscape painting at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. At the end of the 19th century, he approximated impressionism by his distinctive way of light rendering. Around 1900, he paid his attention to the suburbs and secluded places of the redeveloped Prague which he depicted in many small studies using an expressive painting style. The same style is also found in large formats, for example the canvas Eliška Bridge in which he rendered an edge of the chain structure that was on the site of today’s Štefánik Bridge from 1865 to 1947. Officially, the bridge was named after Emperor Franz Joseph I, yet people commonly called it after his wife Elisabeth.