Václav Špála

The Czech painter Václav Špála is remembered for a colour. From the mid-1920s he painted landscapes, and later bouquets, almost entirely in blues, ultramarine and Prussian blue laid shade on shade, and Czech writers still speak of Špála blue.

He was one of nine children of a brickmaker from the village of Žlunice in Bohemia, and he studied at the Prague Academy until he was told to leave for spending too much of the year painting outside school. In 1911 he went to Paris, and the same year he co-founded the Group of Fine Artists, the Prague circle devoted to Cubism, though he left it after two years. The Belvedere's At the Water dates from 1914, from those Cubist years.

The war took him in 1915, and he spent most of his service in a hospital at Siófok on Lake Balaton. From 1918 he belonged to the Stubborn Ones, a group of Czech modernists, and in 1923 he illustrated a new edition of The Grandmother, Božena Němcová's classic novel of country life. A green period came first, then the blue one. He was named National Artist in 1945 and died the following year in Prague, where he was buried in the Slavín tomb at Vyšehrad cemetery.