Jan Zrzavy - Boats in Le Fret "1937, oil tempera on panel, 13 x 21,2cm, verso signed, dated and inscribed: Jan Zrzavy / Boats in Le Fret / tempera / 1937" Provenance: - significant private collection Prague Expertise by renowned expert Professor Jaromir Zemina, enclosed. Professor Jaromir Zemina, remarked: “The painting dates from 1937 and belongs to those works characterized by smooth paint work with the details drawn with a ruler, through which Zrzavy confirmed, as he had done since the late 1920s, the important role of regularity, precision and purity in his artistic expression. However, in Brittany, probably out of a need for inner release and counterbalance, he began to apply more of a material component than in other paintings, to paint more pastorally with a more expressive hand. And in turn, he began to alternate these two methods. Zrzavy created a compositional scheme for the depiction of the harbour bars, which he then adhered to continually, using it as a basis of to create variations from memory. In the painting under consideration, he changed the overall arrangement by surprisingly pushing one barge into the foreground all the way to the lower edge, covering almost the whole of it and allowing only the top of the mast to be seen from it, which adds dynamism to the composition and brings the scene visually closer to the viewer.“ Further consulted with Dr Irena Zantovska Murray HonFRIBA, Dr Karel Srp, Dr Jiri Machalicky and Vladimir Lekes.