Josef Sima - Composition with Inscription 1921, watercolour and charcoal on paper, 48,5 x 68,5 cm, signed in pencil lower right: J. Sima 21 with inscription RAMUNT Expertise by renowned expert Professor Jaromir Zemina, enclosed. Professor Jaromir Zemina, remarked: “The painting was made at the beginning of Sima's permanent residence in France, where he travelled with his friend, architect Bedrich Feuerstein, at the end of 1920. Feuerstein settled immediately in Paris, Sima for the time in the small seaside resort of Henday, near the border with Spain, where he worked as a draughtsman for a firm producing stained glass and glass mosaics. However, in the autumn of 1921, he also moved to Paris, not knowing that he would remain there for the rest of his life. Feuerstein came to see him in Hendaye in the summer of 1921, stayed there for almost two months, and painted with Sima. They both painted in watercolours and their paintings are strikingly similar - it is not easy to determine who influenced whom. Frantisek Smejkal writes in his great monograph on Sima that Sima's paintings "are more varied, spontaneous and lyrical in expression" than Feuerstein's. They are multi-coloured compositions composed of vertical and horizontal straight lines forming rectangular shapes as well as curves, and in their abstractness, they evoke the bustle of seaside ports and modern technological civilisation, which Sima had already celebrated with his earlier Brno paintings. They are distinctive but reveal the influence of the purism that emerged at the time. Like Picasso and Braque in their cubist paintings, Sima here enriched the composition with writing. The incomplete inscription Ramunt may refer to the title of Pierre Loti's adventure novel Ramuntcho, or to the same name of a hotel in the town of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, near Hendaye, which is known as the gateway to Spain; this hotel is still there today.” Further consulted with Dr Irena Zantovska Murray HonFRIBA, Dr Jiri Machalicky and Vladimir Lekes.