Vojtěch (Adalbert) Hynais (1854 – 1925)
Portrait of Herman Bollé, 1877
oil on canvas, 110.7x80.5 cm
MG-276
Vojtěch Hynais is one of the most prominent Czech painters, graphic artists and designers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was born in Vienna, where he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts. He later attended the school of Anselm Feurbach (1829 -1880), one of the leading German classicist painters. As was customary in art education at that time, he went to Rome, first in 1874 where, together with the Slovenian painter Janez Šubic, he created frescoes for a hospice, and then again in 1877 with Feurbach. After having returned to Vienna, he quickly completed the commission he received from Bishop Strossmayer and he then won a scholarship to study in Paris where he lived from 1878 to 1893. He met Vlaho Bukovac in Paris, which is later going to be of great help to the Croatian painter after he moves to Prague. Both will become professors at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts and good friends. Hynais also spent some time in New York, together with this Parisian professor Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry (1826 – 1886) where he worked on the ceiling decorations of a villa.
Stylistically, his oeuvre is heterogeneous, ranging from the religious and mythological scenes painted in the academic style, through realistic portraits and proto-impressionist landscapes and symbolic compositions. Hynais was also one of the founders of the Vienna Secession.
The realistic bourgeois portrait of the confident Bollé is painted in brown – reddish tones. The hair, flesh tones of the face and hands and the coat’s fur are rendered in warm brown reddish tones, which in combination with the dark brown background and the colour of the coat enhances the elegance, even nobility of the Austrian architect who will soon move to Zagreb permanently. Hynais’ painting skill is especially visible in the way he painted the hands with pronounced bluish veins, while his realism is reduced to the painterly essence, without superfluous description. Brushstrokes are occasionally hatched (fur), which indicates the painter’s knowledge of contemporary painting phenomena.
Text: Dajana Vlaisavljević, Museum advisor of the National Museum of Modern Art© National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2022
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2022