The „Drowned“ Pond

Antonín Chittussi's 'The Drowned Pond' (1887) depicts a submerged or dried-out pond — an unusual landscape subject that combined the melancholy of a landscape feature in decline with the specific visual character of overgrown or flooded agricultural land. His Czech landscape subjects engaged with the specific character of Bohemian land management and the distinctive landscapes created by the region's combination of forests, ponds, and agricultural fields. The drowned pond subject offered both atmospheric and social observation — the pond as a feature of the managed landscape falling into neglect.

Chittussi renders the drowned pond with the atmospheric sensitivity his Barbizon training gave him — the specific visual character of the overgrown or submerged water feature, the particular quality of light on still or shallow water among dense vegetation, and the melancholy atmosphere of a landscape feature in abandonment all observed with direct naturalist honesty. His handling of the specific vegetation characteristic of pond margins and the quality of the light within this particular landscape creates the composition's distinctive atmosphere.