Museum of Underpaintings
Visit the exhibition focusing on the former - almost a century old - Kvilda production of underpaintings on glass. In addition to the expert exhibition, you will be drawn into the actual production of glass pictures and their wooden frames through a creative workshop. And you will take away not only experiences.
Glass as a painting surface requires special skills from the painter. The image is painted mirror reversed from the reverse side of the glass. Viewed from the front, the glass gives the painting its brilliance and colour saturation.
The technique of underpainting on glass came to Kvilda thanks to several painters from the Bavarian Raimundsreut and its surroundings in the last quarter of the 18th century.
The existence of several nearby glassworks producing the necessary plate glass was a prerequisite for the production of underpaintings. The Raimundsreut painters were also attracted by the possibility of duty-free export of their products to Austrian countries. However, it was not until later that three generations of the Verderber family, originally peddlers from Carniola, became famous for their underpainting - first Michael, then his son Johann and then his grandson Franz.
The greatest boom of the Kvilda large-scale painting workshop under Johann Verderber occurred around 1850, when the annual production was up to forty thousand pieces of pictures on glass.
In the 19th century, the holy pictures painted on glass from the Verderber family's large workshop made Kvilda in Šumava permanently famous.
Subsequently, however, underpaintings gradually began to be replaced by much cheaper colour prints and the end of the workshop was hastened by the fire of the building of the Kvilda large workshop in 1881.
