Josef Lada – A Fight In A Tavern (1943)

Back in 1994, Mrs RP and I went to Brněnská Přehrada for a week. It’s a man made lake and it certainly didn’t have a dull English name like Brno Reservoir, like it does now. We had a nice week away drinking very cheap beer and wandering around a country which had only dropped the Iron Curtain three years before. Mrs RP blogged about it (well, she kept a diary which I put online here).

We stayed at a hotel called the Kozi Horka and just outside our door was a framed print of this drawing (above). I spent ages looking at all the detail that went into it – I absolutely loved it. I asked the hotel where I could get a copy but they had no idea.

I took a photo of it. When I went back to work the following week and spoke to my boss (the Bursar of a public school, no less) about my holiday the following week, he asked to see a copy of it as he was an ex-army guy and found stuff like this funny. I brought the photo in to show him, and never saw it again.

From time to time I’ve tried to find it online and didn’t really know where to start. Last night at 3am I was laying awake in bed thinking “I wonder if I can find it now?” About 5 minutes later, I found it! It’s really weird how some things suddenly jump into your head.

There are a couple of variations but I remember this is the correct one as I remember the two nuns cowering in the corner, which don’t appear on the other versions. It still seems impossible to buy a copy of the print anywhere though.

Ironically this exact scene was played out the first time I visited The Unicorn in Gidea Park, when I was a teenager back in the 80s.

Wednesday 22 January 2025, 260 views