1899–1900
The design of the house, referred to in the relevant literature as the Peterka House, was the very first commission that Jan Kotěra carried out in Prague, and also one of the first commissions for the firm that Novák and Pekárka had formed at that time. Despite its historical significance, this work is still shrouded in uncertainty in the scholarly literature. This begins with the identity of its builder, as the house is commonly associated with the name of Lev Peterka—a figure who is, in fact, little known—whereas it was his wife, Františka, the heiress to the original house at No. II-777 on Wenceslas Square, who in 1898 had to decide to demolish the house and replace it with a new building.
The new building was intended to combine commercial space on the ground floor with apartments on the upper floors. The shell of the building was constructed according to a design by builder Vilém Thierhier, but the city’s building department rejected his conventional facade design due to the building’s prominent location. Jan Kotěra, who had recently begun working as a professor of architecture at the School of Applied Arts in Prague, was asked to design the building’s final form. His facade design was approved on August 8, 1899. In addition to the facade and its components, such as the metal gates of the main entrance, Kotěra also designed at least part of the building’s interior furnishings and was apparently responsible for its overall artistic decoration as well. The building was officially approved for occupancy on May 2, 1900. That same year, Peterka founded the People’s Bank for Small Deposits and Loans, for which the ground-floor spaces were reserved, as evidenced by a photograph from 1901.
The building’s facade is clearly divided into two stories housing the bank’s offices and three residential stories. The commercial floors are distinguished by sandstone cladding, while the residential sections of the facade feature stucco decoration. The transition between these two parts of the facade is formed by a large stucco floral ornament surrounding the nameplates bearing the bank’s name. It was on the first floor, above this striking decoration, that the Peterkovs’ salon was located. The visual highlight of the facade lies in a similarly defined section along the central axis of the top floor, featuring relief sculptures of a man and a woman crafted from artificial stone. The distinction between these sections—featuring figural decoration and ornamentation—and the otherwise simplified, flat design of the façade was one of the many contributions of this project by Kotěra in Prague.
Given the prevailing practices of the time, when an academic architect was also responsible for a building’s artistic decoration, it is clear that Jan Kotěra played a significant role in shaping the artistic decoration of the Peterka House. On the other hand, Karel Novák and Josef Pekárek are usually cited as the creators of the sculptural decoration.
Jan Kotěra studied architecture in Vienna from 1894 to 1897 under Otto Wagner, a pioneer of Art Nouveau and Modernism. At that time, the Neo-Baroque style was gaining prominence in Prague, championed by Friedrich Ohmann, Kotěra’s predecessor as a professor of architecture at the Prague School of Applied Arts. Nevertheless, interest in Viennese Art Nouveau was growing there (an example of this is the Mánes Association of Fine Artists, whose members were enthusiastic about Kotěra’s arrival in Prague). During the second half of the 1890s, Kotěra designed buildings in Plzeň and Červený Hrádek and participated in competitions for the Živnostenská Banka building in Prague and the town hall in Kladno. It was not until 1898 that an exceptional opportunity arose with Ohmann’s departure from Prague to Vienna. Jan Kotěra secured the vacant position of head of the architecture department at the University of Applied Arts at the age of just 27. With his move from Vienna to Prague, he found himself in an environment dominated by architects who predominantly favored historicist styles. In Prague, initially only the SVU Mánes magazine *Volné směry* leaned toward modern architecture, and Kotěra was supported by his colleague at the UPŠ, the art historian and critic K. B. Mádl.
Jan Kotěra sought to make the most of his first commissions in Prague, and in the Peterka House he demonstrated the principles he espoused and soon afterward articulated in his essay *On the New Art*. Among other things, this involved a reevaluation of the historicist division of the facade and the articulation of its elements, and above all, a break with excessive historicist decoration. On the Peterka House, the architect emphasized the flatness of the façade and, in contrast, reserved spaces for ornamental and figurative decoration. This is already evident in the sketches of the façade. The final design specifies where this decoration is to be placed, and its form is also clearly defined here.
The details of the building’s decoration were left to the artists, which is significant given the growing recognition at the time of the importance of the execution of a work of art. As for the specific contributions of the two sculptors mentioned above, given their subsequent careers, it is likely that Pekárek was more involved in the sculptures on the facade of Peterka’s house, while Novák was primarily responsible for all the stucco decoration. Novák’s firm also later participated in significant projects by Kotěra.
The ground floor of Peterka’s house, designated for Lidová banka, is marked by sandstone cladding. Above the entrance to the house is a bronze sculpture of the Madonna and Child, set against a sandstone backdrop depicting a double-headed eagle with outspread wings—a variation on the original house emblem, “At the Black Eagle.” Jan Kotěra was the designer of this decorative element, though he expressly declined to be credited for other decorative features of the building.
Above the sandstone cladding, the facade features stucco ornamentation, consisting initially, in its side sections, of an interlacing pattern of pink stems and flowers. The sculptural decoration of the facade culminates in its central axis with the figures of a man and a woman. In Kotěra’s final design for the facade, we can see that the male figure has both hands on his hips. In the completed sculpture, however, his left hand is resting on a hammer. As for the female counterpart, a comparison with period photographs reveals the absence of an ornamental ribbon beneath the figure’s breasts, which previously extended significantly into the left window axis and which can also be seen in Kotěra’s original sketch.
The iconography of the central figure in the decoration of the Peterka House façade is also interesting. A man leans on a long hammer and gazes at a woman. She holds a wreath in her right hand and raises it toward a band of stylized roses. However, the pair and their attributes could hardly have been intended as a reference to the People’s Bank on the ground floor of the building, since in that case they would have had to take the established form of truly complementary allegories—which we will encounter later when examining the decoration of the bank’s own premises. On the contrary, the pair on the building’s facade is characterized by the fact that the woman is depicted here as an idealized being, while the man has been given a very realistic appearance of a man resting after work, as evidenced by his clothing (a work shirt).
The depiction of a real-life figure encountering a muse in the decoration of the Peterka House invites a comparison with Jan Preisler’s famous triptych *Spring*, commissioned shortly after the building’s completion specifically for the Peterkas’ apartment. This painting was, in fact, Preisler’s first painted triptych and became one of the manifestos of the emerging artistic generation. The similarity between the facade’s decoration and the concept of the main painting inside the house lies in the distinct nature of the figurative counterparts. In both Preisler’s work and Kotěra’s façade, a realistically depicted young man encounters a muse rather than a real woman, and the embodiment of harsh material reality is confronted with an ideal figure alluding to universal well-being, beauty, and a higher reality. This contrast, however, is applied in different artistic ways and has different effects in both works, of which Preisler’s *Spring* has already been thoroughly interpreted on multiple occasions. The encounter between the two figures in Preisler’s work refers to the innermost being of the human soul, to the clash between desire and the impossibility of its fulfillment, to the female alter ego of the scene’s protagonist, and so on. In contrast, on Kotěra’s façade, the pair of figures functions as a more generally understandable expression of harmony between earthly labor and the higher forces that patronize it, or even as a conventional symbol of a family residence.
In the case of Peterka’s house, we can assume—in accordance with the customs of the time—that the architect had both the right to choose and the responsibility for the artistic decoration. At the same time, thanks in part to the client’s fondness for contemporary art, the project was realized in a way that was still quite exceptional in Prague at the time. Jan Kotěra likely also deserves credit for securing the commission for Jan Preisler to create the triptych *Spring*, which became one of this painter’s seminal works. In addition, however, Kotěra had already employed individually modeled sculptural ornamentation on the facade of Peterka’s house, and he further introduced color into this aspect of the artistic work (now not only in the interior but also on the facade). Novák and Pekárek surpassed the standard set by their teacher Klouček precisely through their ability to adorn the exterior of a building with colored or polychrome stucco decoration.
Ultimately, the exceptional quality of this architecture is linked to the quality of its artistic decoration. This remained a defining ambition of Kotěra’s work even later on, in cases where he was given greater creative freedom by his clients. The Peterka House, as it was realized, marks the beginning of that phase of Jan Kotěra’s work that could not have been achieved without the substantial contribution of visual artists.
The stucco decoration in the representative interior spaces of Peterka House is also of very high quality. The vestibule and ground-floor hallways are adorned with a band of sunflowers with ribbons and female mascarons framed by ribbons. In the hallways on the upper floors, we find variations on stylized flowers, trees, and the like. On the facade of the landing in the ground-floor area reserved for the bank, in addition to decorative elements, there are two figural reliefs: a young man with the attributes of Mercury and a girl embracing a sheaf of grass. The symbolism here refers to Commerce and Abundance (or the Harvest). Given their stylistic similarity to the work produced by their teacher Klouček, these two reliefs could easily have been created by Novák and Pekárek. More artistically sophisticated and, at the same time, iconographically less unambiguous stucco decoration can be found in the former Peterka family salon. Set into the corners of this large room are four reliefs depicting the stages of a person’s—or a man’s—life. In the first relief, we see a young man standing next to an older man, perhaps his father. The second relief depicts the years of apprenticeship, during which the young man looks up in admiration at the buildings shown in the background. The third relief concerns the realization of the hero’s life’s work: here we see four young men in their prime working on a construction site. The fourth relief represents the end of life. Here, the protagonist of the scene is at the end of his strength, and the angel of death is leading him aside. The author of these reliefs was Stanislav Sucharda. This is evidenced primarily by the fact that he later reworked several of the scenes into small plaques and gave them individual titles. Given the uniqueness of such a cycle, it is likely that Jan Kotěra was behind its basic concept. It can also be assumed that it was Sucharda who recommended Novák and Pekárek to Kotěra as talented emerging sculptors. Finally, Sucharda’s contribution can be envisioned as follows: the sculptor sketched the designs for the individual reliefs for Kotěra, who then commissioned the Novák-Pekárek duo to execute them.