Life story
Josef Lada was born in 1887 in Hrusice as the youngest of five children of a village shoemaker. He completed primary school in 1901, and at thirteen his parents sent him to Prague to apprentice as a painter of interiors. His first drawing was published in 1904, when he was sixteen.
In 1906, on his second attempt, he was admitted to the School of Arts and Crafts, and in 1909 he became editor of the newly founded magazine Karikatury. It was precisely in this magazine that Jaroslav Hašek published his first short story about the good soldier Švejk in 1911. When Hašek returned from the war, he asked Lada to illustrate the book covers—and his Švejk became the Švejk that everyone imagines.
In 1926 the Mánes society organized his first solo exhibition; by then he was an acknowledged artist. He wrote and illustrated books for children—in 1933 came the adventures of the tomcat Mikeš, in 1937 O chytré kmotře lišce. In 1942 he published his autobiography Kroniky mého života.
He died in December 1957, just as a major exhibition was being prepared for his seventieth birthday, which he did not live to see. He is buried in Olšanské cemetery.
Portrait: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
Constellation of Life
Important milestones that shaped their journey.