Joseph Tomanek

Joseph Tomanek was a Czech-American painter who spent his working life in Chicago. He is best known for highly finished paintings of the female nude in the academic tradition of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and above all for Nymphs Dancing to Pan's Flute, a moonlit bacchanal of nymphs dancing around a bonfire that circulates widely online, often under the name "Fire Dance."

Life

Tomanek was born on 16 April 1889 in Strážnice, in Moravia, then part of Austria-Hungary and now in the Czech Republic. He began his art training in Prague; sources describe this variously as the Academy of Fine Arts and a school of design. He emigrated to Chicago in 1910, and one account says he left partly to avoid three years of military service.

In Chicago he continued his studies at the School of the Art Institute, where his teachers included Albert Henry Krehbiel, Antonin Sterba and Karl Albert Buehr. He became part of the city's large Czech community and was associated with the Bohemian Arts Club of Chicago. He worked across fine and commercial art: dealers' biographies describe him as an interior designer and a painter of billboard advertisements, and he painted religious works for Chicago's Catholic churches as well as a mural for St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Forest Park, Illinois.

He exhibited from the 1910s to the 1940s, including at the Art Institute of Chicago. He died in Berwyn, Illinois, on 31 December 1974. His papers, dated 1918 to 1960, are held by the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art.

Style: Bouguereau in the Midwest

Tomanek openly modeled himself on Bouguereau, the French academic painter whose nymphs and bathers, with porcelain skin and invisible brushwork, were hugely popular with American collectors in the late 19th century. By the time Tomanek was working, that style was unfashionable in museums. Modernism had arrived, and the 1913 Armory Show had come to the Art Institute of Chicago. Tomanek kept painting in the older manner anyway, for a market that still wanted it.

His typical picture is a single nude or a small group of young women in a landscape: by a creek, on a beach, under autumn trees with scarves blowing. The flesh is smoothly modeled and lit, the setting softer and more loosely painted. He also made colorful floral still lifes and studio nudes. In 1933 he painted a close copy of Luke Fildes's 1891 painting The Doctor, which has sometimes been mistaken for the original.

Nymphs Dancing to Pan's Flute

His best-known picture shows a ring of nude nymphs dancing at night around a blazing fire while Pan, the goat-legged god of the wild, plays his pipes. The firelight does the work: it catches the dancers' bodies in warm orange and leaves the surrounding woods in blue-black darkness. The subject comes straight from the classical bacchanal, a favorite of Bouguereau and of 17th-century painters before him, but the strong single light source gives Tomanek's version a more theatrical feel.

The painting has been offered at auction through Christie's. Its date, size and current owner are not publicly recorded, and the alternative title "Fire Dance," under which it is often shared, does not appear in the documentary sources we found.

What does the Fire Dance painting mean?

Tomanek left no statement about it, so any reading rests on the tradition he borrowed. In classical myth the nymphs are spirits of nature and Pan is the god of shepherds, wild places and unrestrained music; dances around Pan stand for the pull of instinct and pleasure, outside the order of the city. Nineteenth-century academic painters used the theme as a respectable frame for the nude. Tomanek's firelit night adds a hint of ritual and danger, but the mood is celebratory rather than dark.

Legacy and where to see his work

Tomanek is a minor figure in American art history, but his work keeps finding admirers, partly through social media and partly through the revival of interest in academic painting. His work is held by the Vanderpoel Art Association in Chicago, and paintings regularly appear with dealers and at auction. For the tradition he followed, see our guides to academic art and Greek mythology in art, and Bouguereau's The Birth of Venus.