Mária Medvecká

The painter of Orava and its people — and the designer of the ten-crown banknote with which Czechoslovakia paid in 1961 – 1988. She came from the gentry family of Medvecký of Medvedzie; after her school-leaving exams in Košice she graduated from the Pedagogical Academy in Bratislava, taught in upper Orava from 1935, and in 1945 – 1946 studied with her husband, the painter Ctibor Belan, at the academies in Vienna and Prague. In 1949 she returned to Orava for good.

Her realist-impressionist pictures of Orava villages, women in folk costume and work in the fields were joined from the 1950s by the committed themes of industrialisation. In 1974 she was named National Artist; a selection from her life's work has been on view since 1979 in the Mária Medvecká Gallery in Medvedzie, administered by the Orava Gallery.