Matija Jama is one of four Slovenian impressionists of which he was the greatest traveller – for some time he painted in German, Austrian and Dutch villages. He was educated in Zagreb and Munich at the painting school of Simon Hollósy, and later on the prompting of Rihard Jakopič he joined the Ažbe studio.
Among experts, Matija Jama is prized for his studies of perception of his surroundings, which places him among the main proponents of classic modernist principles in Slovenia. When he settled down in Ljubljana after 1924, he often went off to paint in Bled, Volčji Potok and then Bela Krajina. He is therefore known in the public for his numerous cityscapes and landscapes of those locations and his native Ljubljana, and his better known paintings include Vrbe (Willows) and Kolo (Ring of Dancers). At the beginning of the 20th century, he dabbled in the newly emerging art form, photography, which he used as a tool in his painting and which then occupied an important place in his art.
Matija Jama’s work is today part of the permanent collections in Slovenian museums, especially the National Gallery and Museum of Modern Art, and they represent an indispensable chapter in overviews of art history in Slovenia. Together with Rihard Jakopič, Ivan Grohar and Matej Sternen, he represented the beginning of modernism in Slovenian art, and along with literary figures such as Ivan Cankar and Oton Župančič, he helped guide Slovenian art to a new and now internationally recognised level.
