From Sydney to Bohemia: Unique toy collection donated to Chrudim museum
The Puppet Museum in Chrudim, East Bohemia, has received a remarkable gift: a collection of tin toys created over four decades by Czech stage designer and artist Jan Červenka. The priceless works travelled more than 31,000 kilometres from Sydney, spending 55 days at sea before arriving at their new home.
The collection includes hand-crafted boats, cars, train stations, and castles, all meticulously made from painted tin. It was donated to the museum by Pavel Sádek, who first met designer Jan Červenka in Australia, where the Czech emigrant offered him accommodation and support.
Through their friendship, Sádek came to see the full range of Červenka’s imagination. Over the years, the designer expanded his creations beyond everyday toys, venturing into ambitious designs such as masts, carousels, and even submarines.
“He had a precise idea of what a toy should look like, and how many functions it should have. When I once suggested making a copy of Verne’s submarine, he told me I must never create replicas—every piece had to be an original,” Sádek recalls.
Highly prized by collectors, Červenka’s works now appear in private collections around the world, though the word “toy” only partly captures their nature. Richard Matula Sieber of the Chrudim Puppet Museum explains:
“They are both art and toy. In truth, most aren’t really playable—except perhaps the automatons, which use gears and clockwork mechanisms to spin, sail, move, or play music. In many ways, they are toys for adults.”
The donation is extraordinary not only in scope but also in value. Smaller pieces are estimated at around 35 dollars, while the largest reach up to 15,000. In the museum’s fifty-year history, nothing of this kind or scale has ever been received.
For Sieber and his team, the challenge now lies in unpacking and cataloguing roughly 300 items carefully packed in crates.
“I don’t know of anything comparable from a single maker who devoted tens or even hundreds of hours to each piece—not just to their construction, but also to the technical drawings and the entire thought process. In both scope and quality, I am almost certain there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world,” he adds.
Pavel Sádek, who inherited the toys, says that by donating them he has fulfilled the creator’s final wish.
“I remember one evening, we were shuffling through the house—he was already struggling to walk—and he told me how much he wanted people to see what he had made. At the time, I had no idea how much there really was. I only realized after his death,” Sádek recalls.
The museum now plans to present Červenka’s extraordinary toys in a major exhibition to be prepared in the coming years.
