The earliest tomb mosaics from the production of Innsbruck-based companies in Bohemia and Moravia

Albert Neuhauser's mosaic company was founded in Wilten near Innsbruck in 1877. In 1900 it merged with an Innsbruck-based stained-glass company under the joint name Tiroler Glasmalerei- und Mosaikanstalt. The company still operates today, and within the premises of the historic factory, it also keeps original designs, mosaic cartoons (models for mosaics in the form of drawings, paintings etc.), albums with photographs of completed mosaics, and documents connected with contemporary commissions. Among them are numerous mosaic works that emerged in Bohemia and Moravia over the course of at least four decades starting in the 1880s. As well as monumental commissions (probably the best-known ones are the mosaic compositions installed on the facades of the department store U Nováků, the Municipal House, and the Land Bank in Prague), they include mainly smaller decorative work created for the interiors and exteriors of tombs or on tombstones. These not yet ascribed works have been discovered for the professional community only recently thanks to a complex topographic survey of mosaic works. Through a combination of field and archival research, this study sheds light not only on the context of the origin of these specific commissions but also on the ordering process and the system through which the mosaicists from Innsbruck cooperated with Czech stonemasons or architects.