Josef Navrátil worked exclusively from sketches, painting the final works only in his studio. He combined realistic landscape elements into an artificial, idealized, yet immensely vivid, striking, and convincing natural setting. His works reveal a remarkable capacity for observation; he traveled frequently and constantly reworked and paraphrased his travel memories with great charm. He most often created scenes featuring sailing ships in the 1940s, drawing in a distinctive way on the decorative and coloristic tradition of the 18th century, as represented in our country by Norbert Grund.