Page:Bohemia; a brief evaluation of Bohemia's contribution to civilization (1917).pdf/42

 This national ornamental art, this folklore of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakland, remained forever our pride as well as the mainspring of pure Bohemian Art for all times to come.

When after the fall of the Bohemian Kingdom during the XVII Century the Bohemian intellectuals scattered into all corners of the earth it was the good fortune for the people to live in the heart of the Bohemian Lands as if forgotten and unheeded as to their culture. Deprived of their faith, they were not deprived of their national spirit.

In the art of the common people, in the folk song, and in cherished tradition lived the national spirit gagged and bound, waiting for the moment when the savior would free it from the mediaeval dungeon in which it was chained so cruelly and long.

Then came the French Revolution and humanitarian philosophy which freed the man and nations. Our nation began to live spiritually. Then was the Bohemian Art born. Its beginning was necessarily simple, nor was there anything characteristically Bohemian in it. The Arts Academy of Prague was directed by the Germans in a soulless formalism, without devotion, without enthusiasm. It was more a trade than an art they taught. Religious painting was ossified in commercial religious pictures; landscapes which came from the brushes of painters of those days were not the fruit of the study of nature, but of lifeless phantasy and mechanical theory of combination of colors; historical pictures were hardly more than products of indifferent imagination without regard to the era, costume and local historical color.

At this time, after the first artistic attempts of Jaroslav Čermák and some other painters of Bohemian blood, who began to feel for the real, throbbing Bohemian Art, a man appeared in Bohemia, whose name meant a total revolution in Bohemian Art. This man was Josef Manes, a great student of life and an artist of wonderful qualifications. Like the majority of great men, he, too, was misunderstood in his time, when he preached, with his brush, a return to the people, to life, to nature, and to the human heart. He was a great lyric artist, loving the strong, manly peasant types of his race, sketching and