Page:Bohemia; a brief evaluation of Bohemia's contribution to civilization (1917).pdf/43

 painting them in rythmic lines in their peasant life, in their songs and their sorrows. Especially did he love the child, and his most valuable works are his studies of children. And this it was that made Manes great, his pictures spoke Bohemian language and breathed Bohemian spirit. He found the soul of his nation and sang all its beauty with his brush. His children were truly Slavic children, his peasants were true Bohemian men and his maidens were true Bohemian maidens. They were not Bohemian because Manes clothed them in a Bohemian costume, or in a picturesque Slovak garb, but because they expressed the inner Bohemian or Slovak life and soul, as Manes only knew how to paint them with his brush. Manes studied his people. He lived with them and among them and learned to love them, their customs, their habits, songs, desires, joys and sorrows. And this real and life-loving folk he painted, not any imaginary type. His youths were real Bohemian boys from a certain village or district, its noblest types. Manes’ little children breathed with the music and the joy of childlife—each line spoke as the very youth itself.

The most distinguished work of Manes is a cyclus of paintings, “The Life on a Lord’s Estate”. Perhaps the most important and the greatest work of his life is his world famous “Horologe”, which consists of twelve brilliant illustrations, the inspiration for which he found in the joyous and honest life of our Bohemian peasant folk and with which he helped to adorn so beautifully the historical court house of Prague. In the year of 1871, with Josef Manes was buried in the ancient cemetery at Prague in Vysehrad, the father of modern Bohemian art.

What Manes accomplished in “genre” pictures and figural drawings, Antonín Chittusi, another eminent artist, attained in landscape painting. He was a pupil of the Parisian school, where he learned to paint from nature itself. Up to that time Bohemia had been the home of landscape and romanticism, where the artists had painted and drawn landscape according to their wild fancy, without regard to truth. They were impossible scenes under impossible conditions, untrue and lifeless, wherein nature was misrepresented in fantastic colors. At this time