Page:Bohemia; a brief evaluation of Bohemia's contribution to civilization (1917).pdf/47

 race. The gentle Slovak song played upon the most beautiful strings of his big heart and charmed from his pen most precious art.

The history of Bohemia, its bright and dark sides, the great Hussite period, Aleš portrays through his illustrations as masterfully as Palacký did in his great history and Jirásek in his historical novels. And yet Aleš is not an historical artist in the full sense of the word. He never painted big and ostentatious historical canvases that would dazzle the eye. He illustrated great literary works, fictional and historical, and in his illustrations depicted the past of the Bohemian people in a direct and simple way, that gripped the heart.

There is not a child in the land of the Bohemians and the Slovaks that does not know Aleš. His sketches of children, soldiers, horses and cows, and the joys and other phases of child-life are the Bohemian child’s constant companions. No one in the whole world but Aleš could draw for the Bohemian child horses and soldiers and the joy of life and youth.

Another wonderful Bohemian artist is Hanuš Schwaiger. He is of Dutch descent on his mother’s side and his works show a harmonious blending of both the Bohemian and Dutch blood.

Southern Bohemia is a land of dreamy ponds and swampy meadows. Folk-lore has woven about them magnificent tales and legends about the water-kings and other mysterious beings of the woods, mountains and waters. This fairy world Schwaiger depicted. He depicted it with such brilliant imagination, with so great an understanding of the soul of the common folk, that one cannot help being transported into the charmed atmosphere which rises before his eyes like an enchanted, distant, strange and yet as if a real world.

Schwaiger studied nature even in the land of his Dutch ancestors, bringing into Bohemia a bountiful, artistic harvest: old fish markets, the life at Dutch ports, landscapes in which the clouds hang low, in short, that atmosphere which gave birth to the old Dutch masters. The influence of his sojourn in Holland was shown in his work immediately on his return to Bohemia. Schwaiger