Page:Bohemia; a brief evaluation of Bohemia's contribution to civilization (1917).pdf/51

 spirit of the Bohemian Brethren. The title page on his work “Thoughts on the Catechism” beautifully expresses the idea which was the foundation for this excellent contribution to art: a man hides behind the mask of Christ. He thus characterizes the pseudo-Christian Society of today against which he directed his art.

The limited space of this study precludes even mentioning a whole list of celebrated names. Rudolf Bém, the delicate Victor Stretti, the poet of the sea Beneš Knüpfer; the genius in decorative art, who awakened the sincere interest of France and the United States, Alfons Mucha, and a whole list of other young artists, whose lines are being thinned by death on the battlefields where Austria is driving them with other great men of the Bohemian nation all these constituted the hopeful army, which promised its nation a brilliant future in art.

One of the artists, now deceased, whose name blazed its way through France into the world was Luděk Marold. The wonderful facility with which he created his exquisite interpretation of modern Paris with all the elegance of its beautiful women, opened for him the way to the world of art. He wrote his name indelibly on the hearts of his own countrymen by his pictorial panorama of the great national tragedy “The Battle of Lipany” where national Hussite democracy was crushed by the combined reactionary forces, foreign and native.

The Bohemian landscape, its refined beauty, is the contribution of the brush of Antonín Hudeček. Sweet, subdued shadows and lights of lonely brooks in the woods, the flocks slowly returning home from their pastures, the open country in the sun and in the storm: those are the subjects he glories in.

The greatest landscape painter without a doubt was Antonín Slavíček. However, just at the time when he was about to blossom into an artist such as Bohemia perhaps never had before, he was torn from our midst by sudden death. There was nothing in Nature on which he would not try his talents. The entrancing beauty of Prague was never depicted with such deep appreciation as when he painted it. The majestic Gothic of the Cathedral of St. Vitus he comprehended not only by his eyes but by