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O genuine art can ever flourish without a tradition. Yet it was just this tradition that was lacking in the early stages of modern Czech art. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Bohemia, a country that during the two preceding centuries had witnessed a rich expansion, a superb efflorescence of the Baroque style, was artistically in a state of deplorable barrenness. About the year 1800, the very nadir had been reached. The output had practically ceased: there were no longer any masters, commissions, or offers. Art had sunk to the level of a provincial dilettantism. The stray survivors of the great age no longer had the energy to do better. All interest in the history of art had faded, and such production as there was had become mere journeyman-work. Under Joseph II, the ancient guilds of Prague painters—the oldest dating from 1348—were dissolved, the treasures of Bohemian art were belittled, dispersed, or even destroyed in the course of the secularisations decreed by an Emperor with a passion for reform. The scanty remnants of Rudolph II’s famous collections were disposed of by auction under conditions to which the whole history of art affords no parallel.

This state of things could not fail to produce a reaction, somewhat similar to that which brought about the renascence of the Czech language and literature. But while the revival of