Page:Modern and contemporary Czech art (1924).pdf/24

 interested in the play of light and in differences of atmosphere, andalthough his courage often failed him where he had to pass from the preliminary draught to the final canvas, Antonín Mánes relieved with a momentary radiance the depressing gloom that shrouds the first half of the nineteenth century.

The painter, Josef Navrátil, through his origins and his temperament alike, belongs to this period and this tradition, although his creative work did not reach full maturity until after 1848. He too was at heart a passionate realist with a preference for the informal and unconventional, and it was only circumstances that compelled him to paint great mural decorations with historical subjects in accordance with the rules of academic Romanticism. But even here, where other artists of his day were content to produce frigid and pretentious cartoons, purely mechanical in workmanship, he succeeded in conveying touches of poetry and picturesque charm, uniting Baroque sumptuousness with Romantic inspiration. There was a regular craze to possess his innumerable little landscapes of a somewhat laboured prettiness, but the works of this born painter (done in gouache) that find most favour to-day are his recently discovered sketches in oils, fresh studies of real life, the spontaneous fruit of direct observation, racy impressions of the picturesque in common things, seized with a bold, alert and vigorous brush. Without founding a school, Josef Navrátil, together with Antonín Mánes, paved the way for modern landscape painting in Bohemia.

A third painter completes this group: the portraitist Antonín Machek. He too has in him an element of realism, and in his portraits of solid citizens and their wives keeps close to reality, never flattering his subjects; but he also shows a trace of that stiffness and frigidity that characterised the art of the first half of the century. His faces, however, are well studied and his heads are modelled with vigour.