Page:Modern and contemporary Czech art (1924).pdf/28

 to Czech art and had been the first to divine the Slav soul, arrived there in a state of serious brain-trouble. The collector, Lanna, his staunch friend, hoped to cure him by sending him to Italy, but his sister, herself a talented painter, found him there in a deplorable condition. Later, he was seen back in Prague, wandering through the streets in broad daylight with a lighted candle in his hand, haunted by an obsession of strange yellow roses. He was visiting all the gardeners in Prague to ask for these roses, he was looking for them even in the neighbouring Bohemian Forest. Finally he passed away in 1871.

Josef Mánes’ work, by the masterly divination of the Czech soul that it reveals, forms the noblest page in the history of our art, and Mánes himself will remain one of our most cherished and most hallowed glories.

Towards 1860, progress is evinced in every field of national activity. Josef Mánes had not sacrificed himself in vain; at last the time had come to open up a free pathway through the thorny hedge in which the creator of a national Czech art had been so painfully entangled. His example gave food for reflection. Furthermore, by substituting for the abstract idealism of Cornelius and Overbeck, so much in favour with the Prague Academy, his concrete Czech idealism, and by putting in place of idealistic composition a direct and loving observation of real life and Nature, Mánes had pointed for his successors the way to France rather than to Germany. Accordingly, they soon learnt to turn their steps towards the West. In 1848, when vague rumours of the new evolutions achieved by the art of Western countries were already abroad in Prague, the young artist Jaroslav Čermák betook himself to Antwerp. From there he went on to Brussels to study under Gallait, and as early as 1852 he took up his quarters in Paris. He spent the remainder of his life in the City of Light. From 1850, when he won his first success with his “Slovak