Page:Modern and contemporary Czech art (1924).pdf/35

 was the open country, and he painted it in every phase of the different seasons and times of day. He faithfully reproduced local colour, but his great ambition was to seize the colour-scheme as a whole, in the subtle combination made up by light and atmosphere. His early landscapes were still formal in composition, but soon he introduced into his pictures any chance fragment of Nature, being convinced that only a powerful personality, an original genius, would give it expressiveness and permanent value. Gradually he brightened his palette, and forced even the dull tints to yield freshness and brilliance. His sojourn in Paris was marked by a feverish activity. In 1882, he exhibited at the Salon “Le Quai de la Conférence” and in 1883 “On the Czecho-Moravian Tableland.” He returned to Bohemia for good in 1885, and devoted the six remaining years of his allotted span to studying the Czech country, its cities and its smaller towns, not even flinching from the great problem of a general view of Prague. But he was not very successful in these attempts to capture the old-world beauty of the capital, for his temperament was never really at home amid the haunts of men. In his numerous paintings he reproduced nearly every feature of Czechoslovak scenery. He revealed to us the beauty of our land, and at the same time taught us to revere each individual landscape as a portion of universal Nature. Later on, Chittussi’s example had a profound and salutary influence on Czech landscape painters. The generation now at work has achieved admirable results on the lines laid down by this artist.

Another powerful influence on the present generation of landscape painters was that of Julius Mařák, who acted as teacher to nearly all these artists at the Prague Academy. Although moulded by Vienna and Munich, Mařák enlisted under Chittussi’s banner. Like Chittussi, he aimed at seizing the very soul of a landscape according to the variations of time and light. Endowed