Page:Modern and contemporary Czech art (1924).pdf/65



ODERN Czech sculpture had even more difficulty in coming to birth than modern Czech painting. During the first half of the nineteenth century there was no monumental statuary of any kind either in Prague or in the provinces, and the craft of stone-carving was only kept up here and there in a very limited measure.

There is nothing that characterises the weakening of plastic perception more clearly than the works of Václav Prachner. The sole representative of Empire sculpture in Bohemia, Prachner does not create, but is content to reproduce the frigid forms of Bergler’s designs. Here the sculptor is merely the interpreter of a piece of drawing, the faithful exponent of the artist’s conception. Yet his works testify that this dependence had not been forced upon him. They are only of interest in as far as they represent the design. Memorial stones occupied the first place in his works; they remain the sole manifestation of plastic art in Bohemia during the first half of the century. Towards 1850 the imperfection of sculptural art became evident; the more important work was entrusted to foreigners.

It is significant of the age that a patron of art who wished to commemorate the glorious past of Bohemia by a monumental edifice after the pattern of the Walhalla at Regensburg, was obliged to order at Munich, from Schwanthaler’s studio, the sculptural