Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/117

 ing that a rare landscape artist was hidden in his soul. The modern French school of landscape painting opened his eyes. After the classical period which had filled imaginary vistas with antique temples and chapels bordered by beautiful trees right and left and hills and groves rolling in the background, and after the period of new romanticism which again demanded castles and ruins and picturesqueness of scenes came the modern masters who smashed tradition and fashion and forbad the painting of immaginary landscapes. They declared that a painter should put down on canvass the real scene, as he sees it through his own eyes and his individual temperament, that a painter should infuse his soul and his feelings into his immediate concepts. Thus impression becomes the main thing and a landscape must be expressed by fluttering tones.

Since 1880 when his first paintings “A scene on the Elbe” and “An evening in the neighborhood of Barbizon” received merited success in the Paris Salons, Chittussi devoted himself exclusively to landscapes and created a number of splendid paintings, based partly on what he had seen in France and partly in Bohemia. Veiled harmonies of forest and sweet melancholy of great silences of fields and meadows together with dreamy pools are the kingdom of his poems in paint. In France he makes us see the delightful coquetry of the banks of the Seine and Oise, the mystery of the forest of Fontainebleau, the bitter roughness of Bretagne; in Bohemia he looks upon the central Bohemian plains, he depicts the banks of the Elbe and the ponds of Southern Bohemia all in a clear sonorous and natural diction, accessible to every heart open to sincere feelings. In 1891 this first modern landscape painter died at Vinohrady, a suburb of Prague.

Vojtěch Hynais was born in Vienna December 14, 1853. While at the Vienna Academy he became the favorite pupil of Anselm F. Feuerbach, the first really modern Austrian artist. In 1874 he received the Rome fellowship and after he came back was granted the State traveling stipendium. That enabled him to live in Paris for a number of years. Of French masters Baudry had the greatest influence upon him by his decorative talent. Hynais is the delicate poet of the sweet beauty of the female body, and only Max Švabinský of the later artists, can equal him. Of his main works one must mention the curtain of the National Theatre in Prague and panels along the marble stairway leading to the royal section in the National Theatre (Apotheosis of the lands of the Bohemian Crown, Peace, History and Idylls) and in the blue boudoir of the royal box (Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter), and paintings in the Court Theatre in Vienna.

In 1893 he became together with Brožík professor at the Prague Academy of Painting. His beautiful picture “The judgment of Paris” called forth a stormy criticism from the Prague clericals, just as recently Polášek’s “Sower” stirred up the false shame of Chicago’s hypocrites.

Luděk Marold commenced his brief life of 33 years on the 7th day of August, 1865, in Prague. The following year his father, a major in the army, fell in war with Prussia and his mother with an aunt undertook to bring up the boy, who since his earliest childhood had kept on drawing. At the age of 15 he was enrolled in the Academy of Painting. In 1887 he came back to Prague from Munich and the following year he created a sensation by his picture “From the Egg Market”. It is now in the Rudolfinum Gallery. I may say that I was born in this very street and have lived in this characteristic corner of old Prague before the street was demolished by the erection of the City Market; I can state that the painting is an excellent representation of the real scene. Incidentally, this was the first perfect picture of Prague streets, clear and with the right atmosphere. Even then Marold was making ready to go to Paris, where the fairy blossom of his talent burst open and gave out an intoxicating perfume. Now with a feverish activity his hand produced thousands of those delicious drawings, aquarelles, gouachos, etc., that filled the Paris newspapers and illustrated weeklies, novels and short stories, the Munich “Fliegende Blaetter” and the Prague “Zlatá Praha” (Golden Prague) and various other books. Paris cheered him, being bewitched that he, a foreigner, should so bring out the charm of the Parisienne.

Mádl well says: “Marold became the artistic reporter of elegance, charm, coquetry, attractiveness and chic of the daughters of the French metropolis; he was their devoted page, and his eyes thirstily drank in their lines, stroked their soft hair, slender waists, small feet; his ear caught the least rustlings of their silks, every exciting sound of their satin slippers. With these he filled his drawings and aquarelles. In them he de-