Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/29

 portant part in the lifework of Mánes. But woman is the red strand in Mánes’ creation.

Mánes is the first Bohemian painter of woman. The center of his art is the bewitching belle, of healthy charms and full lines. To her he dedicates ever new and fervent hymns. A little picture “Kiss” from 1851 will serve as an illustration. Young rococo love and two pairs of hungry lips met here in a kiss. But how ardently is painted this moment of burning passion, how splendidly are drawn the two heads whose intoxication we feel, though we do not see their eyes and faces.

The art of Mánes can be appreciated only now, when sufficient time has elapsed to see him in all his greatness. His contemporaries did not realize what Bohemia had in this man of genius, and this lack of understanding aggravated the melancholy the causes of which were to be found in family troubles. When Mánes took part in the pilgrimage to Moscow in 1867, signs were already manifest of a serious nervous disorder. The disease grew rapidly worse, a trip to Italy brought no improvement, and Mánes breathed his last in the darkness of mental disease on October 9, 1871.

In many respects the heir of Mánes was Aleš; nadand [sic] so we shall interrupt for the time being the historical current of our story and will discuss this artist, whose work, next to Mánes, was most characteritically Czech.

Mikoláš Aleš was born November 18, 1852 in Mirotice. When he came to Písek in 1862 to follow his two elder brothers to school, his uncle, Thomas Famfule, who had charge of the three little students, little thought that the youngest would learn the most from his uncle for his future career. Uncle Thomas was compelled in 1812 to put on the “white coat” and was placed among the chevau-legers (light cavalry) of Vincent’s regiment. He saw service in France, Poland, Italy, and only in 1830 he came back to Mirotice. Famfule was the original of “Salakvarda Baltazar Uždán” in Jirásek’s historical story “Skaláci”. When the old soldier related his experiences to the boys about his white horse and his successor the black horse with whom the soldier parted so reluctantly that he almost decided to remain in the army, when uncle sang with them folk songs of Bohemia, the soul of young Aleš received indelible impressions, so that we do not wonder, why the drawings of Aleš abound with rearing horses, such as few artists can create, and why Aleš became the incomparable illustrator of Czech folk song.

Aleš came to the painters’ academy of Prague a born master of pen, as the director, John Swerts, a Belgian, found out very soon. He told him once: “You may become a great artist, for you possess in great measure the things that cannot be taught.” Aleš remained in the academy until 1875. That he possessed a hard, South Bohemian head he proved at the riot caused by professor Alfred von Woltmann. This German historian of art came in 1874 to the Prague University, at that time still wholly German, and lectured also at the painters’ academy. When he went so far as to declare that all decorative art in Bohemia was of German origin and that there were no monuments of art either in Prague or elsewhere in Bohemia that could not be traced to German sources, he caused great riots in the university, and in the academy he was thrown bodily out of his lecture room. Aleš took a prominent part in the proceedings and spent a few days in the cells of the Prague police headquarters.

The first drawings of Aleš were published in November, 1872, in the humorous weekly “Paleček”, then edited by Dr. Josef Štolba. His first pay of two florins (about 80 cents) was a great event to Aleš. But the superstitoussuperstitious [sic] might say that it was but an omen of the beggarly rewards which the great artist was to reap for years, until at the age of fifty things became better.

The year 1879 was memorable in the life of Aleš. For the decoration of the National Theater in Prague Aleš offered sketches of twelve lunettes and four great wall pictures for the foyer. Among many competitors he won out. The lunette cycle “Vlasť” (Motherland) is one of the culminating points of the lifework of Aleš and together with Smetana’s cycle of symphonic poems “Má Vlasť” (My Motherland) constitutes one of the most splendid expressions of Bohemian art of the 19th century. Truly says Jirásek: “It is an epic of deep feeling, a gripping song of our motherland; it holds in itself divine dreams and gives out the charm of mythical twilight like the song of Radovan in Smetana’s “Libuše”. A heroic young man brought up on the stories and tales of his people, rides through the Bohemian lands; in the Ore Mountains he has a sword forged, in the Trutnov country as Trut he fights the dragon of Teutonism, in the Krkonoše Mountians he is healed of his wound by herbs of strange virtue, in the