The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 2/Fine Arts in Bohemia (5)

by Jaroslav Egon Salaba-Vojan

Fine Arts in Bohemia.

By Dr. J. E. S. Vojan.

 

(Continued)

 

Toward the end of the forties, when Josef Mánes was laying the foundations for the modern Bohemian decorative arts, a man of talent appeared at the Prague Academy who, if not a pioneer, was at any rate a strong progressive spirit. His name was Jaroslav Čermák.

Čermák was born in Prague on August 7, 1831, and grew up in a strongly nationalistic atmosphere. His father was a physician, and Jaroslav’s brother John followed the same profession. John became an assistant at the Prague University of the famous scholar Professor Purkyně, and later was himself professor of physiology at various universities earning fame by important scientific discoveries. His mother’s maiden name was Veselá of Molitor’s man or near Kouřim, where the Bohemian patriots of those days were frequently guests. Jaroslav showed a talent for painting very early and so was sent in 1847 to the Prague Academy. He did not stay there long, but proceeded to foreign countries. Instead of going to Italy, as every budding artist did, he went to Belgium, for there Louis Gallait and others brought once more into great repute the art of the Netherlands. Čermák became a student at the Antwerp Academy and made such an impression by his talent and especially by his zeal on the master that Gallait broke his rule and took him for personal pupil. Čermák rapidly acquired the characteristics of his master’s art so completely that Gallait confided to him the execution of substantial parts of his paintings. But the student soon realized the weak points of the master, and when he settled permanently in Paris in 1852, he sought diligently to cure himself of various mannerisms of the Belgian school.

The young spark who had learned at home to move in society with assurance and grace made himself at home in Paris very soon. He had his box in the Grand Opera, went through a duel as champion of Richard Wagner, whose “Tannhauser” was then to be sung in Paris, dined with the author of “La Vie de Boheme”, Henry Murger, smuggled Victor Hugo’s writings from Jersey to Paris, shot gulls on the coast of Normandy, and painted now at Paris, now among the rocks of Bretagne. He was a muscular young fellow of sparkling eyes and dark locks, slightly limping as a result of a painful disease with which he had been afflicted when he was sixteen. Naturally he was popular in Paris. But strange to say, his entire Paris period, 1852 to 1860, was devoted to painting scenes from the past of Bohemia. For the annual publication of the Union of Decorative Artists he painted “The Bohemian Mission in Basle”, portraying the spiritual leaders of medieval Europe as they looked with mixed feelings at Procopius the Great, Rokycana and the other Hussites who had made all Europe tremble. He also engraved “Přemysl Otokar II. before the Battle on Moravian Field”, “Žižka and Procopius reading the Scriptures on War Chariot”, “The Taborites Defending Sunken Road”, “Šimon of Lomnice begging on the Prague Bridge”, and “Counter-Reformation”, a painting that received the great golden medal in Brussels in 1854. But suddenly new interests, a new enthusiasm captured him, the Slavic South.

From the year 1860 on Čermák frequently made trips with Mrs. Gallait and her two little daughters into southern Dalmatia. In Ragusa Čermák had a friend, Meda Pučič, a Croatian author, and through him Čermák came into touch with the borderland of the heroic Montenegro. From Mandalina south of Ragusa, where Čermák established a home for the Gallaits and for himself, he made short trips into the mountains, causing himself to be suspected for a dangerous Pan-Slav agitator. What he saw there gave rise to a whole series of paintings, a veritable apotheosis of the Slavic South. But though Čermák was overflowing with enthusiasm, he had a strong feeling for truth and reality, and so his heroic visions do not lose contact with facts. As Mánes created an idealized Czech type, Čermák created his own South Slav ideal of beauty, and everyone who has seen his “Herzegovinian Girls with Horses at the Spring”, “Montenegrin Girl”, “War Booty” (sue girls guarded by two Albanians) , or “Blind Bard and Daughter”, will never forget these wonderful beauties. Even though the girl from Herzegovina is not to be found in all province, though the girl is a princess and her horse a wonderful Arabian, the like of which can only be seen in the Sultan’s stables, the whole vision has such a charming Slav type and strong individuality that it makes a permanent impression. Others of Čermák’s fine paintings are “Wounded Montenegrin” (now in the Zagreb Academy) and “Rape of Herzegovinian Woman”, exhibited in Paris in 1861 and honored by the golden medal at Rouen, as well as other great paintings which brought to Čermák distinguished honors—in 1862 the Belgian cross of Leopold and in 1873 the French Legion of Honor. At home, too, his work began to be appreciated, and the Artists’ Club published his works in fine reproductions. Then Čermák returned once more to Bohemian history and in 1875 he painted “Procopius the Great before Naumburg”, but shortly after he died of a pulmonary complaint, April 23, 1872. His remains were transported to Prague and buried with great ceremony on the Olšany Cemetery under a splendid monument. The house on Bethlehem Square, where he was born, bears a memorial tablet by the sculptor Joseph Mauder: Genius holding laurels in the left hand and writing with the other hand Čermák’s name.

Čermák by his removal to Paris tore up the bonds that had up to that time fettered the art of the Czechs. If it be true that up to the fifties the cultivation of arts in Bohemia was far from flourishing in originality, the explanation is found in this that at the beginning of the 19th century Bohemian art found itself under the tutelage of the contemporaneous German art, dry and tasteless, narrow-minded and doctrinaire. We may study the works of men, such as were the first directors of the Prague Academy, Bergler, Waldherr and Ruben, as we would study a historical curiosity, but we cannot admire them as works of art. The bourgeois art produced various historical disasters, battles, solemn entrances, flights, kidnappings, murders, etc., poorly painted and more than mediocre from the viewpoint of invention and composition. This dry desert was freshened up around the year 1840 by the French names of Delacroix, Gallait and others; they heralded freedom from stereotyped production of “pretty groups” and brought instead the assertion of artistic individuality and victory of color. Of course in those days Belgium was farther away from Prague than it is now from Russia. But now and then an artist had enough initiative to go as far as Paris. After Hellich, who made merely occasional brief trips to Paris, it was especially Karel Javůrek (1815–1908) who studied first at Antwerp and then spent a year in Paris under Couture and who, though later he did become a conservative, as he grew old, nevertheless is entitled to be called a pioneer, because his paintings really have color and are not mere colored drawings. Another pupil of Couture was Soběslav Pinkas (1827–1901) whose works were exhibited in the Paris salons in the sixties and many were purchased by Americans; some of his Fayence dishes were bought by the French government for the Limoges museum. When he returned home, he ceased creating, and Prague knew him principally as a professor of drawing and a publicist. In 1886 he founded the Prague Alliance Francaise for the purpose of spreading the knowledge of French language, literature and art.

Václav Brožík (1851–1901) spent quite a number of years in Paris, from 1876 to 1893. From Paris his fame spread through out the world, and among Bohemian artists he alone enjoys the distinction of having his painting reproduced on American postage stamps, for the “Columbian issue” of 1893 of the five-cent stamp reproduces his “Columbus at the Court of Isabella”, a painting now in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art as gift of Morris K. Jessup. Brožík’s most popular work is “Master Jan Hus before the Council of Constance”, known to every Bohemian. The original was painted in 1883 and together with Brožík’s “George of Poděbrady Elected King of Bohemia” now decorates the council room of the Prague Town Hall. In 1867 this great master was apprentice in a chinaware factory at Smíchov, a suburb of Prague. The following year the brewer Paul Vňouček or Mňouček, a zealous Bohemian patriot of the days of 1848, sent him to the Prague Painters’ Academy. From there Brožík went to Dresden, then to Munich to Piloty and finally he settled in Paris. His first success was won in 1878, when he exhibited in the Paris salon a great historical painting “Embassy of King Ladislav asking French King Charles VII for His Daughter’s Hand”. Of his other principal works we must mention “Defenestration”, the historical act of 1618, when the Bohemian estates by throwing the emperor’s lieutenants out of the windows of the Prague castle gave the signal for the opening of the thirty years’ war; further “Tu Felix Austria Nube”, a painting ordered by Francis Joseph in 1897 and for which he was ennobled. Outside of his historical groups noteworthy also are some of his country scenes from Normandy.

The chief excellence of Brožík’s paintings consists in the richness and color. His pictures are brilliant, virile and powerfully carried out, and no critic will find fault with his judgment of the color scale. His weak points are partly technical; he always tried to have the light come from a single source, manipulating the scene accordingly, and violated the background perspective by crowding the figures close together, even where it was not necessary. A graver charge is that all his historical painting is too theatrical. Bro59k, like Piloty, Munkacsy and others, handled his figures on the same principle that makes second-rate actors believe that they must always be facing the audience. Many figures, like the chorus or the mob of the stage, are there only to fill up the space, even though they may take no interest in the historical event. And finally the painting only succeeds to portray a picturesque event, but does not suggest at the same time the connection with the past and the future, in other words the causes and effects of the particular great moment. For that one must be more than a brilliant painter, one ought to be also a strong and deep psychologist. This is something that Mucha is attempting now in his gigantic historical pictures which will be twenty in number and are intended to bring out the great epochs in the evolution of the Slav race.