his genius, one has only to look at the fine portraits of Mesdames Václavík and Vendulák, the superb bust of his “Josephine,” whose enigmatic, sensual smile conjures up the fateful chain that linked her with the painter’s life, or the beautiful nude of his “Morning,” lovingly interpreted by a poet’s brush.
Mánes introduced into Czech art the sound tradition which his predecessors had not been strong enough to enforce upon their age. He thus endows the national art with. that “beauty of form” which France had received as a magnificent heritage at the hands of a David and an Ingres. Mánes’ line is firm, sweeping and expressive, his contours are supple, drawing is for him what it was for Ingres, the inner form itself, the modelling. Colour serves to set forth fully what the line has only hinted at. His colouring is rich and vivid, though still nothing more than a local tone, eminently plastic. Such a little picture as “The Red Parasol” is a sheer marvel, executed as it is with a sure and even daring hand, the work of a colourist who does not flinch from either the liveliest hues or the most delicately varied combinations. Mánes may thus be fairly styled a precursor of the new tendencies which reproduce Nature in her full optic brilliance. He was supported in this by his younger brother, Quido Mánes, a painter of less importance, it is true, but also a subtle observer and a colourist of distinction.
The deep significance of Josef Mánes in the evolution of Czech art lies in his profound insight into the soul of the people, his instinctive grasp of the type of art suitable for embodying the new ideas of his race and his nation. Happy in his artistic inspiration, he was far from happy in his life: it was one long series of struggles with a cramping environment of mediocre patronage for trivial work, with vexations of every kind, and finally with an incurable malady. In 1861, under Palacký’s aegis, he went to Russia with our “Moscow pilgrims,” but he, who had revealed Slovakia
