There were many of these pilgrims, indeed, whose moderate talent could not sustain their early promise, and who, as if dazzled by all they saw, came back to sink into the quicksands of mediocrity. Some of them, on the other hand, are to-day in high favour. Such is the case with [[Author:Karel Purkyně|], son of the eminent Czech physiologist. Starting with genre pictures of the type that was in fashion about the middle of the century, he became in the end, after hard study in Paris, a realist in the French sense of the word. A restless and roving spirit, he left Munich for Paris, where he studied the older masters, regardless of his father’s advice that he should become a pupil of Couture’s. His apprenticeship was, above all, concerned with colour. Hence he used colour lavishly, and succeeded in obtaining from it some rather audacious harmonies, which, on his return to Prague, baffled the critics and led them to tax him with coarseness. Gradually he gave up exhibiting, and came to work for his private satisfaction only, keeping faithfully to that original and slightly barbaric style of his, always laying chief stress on colour. Thus he has left a few portraits and still life studies, all in direct contact with reality and distinguished above all by good brushwork. He died at the age of thirty-five, never understood by his contemporaries and entirely forgotten by the succeeding generation, to receive due recognition only from the younger men of to-day, who hail him as one of their forerunners.
Two other fervent devotees of French realism whose work met with no immediate response, were Soběslav Pinkas and Victor Barvitius. The former went to Paris in 1854 and settled for a considerable time in France, not leaving that country till 1865. He studied industriously under Couture, and was a member of the artists’ colony at Marlotte, in the Forest of Fontainebleau presided over by Henri Murger. He took up his residence at Cernay-la-Ville in Champagne—the lady whom he married
