while in France was a native of that province—and lived there at the house of his friend, the landscape-painter, Français. He was a genre and animal painter, and exhibited several times at the Salon. The few big pictures that he executed, representing animals, were sold in America. His picture, “Death and the Old Man” was rejected by the Academy as being too realistic, and was hung in the glorious “Salon of the Rejected.” He also went in for painting on china, and some of his majolicas were purchased by the Limoges Museum. After his return to Prague he remained loyal to realism as it was then understood in France.[1]—The other Prague representative of French realism, Victor Barvitius, brought from Paris a whole series of genre pictures, in which fashionable life under the Second Empire is portrayed in a manner somewhat like that of Guys; and popular scenes with workmen, horse-copers and percheron draught-horses, in the robust style and soft colouring of Millet. These two artists, however, produced so little that they exerted no influence on the development of Czech art, although they might well have contributed in no small measure to its progress.
Nevertheless the more official Parisian art was not without its attraction for many a Czech artist. It drew to France in his youth Václav Brožík, who, while still a pupil of the Prague Academy, had taken a vow, before the dazzling canvases of the Pole Matejko, to become a historical painter. Eager to acquire training, he went from Prague to Dresden, from Dresden to Munich, where he studied under Piloty, and from there to Paris. In Paris he painted a huge canvas, “Ambassadors from Ladislav,
- ↑ A man of no mean lit ability, he was for thirty years a correspondent of the great French newspapers, and all his influence to smooth the way for Rieger’s interview with Napoleon III. On his return to Prague, he inaugurated the Alliance Française and was for sixteen years its President. In 1870 he wanted to enlist in the army of his beloved France, but was compelled to abandon the project. At any rate, during France’s darkest hour, he kept open house for escaped prisoners. He brought Gambetta’s envoy, Emile Picot of the Institut, into touch with Palacký and Rieger, and the result of this interview was the famous manifesto of the Czech deputies. He was a knight of the Legion of Honour.
