he has observed the unaffected poses and gestures that were foreign to his Paris models, here, finally, he has studied and reproduced real light, without any artificial illumination. Together with several portraits, they go to make up that portion of Brožík’s work which best stands the test of time.
In Brožík’s day, the City of Light set its mark even on those painters whose ideal was very far removed from historical painting. Bohemian landscape painters also realised that their art would not thrive unless they acquired a sound training in France. This was all the easier because Czech landscape painting never broke with the Baroque tradition and, despite the School, never lost sight of reality. After 1848, it was Adolf Kosárek, a highly gifted and penetrating artist, who more than anyone else achieved good results. Like so many others, he visited the Alps, at that time the Mecca of artists from Vienna and Munich; but he came back disillusioned, for the stern and rugged beauty of those gigantic heights struck no responsive chord in his gentle nature. The journey that he next undertook, following the impulse of his heart, to the graves of the Baltic Slavs in North Germany, likewise failed to inspire him in the direction of idealised classical landscape. He now felt convinced that, impressionable as he was, his eye would find something to delight it at every step he took, and that he merely had to look around him, in the Bohemian countryside, in order to possess all the material that a Czech landscape painter could require, an inexhaustible store-house of subjects for his brush. Already his pictures, still faithful to Romanticism, disclose a profound grasp both of the external and of the emotional aspect of the Czech landscape. Thus his “Hermit” illustrates how thoroughly he can seize the spirit of the landscape he selects, besides revealing a poetic fervour uncommon in his day. This realism of his grew ever stronger and stronger, in a series of works simple and even bare in theme,
