but imbued with all the lyrical tenderness of an artist, gentle-souled and marked out for an early death. The rocky knolls of the Czecho-Moravian tableland, with their covering of scanty grass, the wooded hills of the Czech countryside, its dells, its fields and its meadows, its ponds, its quarries and its thatched cottages nestling in luxuriant foliage—such are the subjects in which Kosárek’s art excels, and which he seldom enlivens with any human figure of romantic aspect.
As Kosárek had arrived at realism without any tradition to support him or any master to serve as a model, he did not follow out the principles of realism to their logical conclusions. He did not know that light and atmosphere are two capricious deities whose strife and reconciliation go to make up the fickle and elusive soul of landscape. Nor did he understand that realist painting demands the avoidance of dull, lustreless tints, too neutral on the palette. It was Antonín Chittussi, younger by a generation, who brought about the necessary reforms, but only after having known and appreciated the masters of Barbizon. At the age of thirty, dissatisfied with all that Bohemia had to offer him, he went to Paris. At the Salon of 1879 he exhibited “On the Banks of the Elbe,” an epitome of his knowledge and his skill as a Prague artist. In Paris, he did not sit at the feet of any particular landscape painter, but picked up his training everywhere and anywhere, listening notably to the language spoken by the painter-poets of Barbizon. In their wake, he roamed the Forest of Fontainebleau and followed the charming banks of the Seine; here was revealed to him, through the vibrations of air steeped in light, the very soul of the countryside. He also learnt to wield the brush with vigour and dexterity, and trained himself to observe with accuracy the busy and ever-shifting life of Nature. He rigidly excluded the human form, and even in his pictures of urban scenes only two or three figures are to be found. His sphere
