determined to follow in the footsteps of the great Mánes. Like him, they went back to the fountain-head of Czech popular tradition. “Your country guided your hand,” remarked a foreigner, the Belgian Sweerts, director of the Prague Academy, at which they had but recently been students. To-day, we know for a fact that the originator of these lofty conceptions was Mikuláš Aleš, who made the first sketches; but contemporaries were inclined to give the greater part of the credit to František Ženíšek, a skilful manipulator of harmonious lines, who, by softening his colleague’s vigorous and expressive line, gave it more flexibility. The decorations were carried out on the spot, without the assistance of Aleš, by various collaborators acting under Ženíšek’s direction. To-day, however, we turn most readily to the superb designs of Mikuláš Aleš, finding in them all the tenseness and all the charm of the moment of creation. In his cycle, “Our Native Land,” Aleš draws on the resources of Czech legend and history, and personifies our country districts, our rivers, the scenes of our national glories. In the difficult framework of corner-pieces he achieved decorative paintings unrivalled in Bohemian art, rich in ideas, with a fullness and freedom of composition, and original in their arrangement of lines and masses. Everything pointed to the prospect that this painter of twenty-seven would create for us that great decorative art which the buildings under construction in a regenerated Prague demanded. But it was not to be. The unkindness of fate, which had already marred his first great success—perhaps, too, a certain languor inherent in his Slav temperament—thwarted his advance in this direction, and his remarkable gifts remained unexploited. He did some designs for the sgraffiti and frescoes of several buildings in Prague and in provincial towns, but his great ideas had no wider scope than his small scale designs. As instances, we may mention the heroic song of freedom he composes on the basis of
