of forms. After the fire, Hynais returned to Paris to work out the sketch of the new curtain that he had been commissioned to paint. The idea had come to him in Prague, at the time of the catastrophe, when he had witnessed the touching scenes in which the Czech people gathered round the ruined building and hastily collected the money required for the reconstruction of its first national edifice. His conception, accordingly, was a picture in which female figures of great beauty and attractively modern—the Tragic and the Comic Muse—surrounded by poets, musicians and actors, await the solemn moment when they will be able to move into a building which a group of architects, artists and workmen are on the point of completing, while on the other side a vast multitude is thronging forward to offer a portion of its wealth for the accomplishment of the national task. The groups and figures of the picture are connected by a flowing, realistic rhythm, and no central over-emphasis, no pedantic symmetry disturbs the serenity of its arrangement. Hynais, as a realist—a paradoxical quality, this, in a painter of allegories—offers us in his curtain a slice of fresh reality, with only a slight degree of order to ensure its unity. The figures are no stock types, but genuine personalities, portraits of friends idealised merely by a little careless drapery, which certainly does not invest them with any classical remoteness. A dominant gray-green harmonises the discreet, transparent tonalities. Hynais’ curtain is a decisive symptom of the radical revolution that Czech art was undergoing about 1880. In Paris, he adorned the Villa Lecomte at Auteuil with four decorative panels, and began to make sketches for the decoration of the Municipal Theatre in Vienna, four quoins with eminent dramatic poets from Aeschylus to Grillparzer, four arches with the principal characters in the world’s dramatic poetry, friezes for boxes with children assembled in wayward troops (“The Children,”
