the example of Israëls and Mesdag had taught him that there was no need whatever to look for inspiration outside his own age, and he set himself with greater zest to rendering the reality that lay about him, painting his “Amsterdam Fish-market” and, in Moravia, genre pictures drawn from Valach life. Finally we see him reverting to his former ideal, resuming the work of his youth. As teacher at the Prague Academy he exerted a happy influence on his pupils, imbuing them with his ripe experience in craftsmanship, and accustoming them to look naked reality squarely in the face. Thus he prepared the ground for the final stage of realism—impressionist painting.
About 1890, his great native faculty marked out the youthful Luděk Marold, in the eyes of his contemporaries, for a brilliant career. Formal study, however, did not come easily to him; both at Prague and at Munich, his active, restless temperament, his bent for real life, his unconventional ideas of form and his lack of respect for discipline forced him to break away from the School. When scarcely out of his teens, he already aroused astonishment by his sketches, in which line and colour were intimately blended to give an illusion of living form. At Munich he supplied illustrations for novels and for the comic paper, Fliegende Blätter. On his return to Prague he entered Pirner’s studio, and high hopes were entertained of him both by School and public. He won much favour in 1888 by his “Prague Egg-market,” a picture in which he contrived to portray with an energetic brush a scene brimful of life and light. The following year he was sent to Paris to study under Galland. But the boulevard life overflowed too much into the studio, and the voice of Paris, ever buzzing in his ears, was that of a Siren not to be resisted. Here, too, he played truant, and roamed the vast city, with no other teacher than life itself, absorbing in his soul the Parisian crowd, the faces of passers-by, the eternal merry-go-round
