for painting. Their efforts were not in vain, for Antonín Slavíček, the Czech landscape-painter par excellence, emerged from this great movement. Slavíček was a pupil of Matřák at the School, but, exasperated at his teacher’s monochromy, he soon felt attracted towards Chittussi, whose true successor he was destined to become. Accordingly he went out into the country to paint meadows studded with flowers, and fields of ripe corn. In looking at these pictures to-day, we find it hard to understand the indignation of his teacher, who saw in them symptoms of revolt, so dim is the colour, so finicking the form, so enigmatic the sentiment. For all that, he has already begun to come under the spell of plein air, although he vacillates, varying his processes over a long period, now making use of values and now dispensing them with them, yet in one way or another his pictures already place him at the head of Czech landscape-painters. About 1900 all his work was already that of a pure impressionist, intoxicated with air and light. He then came to indulge in violent tonalities which amazed the public, and did not shrink from exaggerating this or that shade in order to obtain the effect he aimed at. At this stage he generally used the forms of technique that suited his fiery temperament and were adapted to open air work—tone-blending, tempera-painting, pastel. In “The Soul of the Birches,” one of the first impressionist pictures painted in Bohemia, his method is not yet entirely free from clumsiness. On the other hand, the paintings subsequently executed by Slavíček in a village of the Czecho-Moravian tableland clearly reveal how he was succeeding in making his processes more flexible and in adapting his method to the varying requirements of the landscape. This region, with its unproductive soil, where weavers wrest from the land a bare livelihood, soon came to have a peculiar attraction for him. It was not long before pity turned into ardent
