love. No longer did he hunt after interesting themes: a squat thatched cottage, two or three stunted trees, a few sparsely cultivated fields, a muddy road—these were enough for him to express in unforgettable pictures all the attachment of his passionate soul for a little desolate corner of the universe. He even wished to found there an artists’ colony, a school. Soon he grew weary of improvisation, and felt an urgent need of a discipline that should control his volcanic temperament and enable him to bring larger landscapes within the scope of a single picture. By dint of stubborn and ungrudging labour, he succeeded. In his “At our home, at Kameničky” he already shows the application of this new method. Returning to Prague, Slavíček was struck with the picturesque beauty of the old, poorer quarters doomed to disappear through the modern improvements, and with an alert and forceful brush he set himself to portray, in a long series of small-scale pictures, the old streets with their variegated shadows, the tumbledown houses with their wrinkled façades and quaint roofs. In this work done in the open air, his palette gained in brightness and his stroke became a blur of colour. The mass of blurs began to whirl round, the outlines were effaced, the picture seemed to be an orchestration of colours shimmering in light. He now grew bolder and essayed landscapes of colossal scope, painting the whole city of Prague or rather certain moods of Prague in the changeable season that precedes the coming of spring, completing enormous landscapes in a few days, working at a feverish pace, but with an admirable creative impulse. The pictures, “Prague, near Troja,” “The Vitava seen from the top of the Letná Hill,” and “The Elizabeth Bridge” are agglomerations of houses and roofs dissolved into dots of colour, noble symphonies of the hundred-towered city, of glittering Prague, such as Slavíček’s generation saw and loved. Slavíček next tried his hand at a theme that
