To the impressionist movement we owe another large monument in Prague of about the same date, the one that Ladislav Šaloun erected to the memory of Jan Hus in the principal Square of the Old Town. Here, in contrast to Sucharda, the sculptor has made sure beforehand that he will dominate the architect, and instead of scattering his figures, he has contrived to gather them into a compact whole which rises unconstrainedly from the base. Nevertheless, in composition as well as in modelling, this monument shows far less coherence than Sucharda’s, and the purely plastic qualities are often sacrificed for the sake of picturesque effects.
Among the impressionists, too, we must reckon the mystic František Bílek. A native of Southern Bohemia, the region that has given us our great Reformers, Štítný, Hus, Žižka and Chelčický, he loves to plunge into the depths of the spiritual life in order to endow his creations with the mysterious fire of his religious ecstasies. After studying at the Academy in Prague, he went to learn under Injalbert in Paris, but what inspired him more than the teaching of the master was the example of the great Gothics through his visits to the Louvre and the Trocadéro. The highly original Calvary which he sent from Paris to Prague led to the withdrawal of the scholarship on which he had been living, and he was compelled to return to Bohemia. Here he worked amid the forests of his native South, absorbed in gloomy ecstasies; but he was delivered from these, and attained a more serene outlook on life and humanity, through the friendship he formed, first with the gentle poet Julius Zeyer, then with another poet, the gifted author of mystic improvisations, Otokar Březina. His great Christ on the Cross, carved in wood, the outcome of his visionary vigils, is the conception of a devotee who, going far beneath the surface, portrays the suffering of the spirit rather than of the flesh. “The Blind,” inspired by a poem of Březina, are
