been quartered in his villa at Meudon. It is to Mařatka’s efforts, too, that we owe the exhibition of Rodin’s works at Prague in 1903, the first to be held outside Paris—an event that marks an epoch in the history of Czech sculpture. In the studio in the Rue de and in that of Meudon, Mařatka executed the first works exhibited by him at the Salon. Thus in 1904, “The Plump Woman” and an “Ariadne” won him golden opinions. On leaving Rodin’s studio he received, thanks to the master’s good offices, the order for the model of the monument to be erected at Buenos Ayres in honour of the airman, Santos-Dumont. A year later he returned to Prague, to display there an activity as varied and intense as the war allowed. It was he, too, who managed to win over Bourdelle to the Czech cause: the fine exhibition of Bourdelle’s work at Prague in 1909, and the increasingly cordial relations of the French sculptor with Czech artists, have already borne good fruit.
Mařatka left Rodin’s studio with a training that any sculptor might have envied him, and this training proved a wonderful stimulus to his great native talent. Like Rodin, he adores Nature, and seeks to wrest from her her inmost secrets. His youthful works are therefore mostly studies from nature, tiny, fragmentary statuettes in which he fixed the varied movements and constant interplay of bones and muscles, whole series of hands and feet rendered in the minutest detail and with amazing industry. In Rodin’s studio he also had an opportunity of drawing nude figures and female dancers, an exercise that enabled him to catch the fleeting movements of undulating bodies in the electric thrill of the dance. His work at this period consists mainly of slight figures in which his sensitive hand has left its subtle trace. But when called upon to carry out orders of a monumental type, he none the less proved equal to the task, showing more amplitude and more discipline in his
