poetic faculty and pantheistic vision of his favourite element led him to people it with ethereal sirens, tritons and robust centaurs wrestling and disporting themselves in the brine. On returning to Bohemia he found that his sea-pieces, true to an ideal that had been abandoned, had lost much of their pristine attraction. He decided to revisit the scenes that he loved so well, but on board the ship that was taking him from Dalmatia to the shores of Italy, he tied a big stone round his neck and threw himself overboard.
A realist of importance for the development of Czech art now appeared in the person of Hanuš Schwaiger. He had received his training in Vienna, where Rahl, Canon and Makart were still burning incense to the great masters of the past. Accordingly, like the rest, Schwaiger loved to linger in the museums. He gained there enormously in technical knowledge, and studied the precepts of the old masters as if all art were contained within their limits. Above all, the Dutch and the old Germans held him in thrall, fostering his ingrained love of realism. They inspired himto works in which-although colour had no secrets for him—he expressed himself as a draughtsman rather than as a painter. He recast old stories in a modern mould, thus combining his reverence for the past with an overmastering impulse towards reality. It was on these lines that he drew and coloured the “Anabaptists,” a vast congeries of faces, attitudes and gestures, imbued with an almost brutal truth; and he illustrated ancient tales with a novel blend of imaginative fantasy and realistic observation. Slowly, through this charmed circle of imagery on the antique pattern, he drove a road towards a pure reality, with its sensations of life lived to the utmost. His visits to the country yielded him figures that flashed across his vision on the highways, beggars, tramps and gipsies, and he deliberately laid stress on their physical and moral abasement. Trips to Holland,
