and nationality were spreading through Europe like wildfire, and Mánes was able to witness patriotic demonstrations in the German city where he was living. The scales fell from his eyes, and he was suddenly inspired with a keen sense of his obligations towards his own country, his own people. Returning to Prague, he took part in the manifestoes of 1848, but he soon had to leave for the town of Kroměříž in Moravia, where he painted portraits of the Czech deputies in the Legislative Assembly. This was nothing short of a revelation for him; Moravia, the land of an unspoiled popular tradition, amazed and enchanted him with the beauty of its types, the picturesqueness of its costumes and its general Arcadian atmosphere. He fell in love with this country, and was to come back to it faithfully later on, as an intellectual to whom the robust physical health and happy moral balance of the Moravian peasant made an irresistible appeal. More than once he went through Moravia from end to end, and passed on into Silesia, even into Slovakia, observing and taking notes, sketching faces, attitudes and scenes. On his return, he made use of these brief notes for the execution of works in which he now celebrated the placid, slow-moving yet laborious life of the countryside, now lent a new dignity to his peasant as an Old Slavonic hero in scenes of love or war. He was the first modern Czech artist to seek the well-springs of emotion in immediate reality, to counter the lifeless convention of his day with an ardent, almost religious fidelity to man and Nature, to substitute the creative impulse for the arid labour of academic permutations and combinations. He is our first painter-poet. His genius was universal. Besides his decorative compositions, he has left us landscapes delightful in their colour-scheme, portraits that show deep insight, illustrations now of a high dramatic and tragic power, now exquisitely playful, innumerable drawings of a rare beauty in line and modelling. In order to realise the suppleness and versatility of
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CONTEMPORARY CZECH ART
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