pure idealist picture. He was in fact entering on a new stage in his production, with works of an uncommon, almost classical beauty, a stage that was not revealed to us, alas! until the posthumous exhibition of his paintings in 1919.
In his earliest work, Max Švabinský, another famous “Mánesist,” showed much the same sort of youthful inspiration as Preisler. He was the rising hope of the professors, and, as soon as his triptych “Love” and his symbolist picture “Blended Souls” were exhibited, sprang into the front rank of public favour. An adept in all the techniques, he had soon created a special technique of his own, one that he wielded as a virtuoso, executing even his big pictures in pen-and-ink. A series of portraits stamps him as a shrewd psychologist, knowing how to decipher the spiritual face of his sitter behind the outward physiognomy and gestures. He also made his mark as a decorative artist, painting two panels for the Bohemian Royal Land Bank. A two years’ stay in Paris completed his training. At the Paris Exhibition of 1900 he received an honourable mention for his portrait of Maeterlinck. On his return to Prague he painted a large picture which he entitled, “The Land of Poverty,” and in which he finally summed up the dreams and sentimental yearnings of his youth. More and more did he come to draw his inspiration from real life. He designed in pen-and-ink and subsequently illuminated a large disc representing a woman seated behind a weaver’s loom. This picture met with a tragic fate, being burnt in the great San Francisco earthquake. Švabinský’s portraits of Czech poets, artists, scholars and men of science soon came to form a whole Pantheon of national glory in which many of the dead are portrayed no less vividly than those painted from the living model. From individual portraits Švabinský went on to large groups, depicting the members of a family with a profound insight into the intimacies of kinship and a consummate mastery
