Page:Modern and contemporary Czech art (1924).pdf/72

---

---

of French art, the local tradition founded by Mánes. It was the period when impressionism was beginning to affect even plastic art, which seemed of its very nature the least amenable to its influence. The material was constrained to undergo the feverish manipulation of modern neurotics, to run into moulds that disregarded all coherence and unity of design. The roughing-chisel scored the clay in a perfect frenzy, leaving innumerable notches and diversifying the surface by violent contrasts of light and shade. It is significant that for this impressionist illusionism in Bohemia—as in fact wherever it appeared in the history of art—the favourite medium was bas-relief, which lies so near to painting. Sucharda’s bas-reliefs, such as for instance the “Treasure” or the “Willow,” are often an impassioned transcript of one of the gloomy ballads of the national singer Erben. Still more often, Sucharda resorts to the lowest of all forms of relief, the plaque. He turned out a large number of these, improvising, in a spirit of ardent and impulsive patriotism, on heroic, historical or popular themes. Dreams of liberty, visions of Prague the victorious, unswerving faith in the mission of the Czech people and of the regenerate Slavs as a whole,—such are the underlying motives of his plaques, large and small. More than once he combines precious stone and rare metal in order to heighten the picturesque effect of some bas-relief in which the Vltava, personified, rises from the waters to gaze admiringly at the Bohemian capital. But all his art, ideas and beliefs are embodied in the work that occupied a considerable part of his life, the monument to the distinguished Czech historian and political leader, František Palacký. This monument, as he conceived it, was to remind posterity of the efforts put forth by the Czech nation, during the nineteenth century, for its political and literary re-awakening. The granite statue of the old man, seated, with flowing drapery over his limbs, is the central figure; radiating