Art. Reference is made in this biographical manual to the work of three artists. The first is Václav Holar of Prácheň, or Wenceslaus Hollar, as his name was spelled in England. A Protestant exile, whom the edicts of anti-reformation had driven from his home, Hollar drifted to England, where he gained the reputation as the foremost etcher of his time. His plates, which number about 2,400 pieces, are highly prized by art collectors. “He drew plans, prospects and portraits; habits and dresses; churches, monuments and antiquaries, or etched designs by famous Italian, German, Dutch and English masters, some done from the collection of King Charles I. and especially from those belonging to Thomas Earl of Arundel, who brought Hollar to and supported him in England.” (Vertue). Born in 1607 in Prague, he was buried in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, 28th of March, 1677. He showed the lasting attachment to his fatherland by signing many of his works “Wenceslaus Hollar Bohemus.”
Anne of Bohemia (1366-1394)
Daughter of Charles IV., wife of Richard II. of England
Václav Brožík (1851-1901) was a noted painter of historic subjects. His greatest picture is “Master John Hus condemned to death by the Council of Constance,” now the property of the municipality of Prague. American art lovers will remember Brožík’s “Defenestration, or thrown from the window at Prague,” exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art owns a large canvas by him, “Columbus at the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella.” The Lenox Library (now the New York Public Library) has “Rudolph II. in the Laboratory of his Alchymist,” and “The Grandmother’s Namesday.” “As a historical painter, Brožík equals the greatest by
his breadth of conception, fine composition, strength of work and dramatic effect.” This is the estimate of the painter by Mr. Larroument, Secretary of the French Académie des Beaux Arts. For his art galleries in New York and Philadelphia, John Wanamaker purchased several of the artist’s smaller themes, and from his executors the entire contents of his Paris studio, studies, sketches, antiques, draperies and hangings.
Alfons M. Mucha, born in 1860 in Moravia, earned his spurs in Paris as a poster artist. He is not unknown in the United States, having visited this country on two or three occasions, working here as portraitist, illustrator and interior decorator. For several years he has been engaged on a series of allegories intended to portray the historical development of the Slavs. When finished, the canvases are to be presented to the City of Prague as the gift of the well-known Slavophile, Charles R. Crane of Chicago and New York.
Bibliography. So far as the writers know, no one has before this concerned himself with a systematic compilation of a bibliography of this kind. The late Herman Rosenthal, Director of the Slavonic Department of the New York Public Library, is said to have been at work on a Slavic bibliography; but his literary executors have not yet published it. Dr. A. Sum, member of the English Club in Prague, has taken more than a passing interest in English Bohemica. The late Jeffrey D. Hrbek, an exceptionally gifted young man (see his biography published posthumously), prepared for the Osvěta Americká (1908) what was then considered to be a fairly exhaustive bibliography. The list mentions ninety volumes, many of them containing but remote and irrelevant allusions to Bohemia. The bibliography appended to Miss Balch’s Our Slavic Fellow Citizens is quite considerable; however, this work treats not of Bohemians alone, but of all the Slavs, and, when the process of elimination is applied, it will be seen that the purely Bohemian share of reference books is small. Then there is Leonard C. Wharton’s list, printed in the Guide to the Kingdom of Bohemia; this takes notice of thirty-five items. As regards the Hus and the Moravian Church literatures, Wm. Gunn Malin’s catalogue is, without doubt, the richest and the most valuable of all.
Biography. Biographical material in the several encyclopædias is meagre and perfunctory and what there is of it has been chiefly extracted from German lexicons. Count Lützow edited items on Bohemia for the Encyclopædia Britannica. J. J. Král has written for Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia short biographical sketches of several authors—Jungmann, Kollár, Němcová, Neruda and the Jirečeks among them. The Biographical Dictionary of the Library of the World’s Best Literature contains the lives of some two dozen men of letters. Injudiciously the editor of the Biographical Dictionary has included among Bohemian (Čech) writers Charles Sealsfield (pseudonym of Karl Anton Postl, by some written Postel) and Fritz Mauthner. While it is true that the first named was born in Moravia and the other in Bohemia, both Sealsfield and Mauthner were, as a matter of fact, Germans.