‘Home is the world of our childhood, nature, the people and the creatures in the fields, a girl’s song and a grandmother’s wisdom, men’s work and grandfathers’ learning, the native region, myths, legends and history, people and kings, the blessings of peace and the clash of weapons. Mikoláš Aleš had to draw it all, for he wanted to portray home as a whole, overlooking nothing’.

In these words the Czech author Karel Čapek summed up the work of his fellow-countryman Mikoláš Aleš (1852-1913), whose paintings and drawings encompassed ‘national idyll and national epic, the beetle in the grass and the knights in combat, nature and history, children and the king’. Visitors to the National Theatre in Prague  can admire the paintings in its foyer which he executed together with František Ženíšek to decorate the building when it reopened in 1883 after burning down shortly after its inaguration two years earlier. In keeping with the proud inscription over its door, ‘Národ sobě’ – ‘the nation to itself’, the paintings depicted legendary scenes and events from Czech mythology, as did the cycle of six murals, ‘Praha’ which Aleš painted in 1904 for the vestibule of the Old Town Hall – Princess Libuše prophesying the future greatness of Prague, ‘a city whose fame reaches to the stars’, and Prague herself, personified as the queen of the realm of Bohemia or a tragic mourner surveying the execution in 1621 of Protestant nobles in the Old Town Square.  

Libuše's Prophecy from the cycle ‘Praha’ [British Library LB.37.b.717]

Aleš, born in 1852 into a modestly prosperous family in Písek, spent some years living and painting in Italy, but throughout his life evoked the spirit, history and landscape of his native country in every format from almanacs, playing-cards and the much-loved collection of children’s rhymes Špaliček (YA.1989.b.4336) to monumental historical paintings showing heroes from Czech history such as Jan Hus.

His murals and mosaics adorn many prominent buildings in Prague, including the Municipal Savings Bank (1891-94) and the Zemská banka (Land Bank; 1985). Their patriotic nature was a visual challenge to the Germanness of their surroundings in the city’s finance district, but created problems of other kinds for the artist. As early as the 1880s Aleš was perceived as being quaintly old-fashioned, and his reputation suffered at the hands of progressive critics when, in the 1880s, he illustrated the collections of ‘mediaeval’ manuscripts from Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora which proved to be forgeries. The rise of modernism in the new Czechoslovak state, established in 1918, and the appropriation of his nationalism by the Communist regime after 1948, caused it to sink still further: a centenary exhibition organized in Prague Castle in 1952 attracted an average of only 71 visitors per day.

By 1979, though, another retrospective attracted over ten times that number, and nowadays Aleš remains an important figure of Czech tradition, his children’s books as popular as ever, and his wall-paintings an integral part of Prague’s cityscape. In 2005 a poll ranked him as 89th in a list of the most important Czechs.

Susan Halstead, Curator Czech/Slovak Studies