Pavla Machalíková
Why and Where Josef Führich and Josef Mánes Journeyed
The traditional landscape painting offers a contrast between heroic (wild) and idyllic landscapes. The experience of a real landscape, which one gets to know through travelling (by walking through it, immersing oneself in it, looking around it, and thus becoming aware of its real shapes and details, as well as the feelings they arouse), led Josef Mánes to conceive two paintings: Labská krajina (Elbe River Landscape) and Řipský kraj (The Říp Landscape) (1863). In the first one, Mánes captured the mysterious and wild forest at the confluence of two rivers, in the second he depicted the cultivated and inhabited landscape from the town of Mělník towards the mythical Mount Říp, where, as legend has it, the first Bohemians came. In both paintings, he captured the contemporary idea of the Czech lands, in which naturalness and wildness are combined with sophistication and idyllicity, evoking the idea of an earthly paradise. This significant allegorical meaning of both paintings is skilfully manipulated and concealed by their visual realism. A similar principle and its development can be observed more generally in the 19th century landscape painting. The examples of Josef Führich's and Josef Mánes's works selected here show that it was the thematization of travel that determined this new iconography.
Keywords: travelling in the 19th century - 19th century landscape painting - Josef Mánes - Josef Führich - ideas about the Czech landscape
design by Bedřich Vémola
