The career of Josef Mánes (1820–1871) manifests several aspects of Romantic Nationalism. Although in some respects he oscillated between classical tradition and modernity, his life and work became part of a nationalist legend which posthumously reputed him to have been the most prominent national painter of the Czech 19th century.

He was born in into a prominent and well-established Prague family of professional painters: his uncle Václav held the position of a temporary director of the Prague Academy (in 1835-36 and 1840), his father Antonín led the school of landscape painting at the same Academy (between 1836 and 1842). Their struggle with the growing pro-German orientation of the Academy’s patrons (the Private Society of the Patriotic Friends of the Arts) fed into later, romanticizing interpretations of the conflict to the effect that the Czech Mánes family (German-speaking though they were) with hostile to German institutional hegemony.

The three Mánes siblings, Josef, Quido and Amalia, were trained in the arts by their father. He was the first landscape painter in Bohemia to attract serious attention not only to the homeland affect, but also to the role of paint in convening atmospheric effects in the landscape. Josef imbued these elements, which became Romantic themes par excellence: the turn towards homeland (combined with a growing interest in folk themes) and highlighting the individual’s bond with nature and its atmosphere. These elements were also reflected and thematized in Czech writing at the time, by Karel Hynek Mácha, Božena Němcová, and Karel Jaromír Erben; illustrative work by Mánes for these writers was limited to the title page for Němcová’s Slovenské pohádky a pověsti (“Slovak folk- and fairytales”, 1857) and some folk songs collected by Erben, published in dispersed form in illustrated magazines.

In 1836, Josef enrolled at the Academy under the city’s most influential (and “Czech”-oriented) painter of the time, the Nazarene František Tkadlík. He learned to combine his feeling for colour, supported by his father’s schooling, with perfect linear disegno drawing of late Nazarene type as taught by Tkadlík. The first pieces exhibited at the Academy in the early 1840s evince an introspective and emotive tendency with fashionably “dark” topics related to death, oblivion or medievalism (“The pilgrim”, “The gravedigger”, “The eagle”). This established Mánes’s reputation as a Romantic, as disputed as this term was in contemporary Czech culture. When the Munich painter Christian Ruben was appointed as the new director of the Prague Academy in 1841, a conflict ensued between the Academy and the Mánes family. The latter were backed by the Prague (Czech-minded) artistic community, which from the 1830s had aspired to establish a national artistic association to counter the German-speaking and Vienna-oriented official structures. At the same time, Ruben’s appointment marked a step towards the modernization of artistic training in Prague.

Young Josef Mánes decided to move to Munich (1844-47), at the time the most alluring destination for Prague artists, to see with his own eyes the latest developments and works of art. This experience proved inspiring and opened new topics that helped him to move beyond the tradition of official history painting. Munich acquaintances (esp. around the Kunstverein, e. g. Carl Spitzweg) directed him towards topics for ambitious painting on contemporary life, especially folk life – as confirmed not only by the turn in his work, but also by his first biographer and friend Eduard Herold.

The deeply Romantic tendency to anchor the modern nation’s character in rustic culture and folkways was accelerated also in Bohemia in 1848; politically, as a result of Slavism and calls for the Slavic peoples’ emancipation within the Habsburg Empire, and culturally, in that a Czech national painting school could draw on a growing body of folklore research. A call for Czech painters to seek inspiration in the Czech countryside and villages was published by Ludwig Ritter von Rittersberg in 1848 in the periodical Květy a plody (“Flowers and fruits”). Josef Mánes was ideally placed to demonstrate this combination of traditional, academic draughtsmanship with a new penchant for folk themes. Around 1848 he painted his first works celebrating the homeland, its character and rustic population (Honeymoon in Haná, Homeland). His quest for a national character is always combined with a more general trend towards idealization: “characteristic” features are combined and generalized into an essence of the homeland. Mánes’s many sketches of folk characters and landscapes, made during his numerous travels through the Bohemian, Moravian and Slovak countryside, resulted ultimately in his most important large-format masterpiece in this vein, the painted astronomical clock for the Prague Old Town Hall (1864). The month-medaillons of the clock evoke the passage of time in vignettes of agricultural activities and country folk. Academically accomplished, the types rendered in folk costumes are placed in rustic landscapes evoking both a Romantic sense of nationality and Biedermeier idyll. This chimes with the emerging trend of European regionalism, manifested for example by Courbet’s realistic, plein-air treatment of rustic themes in the 1840s or later by Millet’s renderings of peasant’s life.

The clockface, with its decorative appearance, is typical of Mánes’s integration of ornamental motifs into his works, breaking the distinction between Fine and Decorative Art. For him, the distinction between the two did not matter as he worked on designs for national costumes in 1848, Sokol uniforms in 1862, insignia of unions and associations (flags, diplomas) or other applied designs which all manifest his sensitivity towards the use of various materials. He was also extremely inventive in incorporating ornaments into illustrations, both of folk songs and of the forged Manuscripts of Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora for a representative new edition in 1855. Fantastic ornamentation, reaching back as far as the medieval droleria, lies also at the basis of his many allegorical interpretations of nature and his variations on the unity or disparity between man and nature, between natural order and the individual’s inner dark forces, including eroticism – thus in “The twilight”, “The gardener and his flowers”, “The cave of Venus”. Their heightened emotionality was also fed by the darker aspects of his personality: his hot temper, his life-long neurosis, his love affairs and his early death. These marked the personality of Mánes as strongly as his sense of belonging (to a community, to a land), and his sensitivity and inventiveness as a painter.

After his death, nationalistic interpretations elevated his reputation into a protagonist of the Czech drive for a national artistic identity which was an important topic in the last third of the 19th century and even after. The subsequent social-realist reactions likewise viewed him in similarly ideological terms and made him into an icon of nationally viewed art, obscuring the aspects of his work which were in tune with trends on the contemporary European art scene.