(b Kutná Hora, 4 Aug 1857; d Brno, 2 Jan 1905). Bohemian painter and draughtsman. He studied under Jan Swerts (1820–79) at the Prague Academy of Visual Arts (1873–8) and under Josef Mathias von Trenkwald (1824–97) at the Vienna Akademie der Bildenden Künste (1879–80). He assisted Trenkwald on the decoration of the Votivkirche at Vienna. His own monumental religious paintings—notably the murals (c. 1900), depicting biblical characters, for the Heilige Familie Church, Neu-Ottakring, Vienna—were more successful in Vienna than in Prague, where he lived after 1880. From 1902 he worked in Brno as an illustrator and drawing teacher. He was known mainly for his drawings and watercolours of Bible subjects, Czech history, and his own symbolic compositions (for instance, Blood Tax, 1882; Prague, N.G., Convent of St Agnes). In Bohemia he aligned himself first with the lyrical tradition of Josef Mánes; later he was influenced by Late Gothic models. In the 1870s and 1880s his work was characterized by elements of neo-Romanticism; it subsequently became more pessimistic and deliberately anachronistic. The style and spiritual content of his work became increasingly clearly defined up to the end of the century. He frequently used stylized silhouettes and large splashes of colour to express the human condition; the mood of his pictures is often apocalyptic, as in his most famous cycle of gouaches, Plague (1900; Prague, N.G., Convent of St Agnes).