THE HISTORY OF
MODERN PAINTING

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

BOOK III

THE TRIUMPH OF THE MODERNS

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CHAPTER XVI

THE DRAUGHTSMEN

Inasmuch as modern art, in the beginning of its career, held commerce almost exclusively with the spirits of dead men of bygone ages, it had set itself in opposition to all the great epochs that had gone before. All works known to the history of art, from the cathedral pictures of Stephan Lochner down to the works of the followers of Watteau, stand in the closest relationship with the people and times amid which they have originated. Whoever studies the works of Dürer knows his home and his family, the Nuremberg of the sixteenth century, with its narrow lanes and gabled houses; the whole age is reflected in the engravings of this one artist with a truth and distinctness which put to shame those of the most laborious historian. Dürer and his contemporaries in Italy stood in so intimate a relation to reality that in their religious pictures they even set themselves above historical probability, and treated the miraculous stories of sacred tradition as if they had been commonplace incidents of the fifteenth century. Or, to take another instance, with what a striking realism, in the works of Ostade, Brouwer, and Steen, has the entire epoch from which these great artists drew strength and nourishment remained vivid in spirit, sentiment, manners, and costume. Every man whose name has come down to posterity stood firm and unshaken on the ground of his own time, resting like a tree with all its roots buried in its own peculiar soil; a tree whose branches rustled in the breeze of its native land, while the sun which fell on its blossoms and ripened its fruits was that of Italy or Germany, of Spain or the Netherlands, of that time; never the weak reflection of a planet that formerly had shone in other zones.

It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that this connection with the life of the present and the soil at home was lost to the art of painting. It cannot be supposed that later generations will be able to form a conception of life in the nineteenth century from pictures produced in this period, or that these pictures will become approximately such documents as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries possess in the works of Dürer, Bellini, Rubens, or Rembrandt. The old masters were the children of their age to the very tips of their fingers. They were saturated with the significance, the ideals, and the aims of their time, and they saturated them with their own aims, ideals, and significance. On the other hand, if any one enters a modern picture gallery and picks out the paintings produced up to 1850, he will often receive 2 the impression that they belong to earlier centuries. They are without feeling for the world around, and seem even to know nothing of it.

Even David, the first of the moderns, has left no work, with the exception of his “Marat,” which has been baptized with the blood of the French Revolution. To express the sentiment of Liberty militant he made use of the figures of Roman heroes. The political freedom of the people, so recently won, so fresh in men’s minds, he illustrated by examples from Roman history. At a later time, when the allied forces entered Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, he made use of the story of Leonidas at Thermopylæ. Only in portrait painting was any kind of justice done to modern life by the painters in “the grand style.” True it is that there lived, at the time, a few “little masters” who furtively turned out for the market modest little pictures of the life around them, paintings of buildings and kitchen interiors. The poor Alsatian painter Martin Drolling, contemptuously designated a “dish painter” by the critics, showed in his kitchen pictures that, in spite of David, something of the spirit of Chardin and the great Dutchmen was still alive in French art. But he has given his figures and his pots and pans and vegetables the pose and hard outline of Classicism. A few of his portraits are better and more delicate, particularly that of the actor Baptiste, with his fine head, like that of a diplomatist. At the exhibition of 1889, this picture, with its positive and firmly delineated characterisation, made the appeal of a Holbein of 1802. Another “little master,” Granet, painted picturesque ruins, low halls, and the vaults of churches; he studied attentively the problem of light in inner chambers, and thereby drew upon himself the reproach of David, that “his drawing savoured of colour.” In Leopold Boilly Parisian life—still like that of a country town—and the arrival of the mail, the market, and the busy life of the streets, found an interpreter,—bourgeois no doubt, but true to his age. In the time of the Revolution he painted a “Triumph of Marat,” the tribune of the people, who is being carried 3 on the shoulders of his audience from the palais de justice in Paris, after delivering an inflammatory oration. In 1807, when the exhibition of David’s Coronation picture had thrown all Paris into excitement, Boilly conceived the notion of perpetuating in a rapid sketch the scene of the exhibition, with the picture and the crowd pressing round it. His speciality, however, was little portrait groups of honest bourgeois in their stiff Sunday finery. Boilly knew with accuracy the toilettes of his age, the gowns of the actresses, and the way they dressed their heads; he cared nothing whatever about æsthetic dignity of style, but represented each subject as faithfully as he could, and as honestly and sincerely as possible. For that reason he is of great historical value, but he is not painter enough to lay claim to great artistic interest. The execution of his pictures is petty and diffidently careful, and his neat, Philistine painting has a suggestion of china and enamel, without a trace of the ease and spirit with which the eighteenth century carolled over such work. The heads of his women are the heads of dolls, and his silk looks like steel. His forerunners are not the Dutchmen of the good periods, Terborg and Metsu, but the contemporaries of Van der Werff. He and Drolling and Granet were rather the last issue of the fine old Dutch schools, rather descendants of Chardin than pioneers, and amongst the younger men there was at first no one who ventured to sow afresh the region which had been devastated by Classicism. Géricault certainly was incited to his “Raft of the Medusa” not by Livy or Plutarch, but by an occurrence of the time which was reported in the newspapers; and he ventured to set an ordinary shipwreck in the place of the Deluge or a naval battle, and a crew of unknown mortals in the place of Greek heroes. But then his picture stands alone amongst the works of the Romanticists, and is too decidedly transposed into a classical key to count as a representation of modern life.

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In its striving after movement and colour, Romanticism put forward the picturesque and passionate Middle Ages in opposition to the stiff and frigid neo-Greek or neo-Roman ideal; but it joined with Classicism in despising the life of the present. Even the political excitement at the close of the Restoration and the Revolution of July had but little influence on the leading spirits of the time. Accustomed to look for the elements of pictorial invention in religious myths, in the fictions of poets, or in the events of older history, they paid no attention to the mighty social drama enacted so near to them. The fiery spirit of Delacroix certainly led him to paint his picture of the barricades, but he drew his inspiration from a poet, from an ode of Auguste Barbier, and he gave the whole an air of romance and allegory by introducing the figure of Liberty. He lived in a world of glowing passions, amid which all the struggles of his age seemed to have for him only a petty material interest. For that reason he has neither directly nor indirectly drawn on what he saw around him. He painted the soul, but not the life of his epoch. He was attracted by Teutonic poets and by the Middle Ages. He set art free from Greek subject-matter and Italian form, to borrow his ideas from Englishmen and Germans and his colour from the Flemish school. He is inscrutably silent about French society in the nineteenth century.

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And this alienation from the living world is even more noticeable in Ingres. His “Mass of Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel” is the only one of his many works which deals with a subject of contemporary life, and it was blamed by the critics because it deviated so far from the great style. As an historical 6 painter, and when better employed as a painter of portraits, Ingres has crystallised all the life and marrow of the past in his icy works, and he appears in the midst of the century like a marvellous and sterile sphinx. Nothing can be learnt from him concerning the needs and passions and interests of living men. His own century might writhe and suffer and struggle and bring forth new thoughts, but he knew nothing about them, or if he did he never allowed it to be seen.

Delaroche approached somewhat nearer to the present, for he advanced from antiquity and the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century; and the historical picture, invented by him, virtually dominated French art under Napoleon III, in union with the dying Classicism. Even then there was no painter who yet ventured to portray the manners and types of his age with the fresh insight and merciless observation of Balzac. All those scenes from the life of great cities, their fashion and their misery, which then began to form the substance of drama and romance, had as yet no counterpart in painting.

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The Belgians preserved the same silence. During the whole maturity of Classicism, from 1800 to 1830, François, Paelinck, van Hanselaere, Odevaere, de Roi, Duvivier, etc., with their coloured Greek statues, ruled the realm of figure painting as unmitigated dictators; and amongst the historical painters who followed them, Wappers, in his “Episode,” was the only one who drew on modern life for a subject. There was a desire to revive Rubens. Decaisne, Wappers, de Keyzer, Bièfve, and Gallait lit their candle at his sun, and were hailed as the holy band who were to lead Belgian art to a glorious victory. But their original national tendency deviated from real life instead of leading towards it. For the sake of painting cuirasses and helmets they dragged the most obscure national heroes to the light of day, just as the Classicists had done with Greeks and Romans. German painting wandered through the past with even less method, taking its material, not from native, but from French, English, and Flemish history. From Carstens down to Makart, German painters of influence carefully shut their eyes to reality, and drew down the blinds so as to see nothing of the life that surged below them in the street, with its filth and splendour, its laughter and misery, its baseness and noble humanity. And from an historical point of view this alienation from the world is susceptible of an easy explanation.

In France, as in all other countries, the end of the ancien régime, the tempest of the Revolution, and the consequent modification of the whole of life—of sentiments, habits, and ideas, of dress and social conditions—at first implied such a sudden change in the horizon that artists were necessarily thrown into confusion. When the monarchy entered laughingly upon its struggle of life and death, the survivors from the time of Louis XVI, charming “little masters” who had been great masters in that careless and graceful epoch, were suddenly made witnesses of a revolution more abrupt than the world had yet seen. Savage mobs forced their way into gardens, palaces, and reception-rooms, pike in hand, and with the red cap upon their heads. The walls echoed with their rude speech, and plebeian orators played the part of oracles of freedom and brotherhood like old Roman tribunes of the people. What was there yesterday was no longer to be seen; 12 a thick powder-smoke hung between the past and the present. And the present itself had not yet assumed determinate shape; it hovered, as yet unready, between the old and the new forms of civilization. The storms of the Revolution put an end to the comfortable security of private life. Thus it was that the ready-made and more easily intelligible shapes and figures of a world long buried out of sight, with which men believed themselves to have an elective affinity, at first seemed to the artists to have an infinitely greater value than the new forms which were in the throes of birth. Painters became Classicists because they had not yet the courage to venture on the ground where the century itself was going through a process of fermentation.

The Romanticists despised it, for they thought the fermenting must had yielded flat lemonade instead of fiery wine. The artist must live in art before he can produce art. And the more the life of nations has been beautiful, rich, and splendid, the more nourishment and material has art been able to derive from it. But when they came the Romanticists found—in France as in Germany—everything, except a piece of reality which they could deem worthy of being painted. The whole of existence seemed to this generation so poor and bald, the costume so inartistic and so like a caricature, the situation so hopeless and petty, that they were unable to tolerate the portrayal of themselves either in poetry or art. It was the time of that wistfully sought phantom which, as they believed, was to be found only in the past. The powerful passions of the Middle Ages were set in opposition to a flaccid period that was barren of action.

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And then came the overwhelming pressure of the old masters. After the forlorn condition of colouring brought about by David and Carstens, it was so vitally necessary to restore the artistic tradition and technique of the old masters, that it was at first thought necessary to adopt the old subject-matter also—especially the splendid robes of the city of the lagoons—in order to test the newly acquired secrets of the palette. Faltering unsteadily under influences derived from the old artists, modern painting did not yet feel itself able to create finished works of art out of the novel elements which the century placed at its disposal. It still needed to be carried in the arms of a Venetian or Flemish nurse.

And æsthetic criticism bestowed its blessing on these attempts. The Romanticists had been forced to the treatment of history and the deification of the past by disgust with the grey and colourless present; the younger generation were long afterwards held captive in this province by æsthetic views of the dignity of history. To paint one’s own age was reckoned a crime. One had to paint the age of other people. For this purpose the prix de Rome was instituted. The spirit which produced the pictures of Cabanel and Bouguereau was the same that induced David to write to Gros, that the battles of the empire might afford the material for occasional pictures done under the inspiration of chance, but not for great and earnest works of art worthy of an historical painter. That æsthetic criticism which taught that, whatever the subject be, and whatever personages may be represented, if they belong to the present time the picture is merely a genre picture, still 14 held the field. Whilst the world was laughing and crying, the painter, with the colossal power of doing everything, amused himself by trying not to appear the child of his own time. No one perceived the refinement and grace, the corruption and wantonness, of modern life as it is in great cities. No one laid hold on the mighty social problems which the growing century threw out with a seething creative force. Whoever wishes to know how the men of the time lived and moved, what hopes and sorrows they bore in their breasts, whoever seeks for works in which the heart-beat of the century is alive and throbbing, must have his attention directed to the works of the draughtsmen, to the illustrations of certain periodicals. It was in the nineteenth century as in the Middle Ages. As then, when painting was still an ecclesiastical art, the slowly awakening feeling for nature, the joy of life was first expressed in miniatures, woodcuts, and engravings, so also the great draughtsmen of the nineteenth century were the first who set themselves with their whole strength to bring modern life and all that it contained earnestly and sincerely within the range of art, the first who held up the glass to their own time and gave the abridged chronicle of their age. Their calling as caricaturists led them to direct observation of the world, and lent them the aptitude of rendering their impressions with ease; and that at a time when the academical methods of depicting physiognomy obtained elsewhere in every direction. It necessitated their representing subjects to which, in accordance with the æsthetic views of the period, they would not otherwise 15 have addressed themselves; it led them to discover beauties in spheres of life by which they would otherwise have been repelled. London, the capital of a free people ruling in all quarters of the globe, the home of millions, where intricate old corners and back streets left more space than in other cities for old-fashioned “characters,” for odd, eccentric creatures and better-class charlatans of every description, afforded a ground peculiarly favourable for caricature. In this province, therefore, England holds the first place beyond dispute.

Direct from Hogarth come the group of political caricaturists, in whom the sour, bilious temper of John Bull lives on in a new and improved edition. Men like James Gillray were a power in the political warfare of their time; bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom with a divine rage and slashing irony, while at the same time they were masterly draughtsmen in a vehement and forceful style. The worst of it is, that the interest excited by political caricature is always of a very ephemeral nature. The antagonism of Pitt and Fox, Shelburne and Burke, the avarice and stupidity of George III, the Union, the conjugal troubles of the Prince of Wales, and the war with France, seem very uninteresting matters in these days. On the other hand, Rowlandson, who was not purely a politician, appeals to us in an intelligible language even after a hundred years have gone by.

Like Hogarth, he was the antithesis of a humorist. Something bitter 16 and gloomily pessimistic runs through all he touches. He is brutal, with an inborn power and an indecorous coarseness. His laughter is loud and his cursing barbarous. Ear-piercing notes escape from the widely opened lips of his singers, and the tears come thickly from the eyes of his sentimental old ladies who are hanging on the declamation of a tragic actress. His comedy is produced by the simplest means. As a rule any sort of contrast is enough: fat and thin, big and little, young wife and old husband, young husband and old wife, shying horse and helpless rider on a Sunday out. Or else he brings the physical and moral qualities of his figures into an absurd contrast with their age, calling, or behaviour: musicians are deaf, dancing masters bandy-legged, servants wear the dresscoats and orders of lords, hideous old maids demean themselves like coquettes, parsons get drunk, and grave dignitaries of state dance the cancan. And so, when the servant gets a thrashing, and the coquette a refusal, and the diplomatist loses his orders by getting a fall, it is their punishment for having forgotten their proper place. They are all of them “careers on slippery ground,” with the same punishments as Hogarth delighted to depict. But Rowlandson became another man when he set himself to represent the life of the people.

Born in July 1756, in a narrow alley of old London, he grew up amidst the people. As a young man he saw Paris, Germany, and the Low Countries. 17 He went regularly to all clubs where there was high play. As man, painter, and draughtsman alike, he stood in the midst of life. Street scenes in Paris and London engage his pencil, especially scenes from Vauxhall Gardens, the meeting-place of fashionable London, and there is often a touch of Menzel in the palpitating life of these pictures—in these lords and ladies, fops and ballad-singers, who pass through the grounds of the gardens in a billowy stream. His illustrations include everything: soldiers, navvies, life at home and in the tavern, in town and in village, on the stage and behind the scenes, at masquerades and in Parliament. When he died at seventy, on 22nd April 1827, the obituaries were able to say of him with truth that he had drawn all England in the years between 1774 and 1809. And all these leaves torn from the life of sailors and peasants, these fairs and markets, beggars, huntsmen, smiths, artizans, and day labourers, were not caricatures, but sketches keenly observed and sharply executed from life. His countrymen have at times a magnificent Michelangelesque stir of life which almost suggests Millet. He was fond of staying at fashionable watering-places, and came back with charming scenes from high life. But his peculiar field of observation was the poor quarter of London. Here are the artizans, the living machines. Endurance, persistence, and resignation may be read in their long, dismal, angular faces. Here are the women of the people, wasted and hectic. Their eyes are set deep in their sockets, their noses sharp and 18 their skin blotched with red spots. They have suffered much and had many children; they have a sodden, depressed, stoically callous appearance; they have borne much, and can bear still more. And then the devastations of gin! that long train of wretched women who of an evening prostitute themselves in the Strand to pay for their lodging! those terrible streets of London, where pallid children beg, and tattered spectres, either sullen or drunken, rove from public-house to public-house, with torn linen and rags hanging about them in shreds! The cry of misery rising from the pavement of great cities was first heard by Rowlandson, and the pages on which he drew the poor of London are a living dance of death of the most ghastly veracity.

But, curiously enough, this same man, who as an observer could be so uncompromisingly sombre, and so rough and brutal as a caricaturist, had also a wonderfully delicate feeling for feminine charm. In the pages he has devoted to the German waltz there lives again the chivalrous elegance of the period of Werther, and that peculiarly English grace which is so fascinating in Gainsborough. His young girls are graceful and wholesome in their round straw hats with broad ribbons; his pretty little wives in their white aprons and coquettish caps recall Chardin. One feels that he has seen Paris and appreciated the fine fragrance of Watteau’s pictures.

Mention should also be made of Henry William Bunbury, who excelled in the drawing of horses and ponies. “A long Story” is an excellent example of his powers as a caricaturist pure and simple. The variations rung on the theme of boredom and the self-centred and animated stupidity of the narrator have been vividly observed, and are earnestly rendered. Rowlandson has the savage indignation of Swift; Bunbury is not savage, but he has the same English seriousness and something of the same brutality. The faces here are crapulous and distorted, and the subject is treated without lightness or good-nature. Perhaps the English do not take their pleasures so very seriously, but undoubtedly they jest in earnest. Yet Bunbury’s incisiveness and his thorough command of what it is his design to express assure him a distinct position as an artist. His “Richmond Hill” shows the pleasanter side of English character. The breeze billowing in the trees, the little lady riding by on her cob, the buxom dames in the shay, and the man spinning 19 past on his curricle, give the scene a spirit of life and movement, besides rendering it an historical document of the period of social history that lies between The Virginians and Vanity Fair.

As a political caricaturist George Cruikshank has the same significance for England as Henri Monnier has for France, and the drawings of the latter often go straight back to the great English artist. But his first works in 1815 were children’s books, and such simple delineations from the world of childhood and the life of society have done more to preserve his name than political caricatures. Their touch of satire is only very slight. Cruikshank’s ladies panting under heavy chignons, his serious and exceedingly prosy dames pouring out tea for serious and not less ceremonious gentlemen, whilst the girls are galloping round Hyde Park on their thoroughbreds, accompanied by a brilliant escort of fashionable young men—they are all of them not so much caricatures as pictures freshly caught from life. He had a great sense 20 for toilettes, balls, and parties. And he could draw with artistic observation and tender feeling the babbling lips and shining eyes of children, the shy confidence of the little ones, their timid curiosity and their bashful advances. And thus he opened up the way along which his disciples advanced with so much success.

The style of illustration has adapted itself to the altered character of English life. What at first constituted the originality of English caricaturists was their mordant satire. Everything was painted in exceedingly vivid colours. Whatever was calculated to bring out an idea in comic or brutal relief—great heads and little bodies, an absurd similarity between persons and animals, the afflorescence of costume—was seized upon eagerly. These artists fought for the weary and heavy-laden, and mercilessly lashed the cut-throats and charlatans. They delighted in spontaneous obscenity, exuberant vigour, and undisguised coarseness. Men were shaken by a broad Aristophanic laughter till they seemed like epileptics. At the time when the Empire style came into England, Gillray could dare to represent by speaking likenesses some of the best-known London beauties, in a toilette which the well developed Madame Tallien could not have worn with more assurance. Such things were no longer possible when England grew out of her awkward age. After the time of Gillray a complete change came over the spirit of English caricature. Everything brutal or bitterly personal was abandoned. The clown put on his dress-clothes, and John Bull became a gentleman. Even 21 by Cruikshank’s time caricature had become serious and well-bred. And his disciples were indeed not caricaturists at all, but addressed themselves solely to a delicately poetic representation of subjects. They know neither Rowlandson’s innate force and bitter laughter, nor the gallows humour and savagery of Hogarth; they are amiable and tenderly grave observers, and their drawings are not caricatures, but charming pictures of manners.

Punch, which was founded in 1841, has perhaps caught the social and political physiognomy of England in the middle of the nineteenth century with the greatest delicacy. It is a household paper, a periodical read by the youngest girls. All the piquant things with which the Parisian papers are filled are therefore absolutely excluded. It scrupulously ignores the style of thing to which the Journal Amusant owes three-fourths of its matter. Every number contains one big political caricature, but otherwise it moves almost entirely in the region of domestic life. Students flirting with pretty barmaids, neat little dressmakers carrying heavy bonnet-boxes and pursued by old gentlemen—even these are scenes which go a little too far for the refined tone of the paper which has been adapted to the drawing-room.

Next to Cruikshank, the Nestor of caricature, must be mentioned John Leech, who between 1841 and 1864 was the leading artist on Punch. In his drawings there is already to be found the high-bred and fragrant delicacy of the English painting of the present time. They stand in relation to the whimsical and vigorous works of Rowlandson as the fine esprit of a rococo abbé to the coarse and healthy wit of Rabelais. The mildness of his own temperament is reflected in his sketches. Others have been the cause of more laughter, but he loved beauty and purity. Men are not often drawn by him, or if he draws them they are always “pretty fellows,” born gentlemen. His young women are not coquettish and chic, but simple, natural, and comely. The old English brutality and coarseness have become amiable, subtle, refined, mild, and seductive in John Leech. He is a fine and delicate spirit, who seems very ethereal beside Hogarth and Rowlandson, those giants fed on roast-beef; he prefers to occupy himself with sport and boating, the season and its fashions, and is at home in public gardens, at balls, and at the theatre. Here a pretty baby is being taken for an airing in Hyde Park by a tidy little 22 nurse-maid, and there on mamma’s arm goes a charming schoolgirl, who is being enthusiastically greeted by good-looking boys; here again a young wife is sitting by the fireside with a novel in her hand and her feet out of her slippers, while she looks dreamily at the glimmering flame. Or a girl is standing on the shore in a large straw hat, with her hand shading her eyes and the wind fluttering her dress. Even his “Children of the Mobility” are little angels of grace and purity, in spite of their rags. The background, be it room, street, or landscape, is merely given with a few strokes, but it is of more than common charm. Every plate of Leech has a certain fragrance and lightness of touch and a delicacy of line which has since been attained only by Frederick Walker. His simplicity of stroke recalls the old Venetian woodcuts. There is not an unnecessary touch. Everything is in keeping, everything has a significance.

Leech’s successor, George du Maurier, is less delicate—that is to say, not so entirely and loftily æsthetic. He is less exclusively poetic, but lives more in actual life, and suffers less from the raw breath of reality. At the same time, his drawing is pithier and more incisive; one discerns his French training. In 1857 du Maurier was a pupil of Gleyre, and returned straight to England when Leech’s place on Punch became vacant by his death. Since that time du Maurier has been the head of the English school of drawing—of the diarists of that society which is displayed in Hyde Park during the season, and found in London theatres and dining-rooms, and in well-kept English pleasure grounds, at garden parties and tennis meetings, the leaders of clubs and 23 drawing-rooms. His snobs rival those of Thackeray, but he has also a special preference for the fair sex—for charming women and girls who race about the lawn at tennis in large hats and bright dresses, or sit by the fire in fashionable apartments, or hover through a ball-room waltzing in their airy skirts of tulle. The coquettishness of his little ones is entirely charming, and so too is the superior and comical exclusiveness of his æsthetically brought-up children, who will associate with no children not æsthetic.

But the works of Charles Keene are the most English of all. Here the English reveal that complete singularity which distinguishes them from all other mortals. Both as a draughtsman and as a humorist Keene stands with the greatest of the century, on the same level as Daumier and Hokusai. An old bachelor, an original, a provincial living in the vast city, nothing pleased him better than to mix with the humbler class, to mount on the omnibus seat beside the driver, to visit a costermonger, or sit in a dingy suburban tavern. He led a Bohemian life, and was, nevertheless, a highly respectable, economical, and careful man. Trips into the country and little suppers with his friends constituted his greatest pleasures. He was a member of several glee clubs, and when he sat at home played the Scotch bagpipes, to the horror of all his neighbours. During his last years his only company was an old dog, to which he, like poor Tassaert, clung with a touching tenderness. All the less did he care about “the world.” Grace and beauty are not to be sought in his drawings. For him “Society” did not exist. As du Maurier is the chronicler of drawing-rooms, Keene was the fine and unsurpassed 24 observer of the people and of humble London life, and he extended towards them a friendly optimism and a brotherly sympathy. An endless succession of the most various, the truest, and the most animated types is contained in his work: mighty guardsmen swagger, cane in hand, burly and solemn; cabmen and omnibus drivers, respectable middle-class citizens, servants, hairdressers, the City police, waiters, muscular Highlanders, corpulent self-made City men, the seething discontent of Whitechapel; and here and there amidst them all incomparable old tradesmen’s wives, and big, raw-boned village landladies in the Highlands. Keene has something so natural and self-evident in his whole manner of expression, that no one is conscious of the art implied by such drawing. Amongst those living in his time only Menzel could touch him as a draughtsman, and it was not through chance that each, in spite of their differences of temperament, greatly admired the other. Keene bought every drawing of Menzel’s that he could get, and Menzel at his death possessed a large collection of Keene’s sketches.

In the beginning of the century Germany had no draughtsmen comparable for realistic impressiveness with Rowlandson. At a time when the great art lay so completely bound in the shackles of the Classic school, drawing, too, appeared only in traditional forms. The artist ventured to draw as he liked just as little as he ventured to paint anything at all as he saw it; for both there were rules and strait-waistcoats. Almost everything that was produced in those years looks weak and flat to-day, forced in composition and amateurish in drawing. Where Rowlandson with his brusque powerful strokes recalls Michael Angelo or Rembrandt, the Germans have something laboured, diffident, and washed out. Yet even here a couple of unpretentious etchers rise as welcome and surprising figures out of the tedious waste of academic production, though they were little honoured by their contemporaries. In their homely sketches, however, they have remained more classic than those who put on the classical garment as if for eternity. What the painter refused to paint, and the patrons of art who sought after ideas would not allow to count as a picture, because the subject seemed to them too poor, and the form too commonplace and undignified—military scenes at home 25 and abroad, typical and soldierly figures from the great time of the war of Liberation, the life of the people, the events of the day—was what the Nuremberg friends, Johann Adam Klein and Johann Christoph Erhard, diligently engraved upon copper with sympathetic care, and so left posterity a picture of German life in the beginning of the century that seems the more sincere and earnest because it has paid toll neither to style in composition nor to idealism. This invaluable Klein was a healthy and sincere realist, from whom the æsthetic theories of the time recoiled without effect, and he had no other motive than to render faithfully whatever he saw. Even in Vienna, whither he came as a young man in 1811, it was not the picture galleries which roused him to his first studies, but the picturesque national costumes of the Wallachians, Poles, and Hungarians, and their horses and peculiar vehicles. A sojourn among the country manors of Styria gave him opportunity for making a number of pretty sketches of rural life. In the warlike years 1813 and 1814, with their marching and their bivouacs, he went about all day long drawing amongst the soldiers. Even in Rome it was not the statues that fascinated him, but the bright street scenes, the ecclesiastical solemnities, and the picturesque caravans of country people. And when he settled down in Nuremburg, and afterwards in Munich, he did not cease to be sensitive to all impressions that forced themselves on him in varying fulness. The basis of his art was faithful and loving observation of life as it was around him, the pure joy the genuine artist has in making a picture of everything he sees.

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Poor Erhard, who at twenty-six ended his life by suicide, was a yet more delicate and sensitive nature. The marching of Russian troops through his native town roused him to his first works, and even in these early military and canteen scenes he shows himself an exceptionally sharp and positive observer. The costumes, the uniforms, the teams and waggons, are drawn with decision and accuracy. From Vienna he made walking tours to the picturesque regions of the Schneeberg, wandered through Salzburg and Pinzgau, and gazed with wonder at the idyllic loveliness of nature as she is in these regions, on the cosy rooms of the peasants with their great tiled stoves and the sun-burnt figures of the country people. He had a heart for nature, an intimate, poetic, and profound love for what is humble and familiar—for homely meadows, trees, and streams, for groves and hedgerows, for quiet gardens and sequestered spots. He approached everything with observation as direct as a child’s. Both Klein and he endeavoured to grasp a fragment of nature distinctly, and without any kind of transformation or generalisation; and this fresh, unvarnished, thoroughly German feeling for nature gives them, rather than Mengs and Carstens, the right to be counted as ancestors of the newer German art.

Klein and Erhard having set out in advance, others, such as Haller von Hallerstein, L. C. Wagner, F. Rechberger, F. Moessmer, K. Wagner, E. A. Lebschée, and August Geist, each after his own fashion, made little voyages of discovery into the world of nature belonging to their own country. But Erhard, who died in 1822, has found his greatest disciple in a young Dresden master, whose name makes the familiar appeal of an old lullaby which suddenly strikes the ear amid the bustle of the world—in Ludwig Richter, familiar to all Germans. Richter himself has designated Chodowiecki, Gessner, and Erhard as those whose contemplative love of nature guided him to his own path. What Leech, that charming draughtsman of the child-world, was to the English, Ludwig Richter became for the Germans. Not that he could be compared with Leech in artistic qualities. Beside those of the British artist his works are like the exercises of a gifted amateur: they have a petty correctness and a bourgeois neatness of line. But Germans are quite willing to forget the artistic point of view in 27 relation to their Ludwig Richter. Sunny and childlike as he is, they love him too much to care to see his artistic failings. Here is really that renowned German “Gemüth” of which others make so great an abuse.

“I am certainly living here in a rather circumscribed fashion, but in a very cheerful situation outside the town, and I am writing you this letter (it is Sunday afternoon) in a shady arbour, with a long row of rose-bushes in bloom before me. Now and then they are ruffled by a pleasant breeze—which is also the cause of a big blot being on this sheet, as it blew the page over.” This one passage reveals the whole man. Can one think of Ludwig Richter living in any town except Dresden, or imagine him except in this dressing-gown, seated on a Sunday afternoon in his shady arbour with the rose-bushes, and surrounded by laughing children? That profound domestic sentiment which runs through his works with a biblical fidelity of heart is reflected in the homeliness of the artist, who has remained all his life a big, unsophisticated child; and his autobiography, in its patriarchal simplicity, is like a refreshing draught from a pure mountain spring. Richter survived into the present as an original type from a time long vanished. What old-world figures did he not see around him as a boy, when he went about, eager for novelty, with his grandfather, the copperplate printer, who in his leisure hours studied alchemy and the art of producing gold, and was surrounded by an innumerable quantity of clocks, ticking, striking, and making cuckoo notes in his dark workroom; or as he listened to his blind, garrulous grandmother, around whom the children 28 and old wives of the neighbourhood used to gather to hear her tales. That was in 1810, and two generations later, as an old man surrounded by his grandsons, he found once more the old, merry child life of his own home. And it was once more a fragment of the good old times, when on Christmas Eve the little band came shouting round the house of gingerbread from Hansel and Gretel which grandfather had built out of real gingerbread after his own drawing.

“If my art never entered amongst the lilies and roses on the summit of Parnassus, it bloomed by the roads and banks, on the hedges and in the meadows, and travellers resting by the wayside were glad of it, and little children made wreaths and crowns of it, and the solitary lover of nature rejoiced in its colour and fragrance, which mounted like a prayer to Heaven.” Richter had the right to inscribe these words in his diary on his eightieth birthday.

Through his works there echoes a humming and chiming like the joyous cry of children and the twitter of birds. Even his landscapes are filled with that blissful and solemn feeling that Sunday and the spring produce together in a lonely walk over field and meadow. The “Gemüthlichkeit,” the cordiality, of German family-life, with a trait of contemplative romance, could find such a charming interpreter in none but him, the old man who went about in his long loose coat and had the face of an ordinary village schoolmaster. Only he who retained to his old age that childlike heart—to which the kingdom of heaven is given even in art—could really know the heart of the child’s world, which even at a later date in Germany was not drawn more simply or more graciously.

His illustrations present an almost exhaustive picture of the life of the German people at home and in the world, at work and in their pleasure, in suffering and in joy. He follows it through all grades and all seasons of the year. Everything is true and genuine, everything seized from life in its fulness: the child splashing in a tub; the lad shouting as he catches the first snowflake in his hat; the lovers seated whispering in their cosy little chamber, or wandering arm in arm on their “homeward way through the corn” amid the evening landscape touched with gold; the girl at her spinning-wheel and 29 the hunter in the forest, the travelling journeyman, the beggar, the well-to-do Philistine. The scene is the sitting-room or the nursery, the porch twined with vine, the street with old-fashioned overhanging storeys and turrets, the forest and the field with splendid glimpses into the hazy distance. Children are playing round a great tree, labourers are coming back from the field, or the family is taking its rest in some hour of relaxation. A peaceful quietude and chaste purity spread over everything. Certainly Richter’s drawing has something pedantic and unemphatic, that weak, generalising roundness which, beside the sharp, powerful stroke of the old artists, has the spirit of a drawing-master. But what he has to give is always influenced by delicate and loving observation, and never stands in contradiction to truth. He does not give the whole of nature, but neither does he give what is unnatural. He is one of the first of Germans whose art did not spring from a negation of reality, produced by treating it on an arbitrary system, but rested instead upon tender reverie, transfigured into poetry. When in the fifties he stayed a summer in pleasant Loschwitz, he wrote in his diary: “O God, how magnificent is the wide country round, from my little place upon the hill! So divinely beautiful, and so sensuously beautiful! The deep blue heaven, the wide green world, the bright and fair May landscape alive with a thousand voices.”

In all that generation, to whom existence seemed so sad, Ludwig Richter is one of the few who really felt content with the earth, and held the life around them to be the best and healthiest material for the artist. And that is the substance of the plate to which he gave the title “Rules of Art.” A wide landscape stretches away with mighty oaks slanting down, and a purling spring from which a young girl is drawing water, whilst a high-road, enlivened by travellers young and old, runs over hill and dale into the sunny distance. In the midst of this free rejoicing world the artist is seated with his pencil. And above stands the motto written by Richter’s hand—

“Und die Sonne Homer’s, siehe sie lächelt auch uns.”

By the success of Richter certain disciples were inspired 30 to tread the same ground, although none of them equalled him in his charming human qualities. And least of all Oskar Pletsch, whose self-sufficient smile is soon recognised in all its emptiness. Everything which in Richter was genuine and original is in him flat, laboured, and prearranged. His landscapes, which in part are very pretty, are derived from R. Schuster; what seems good in the children is Richter’s property, and what Pletsch contributed is the conventionality. Albert Hendschel also stood on Richter’s shoulders, but his popularity is more justifiable. Even in these days one takes pleasure in his sketch-books, in which he immortalised the joy and sorrow of youth in such a delicious way.

Eugen Neureuther worked in Munich, and as an etcher revelled in the charming play of arabesques and ornamental borders, and told of pleasant little scenes from the life of the Bavarian people in his pretty peasant quatrains.

The rise of caricature in Germany dates from the year 1848. Though there are extant from the first third of the century no more than a few topical papers of no artistic importance, periodical publications, which soon brought a large number of vigorous caricaturists into notice, began to appear from that time, owing to the political agitations of the period. Kladderadatsch was brought out in Berlin, and Fliegende Blätter was founded in Munich, and side by side with it Münchener Bilderbogen. But later generations will be referred par excellence to Fliegende Blätter for a picture of German life in the nineteenth century. What the painters of those years forgot to transmit is here stored up: a history of German manners which could not imaginably be more exact or more exhaustive. From the very first day it united on its staff of 31 collaborators almost all the most important names in their own peculiar branch. Schwind, Spitzweg, that genial humorist, and many others whom the German people will not forget, won their spurs here, and were inexhaustible in pretty theatre scenes, satires on German and Italian singing, memorial sketches of Fanny Elsler, of the inventor of the dress coat, etc., which enlivened the whole civilized world at that time. This elder generation of draughtsmen on Fliegende Blätter were, indeed, not free from the guilt of producing stereotyped figures. The travelling Englishman, the Polish Jew, the counter-jumper, the young painter, the rich boor, the stepmother, the housemaid, and the nervous countess are everywhere the same in the first volumes. In caricature, just as in “great art,” they still worked a little in accordance with rules and conventions. To observe life with an objective unprejudiced glance, and to hold it fast in all its palpitating movement, was reserved for men of later date.

Two of the greatest humorists of the world in illustrative art, Wilhelm Busch and Adolf Oberländer, stand at the head of those who ushered in the flourishing period of German caricature. They are masters, and take 32 in with their glance the entire social world of our time, and in their brilliant prints they have made a history of civilisation for the epoch which will be more vivid and instructive for posterity than the most voluminous works of the greatest historians. Their heads are known by Lenbach’s pictures. One has an exceptionally clever, expressive countenance—a thorough painter’s head. The humorist may be recognised by the curious narrowing of one eye, the well-known eye of the humorist that sees everything, proves everything, and holds fast every absurdity in the gestures, every eccentricity in the bearing of his neighbour. That is Wilhelm Busch.

In the large orbs of the other—orbs which seem to grow strangely wide by long gazing as at some fixed object—there is no smile of deliberate mischief, and it is not easy to associate the name of Oberländer with this Saturnian round face, with its curiously timid glance. One is reminded of the definition of humour as “smiling amid tears.”

Even in those days when he came every year to Munich and painted in Lenbach’s studio, Busch was a shy and moody man, who thawed only in the narrowest circle of his friends: now he has buried himself in a market-town in the province of Hanover, in Wiedensahl, which, according to Ritter’s Gazetteer, numbers eight hundred and twenty-eight inhabitants. He lives in the house of his brother-in-law, the clergyman of the parish, and gives himself up to the culture of bees. His laughter has fallen silent, and it is only a journal on bees that now receives contributions from his hand. But what works this hermit of Wiedensahl produced in the days when he migrated from Düsseldorf and Antwerp to Munich, and began in 1859 his series of sketches for Fliegende Blätter! The first were stiff and clumsy, the text in prose and not particularly witty. But the earliest work with a versified text, Der Bauer und der Windmüller, contains in the germ all the qualities which later found such brilliant expression in Max und Moritz, in Der Heilige Antonius, Die Fromme Helene, and Die Erlebnisse Knopps, 33 des Junggesellen, and made Busch’s works an inexhaustible fountain of mirth and enjoyment.

Busch unites an uncommonly sharp eye with a marvellously flexible hand. Wild as his subjects generally are, he solves the greatest difficulties as easily as though they were child’s play. His heroes appear in situations of the most urgent kind, which place their bodily parts in violent and exceedingly uncomfortable positions: they thrash others or get thrashed themselves, they stumble or fall. And in what a masterly way are all these anomalies seized, the boldest foreshortenings and the most flying movements! Untrained eyes see only a scrawl, but for those who know how to look, a drawing by Busch is life itself, freed from all unnecessary detail, and marked down in its great characteristic lines. And amid all this simplification, what knowledge there is under the guise of carelessness, and what fine calculation! Busch is at once simpler and more inventive than the English. With a maze of flourishes run half-mad, and a few points and blotches, he forms a sparkling picture. With the fewest possible means he hits the essential point, and for that reason he is justly called by Grand Cartaret the classic of caricaturists, le roi de la charge et la bouffonnerie.

Oberländer, without whom it would be impossible to imagine Fliegende Blätter, has not fallen silent. He works on, “fresh and splendid as on the first day.” A gifted nature like Busch, he possesses, at the same time, that fertility of which Dürer said: “A good painter is inwardly complete and opulent, and were it possible for him to live eternally, then by virtue of those inward ideas of which Plato writes he would be always able to pour something new into his works.” It is now thirty years ago that he began his labours for Fliegende Blätter, and since that time some drawing of his, which has filled every one with delight, has appeared almost every week. Kant said that Providence has given men three things to console them amid the miseries of life—hope, sleep, and laughter. If he is right, Oberländer is amongst the greatest benefactors of mankind. Every one of his new sketches maintains the old precious 34 qualities. It might be said that, by the side of the comedian Busch, Oberländer seems a serious psychologist. Wilhelm Busch lays his whole emphasis on the comical effects of simplicity; he knows how to reduce an object in a masterly fashion to its elemental lines, which are comic in themselves by their epigrammatic pregnancy. He calls forth peals of laughter by the farcical spirit of his inventions and the boldness with which he renders his characters absurd. He is also the author of his own letterpress. His drawings are unimaginable without the verse, without the finely calculated and dramatic succession of situations growing to a catastrophe. Oberländer gets his effect purely by means of the pictorial elements in his representation, and attains a comical result, neither by the distorted exaggeration of what is on the face of the matter ridiculous, nor by an elementary simplification, but by a refined sharpening of character. It seems uncanny that a man should have such eyes in his head; there is something almost visionary in the way he picks out of everything the determining feature of its being. And whilst he faintly exaggerates what is characteristic and renders it distinct, his picture is given a force and power of conviction to which no previous caricaturist has attained, with so much discretion at the same time. No one has attained the drollness of Oberländer’s people, animals, and plants. He draws à la Max, à la Makart, Rethel, Genelli, or Piloty, hunts in the desert or theatrical representations, Renaissance architecture run mad or the most modern European mashers. He is as much at home in the Cameroons as in Munich, and in transferring the droll scenes of human life to the animal world he is a classic. He sports with hens, herrings, dogs, ducks, ravens, bears, and elephants as 35 Hokusai does with his frogs. Beside such animals all the Reinecke series of Wilhelm Kaulbach look like “drawings from the copybook of little Moritz.” And landscapes which in their tender intimacy of feeling seem like anticipations of Cazin sometimes form the background of these creatures. One can scarcely err in supposing that posterity will place certain plates from the work of this quiet, amiable man beside the best which the history of drawing has anywhere to show.

The Charivari takes its place with Punch and Fliegende Blätter.

In the land of Rabelais also caricature has flourished since the opening of the century, in spite of official masters who reproached her with desecrating the sacred temple of art, and in spite of the gendarmes who put her in gaol. Here, too, it was the draughtsmen who first broke with æsthetic prejudices, and saw the laughing and the weeping dramas of life with an unprejudiced glance.

Debucourt and Carle Vernet, the pair who made their appearance immediately after the storms of the Revolution, are alike able and charming artists, who depict the pleasures of the salon in a graceful style; and they rival the great satirists on the other side of the Channel in the incisiveness of their drawing, and frequently even surpass them by the added charm of colour.

Carle Vernet, originally an historical painter, remembered that he had married the daughter of the younger Moreau, and set himself to portray the doings of the jeunesse dorée of the end of the eighteenth century in his incroyables and his merveilleuses. Crazy, eccentric, and superstitious, he divided his time afterwards between women and his club-fellows, horses and dogs. He survives in the history of art as the chronicler of sport, hunting, racing, and drawing-room and café scenes.

Louis Philibert Debucourt was a pupil of Vien, and had painted genre pictures in the spirit of Greuze before he turned in 1785 to colour engraving. In this year appeared the pretty “Menuet de la Mariée,” with 36 the peasant couples dancing, and the dainty châtelaine who laughingly opens the ball with the young husband. After that he had found his specialty, and in the last decade of the eighteenth century he produced the finest of his colour engravings. In 1792 there is the wonderful promenade in the gallery of the Palais Royal, with its swarming crowd of young officers, priests, students, shop-girls, and cocottes; in 1797 “Grandmother’s Birthday,” “Friday Forenoon at the Parisian Bourse,” and many others. The effects of technique which he achieved by means of colour engraving are surprising. A freshness like that of water colour lies on these yellow straw hats, lightly rouged cheeks, and rosy shoulders. To white silk cloaks trimmed with fur he gives the iridescence of a robe by Netscher. If there survived nothing except Debucourt from the whole art of the eighteenth century, he would alone suffice to give an idea of the entire spirit of the time. Only one note would be wanting, the familiar simplicity of Chardin. The smiling grace of Greuze, the elegance of Watteau, and the sensuousness of Boucher—he has them all, although they are weakened in him, and precisely by his affectation is he the true child of his epoch. The crowd which is promenading beneath the trees of the Palais Royal in 1792 is no longer the same which fills the drawing-rooms of Versailles and Petit Trianon in the pages of Cochin. The faces are coarser and more plebeian. Red waistcoats with breloques as large as fists, and stout canes with great gold tops, make the costume of the men loud and ostentatious, while eccentric hats, broad sashes, and high coiffures bedizen the ladies more than is consistent with elegance. At the same time, Debucourt gives this democracy an aristocratic bearing. His prostitutes look like duchesses. His art is an attenuated echo of the rococo period. In him the décadence is embodied, and all the grace and elegance of the century is once more united, although it has become more bourgeois.

The Empire again was less favourable to caricature. Not that there was any want of material, but the censorship kept a strict watch over the welfare of France. Besides, the artists who made their appearance after David lived on Olympus, and would have nothing to do with the common things of life. Neither draughtsmen nor engravers could effect anything so long as they saw themselves overlooked by a Greek or Roman phantom as they bent over their paper or their plate of copper, and felt it their duty to suggest the stiff lines of antique 37 statues beneath the folds of modern costume.

Bosio was the genuine product of this style. Every one of his pictures has become tedious, because of a spurious classicism to which he adhered with inflexible consistency. He cannot draw a grisette without seeing her with David’s eyes. It deprives his figures of truth and interest. Something of the correctness of a schoolmistress is peculiar to them. His grace is too classic, his merriment too well-bred, and everything in them too carefully arranged to give the idea of scenes rapidly depicted from life. Beauty of line is offered in place of spontaneity of observation, and even the character of the drawing is lost in a pedantic elegance which envelopes everything with the uniformly graceful veil of an insipidly fluent outline.

As soon as Romanticism had broken with the classic system, certain great draughtsmen, who laid a bold hand on modern life without being shackled by æsthetic formulæ, came to the front in France. Henri Monnier, the eldest of them, was born a year after the proclamation of the Empire. Cloaks, plumes, and sabretasches were the first impressions of his youth; he saw the return of triumphant armies and heard the fanfare of victorious trumpets. The Old Guard remained his ideal, the inglorious kingship of the Restoration his abhorrence. He was a supernumerary clerk in the Department of Justice when in 1828 his first brochure, Mœurs administratives dessinées d’aprés nature par Henri Monnier, disclosed to his superiors that the eyes of this poor young man in the service of the Ministry had seen more than they should have done. Dismissed from his post, he was obliged to support himself by his pencil, and became the chronicler of the epoch. In Monnier’s prints breathes the happy Paris of the good old times, a Paris which in these days scarcely exists even in the provinces. His “Joseph Proudhomme,” from his shoe-buckles to his stand-up collar, from his white cravat to his blue spectacles, is as immortal as Eisele und Beisele, Schulze und Müller, or Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Monnier himself is his own Proudhomme. He is the Philistine in Paris, enjoying little Parisian idylls with a bourgeois complacency. With him there is no distinction between beautiful and ugly; he finds that everything in nature can be turned to account. How admirably the different worlds of Parisian society are discriminated in his Quartiers de Paris! How finely he has portrayed the grisette of the period, with her following of young tradesmen and poor students! As yet she has not blossomed into the fine lady, the 38 luxurious blasée woman of the next generation. She is still the bashful modiste or dressmaker’s apprentice whose outings in the country are described by Paul de Kock, a pretty child in a short skirt who lives in an attic and dresses up only when she goes to the theatre or into the country on a Sunday. Monnier gives her an air of good-nature, something delightfully childlike. In the society of her adorers she is content with the cheapest pleasures, drinks cider and eats cakes, rides on a donkey or breakfasts amid the trees, and hardly coquets at all when a fat old gentleman follows her on the boulevards. These innocent flirtations remind one as little of the more recent lorettes of Gavarni as these in their turn anticipate the drunken street-walkers of Rops.

Under Louis Philippe began the true modern period of French caricature, the flourishing time when really great artists devoted themselves to it. It never raised its head more proudly than under the bourgeois king, whose onion head always served the relentless Philippon as a target for his wit. It was never armed in more formidable fashion; it never dealt more terrible blows. Charles Philippon’s famous journal La Caricature was the most powerful lever that the republicans used against the “July government”; it was equally feared by the Ministry, the bourgeoisie, and the throne. When the Charivari followed La Caricature in 1832, political cartoons began to give way to the simple portraiture of manners in French life. The powder made for heavy guns exploded in a facile play of fireworks improvised for the occasion.

French society in the nineteenth century has to thank principally Daumier and Gavarni for being brought gradually within the sphere of artistic representation. These men are usually called caricaturists, yet they were in reality the great historians of their age. Through long years they laboured every week and almost every day at their great history, which embraced thousands of chapters—at a true zoology of the human species; and their work, drawn upon stone in black and white, proves them not merely genuine historians, but really eminent artists who merit a place beside the greatest.

When in his young days Daubigny trod the pavement of the Sistine 39 Chapel in Rome, he is said to have exclaimed in astonishment, “That looks as if it had been done by Daumier!” and from that time Daumier was aptly called the Michael Angelo of caricature. Even when he is laughing there is a Florentine inspiration of the terrible in his style, a grotesque magnificence, a might suggestive of Buonarotti. In the period before 1848 he dealt the constitutional monarchy crushing blows by his drawings. “Le Ventre legislatif” marks the furthest point to which political caricature ever ventured in France. But when he put politics on one side and set himself free from Philippon, this same man made the most wonderful drawings from life. His “Robert Macaire” giving instructions to his clerk as a tradesman, sending his patients exorbitant bills as doctor to the poor, lording it over the bourse as banker, taking bribes as juryman, and fleecing a peasant as land-agent, is the incarnation of the bourgeois monarchy, a splendid criticism on the money-grubbing century. Politicians, officials, artists, actors, honest citizens, old-clothes-mongers, newspaper-boys, impecunious painters, the most various and the basest creatures are treated by his pencil, and appear on pages which are often terrible in their depth and truthfulness of observation. The period of Louis Philippe is accurately portrayed in these prints, every one of which belongs to the great volume of the human tragicomedy. In his “Émotions parisiennes” and “Bohémiens de Paris” he deals with misfortune, hunger, the impudence of vice, and the horror of misery. His “Histoire ancienne” ridiculed the absurdity of Classicism à la David at a time when it was still regarded as high treason to touch this sacred fane. These modern figures with the classical pose, which to some extent parodied David’s pictures, were probably what first brought his contemporaries to a sense of the stiffness and falsity of the whole movement; and at a later period Offenbach also contributed his best ideas with much the same result. Moreover, Daumier was a landscape-painter of the first order. No one has more successfully rendered the appearance of bridges and houses, of quays and streets under a downpour, of nature enfeebled as it is in the precincts of Paris. He was an instantaneous photographer without a rival, a physiognomist such as Breughel was in the sixteenth century, Jan Steen and Brouwer in the seventeenth, 40 and Chodowiecki in the eighteenth, with the difference that his drawing was as broad and powerful as Chodowiecki’s was delicate and refined. This inborn force of line, suggestive of Jordaens, places his sketches as high, considered as works of art, as they are invaluable as historical documents. The treatment is so summary, the outline so simplified, the pantomime, gesticulation, and pose always so expressive; and Daumier’s influence on several artists is beyond doubt. Millet, the great painter of peasants, owes much to the draughtsman of the bourgeois. Precisely what constitutes his “style,” the great line, the simplification, the intelligent abstention from anecdotic trifles, are things which he learnt from Daumier.

During the years when he drew for the Charivari, Gavarni was the exact opposite of Daumier. In the one was a forceful strength, in the other a refined grace; in the one brusque and savage observation and almost menacing sarcasm, in the other the wayward mood of the butterfly flitting lightly from flower to flower. Daumier might be compared with Rabelais; Gavarni, the spirituel journalist of the grand monde and the demi-monde, the draughtsman of elegance and of roués and lorettes, might be compared with Molière. Born of poor parentage in Paris in 1801, and in his youth a mechanician, he supported himself from the year 1835 by fashion prints and costume drawings. He undertook the conduct of a fashion journal, Les Gens du Monde, and began it with a series of drawings from the life of the jeunesse dorée: les Lorettes, les Actrices, les Fashionables, les Artistes, les Étudiants de Paris, les Bals masqués, les Souvenirs du Carnaval, la Vie des Jeunes Hommes. A new world was here revealed with bold traits. The women of Daumier are good, fat mothers, always busy, quick-witted, and of an enviable constitution; women who are careful in the management of their household, and who go to market and take their husband’s place at his office when necessary. In Gavarni the women are piquant and given to pouting, draped in silk and enveloped in soft velvet mantles. They are fond of dining in the cabinet particulier, and of scratching the name of their lover, for the time being, upon crystal mirrors.

Gavarni was the first who seized the worldly side of modern life; he portrayed elegant figures full of chic, and gave them a garb which fitted them exactly. In his own dress he had a taste for what was dandified, 41 and he plunged gaily into the enjoyment of the Parisian life which eddied around in a whirl of pleasure. The present generation feels that the air in such old journals of fashion is heavy. In every work of art there is, in addition to what endures, a fine perfume that evaporates after a certain number of years, and is no longer perceptible to those who come afterwards. What is fresh and modern to-day looks to-morrow like the dried flowers which the botanist keeps in a herbarium. And those who draw the fashions of their age are specially liable to this swift decay. Thus many of Gavarni’s lithographs have the effect of pallid pictures of a vanished world. But the generation of 1830 honoured in him the same charmeur, the same master of enamoured grace, which that of 1730 had done in Watteau. He was sought after as an inventor of fashions, whom the tailor Humann, the Worth of the “July Monarchy,” regarded as his rival. He was the discoverer of all the fairy costumes which formed the chief attraction at masquerades and theatres, the delicate gourmet of the eternal feminine; and having dangled much after women, he knew how to render the wave of a petticoat, the seductive charm of a well-proportioned leg, and the coquettishness of a new coiffure with the most familiar connoisseurship. He has been called the Balzac of draughtsmen. And the sentences at the bottom of his 42 sketches, for which he is also responsible, are as audacious as the pictures themselves. Thus, when the young exquisite in the series “La Vie des Jeunes Hommes” stands with his companion before a skeleton in the anthropological museum, the little woman opines with a shudder, “When one thinks that this is a man, and that women love that”!

But that is only one side of the sphinx. He is only half known when one thinks only of the draughtsman of ladies’ fashions who celebrated the free and easy graces of the demi-monde and the wild licence of the carnival. At bottom Gavarni was not a frivolous butterfly, but an artist of a strangely sombre imagination, a profound and melancholy philosopher who had a prescience of all the mysteries of life. All the mighty problems which the century produced danced before his spirit like spectral notes of interrogation.

The transition was made when, as an older man, he depicted the cold, sober wakening that follows the wild night. Constantin Guys had already worked on these lines. He was an unfortunate and ailing man, who passed his existence, like Verlaine, in hospital, and died in an almshouse. Guys has not left much behind him, but in that little he shows himself the true forerunner of the moderns, and it is not a mere chance that Baudelaire, the ancestor of the décadence, established Guys’ memory. These women who wander aimlessly about the streets with weary movements and heavy eyes deadened with absinthe, and who flit through the ball-room like bats, have nothing of the innocent charm of Monnier’s grisettes. They are the uncanny harbingers of death, the demoniacal brides of Satan. Guys exercised on Gavarni an influence which brought into being his Invalides du sentiment, his Lorettes vieilles, and his Fourberies de femmes. “The pleasure of all creatures is mingled with bitterness.” The frivolous worldling became a misanthrope from whom no secret of the foul city was hidden; a pessimist who had begun to recognise the human brute, the swamp-flower of over-civilisation, the “bitter fruit which is inwardly full of ashes,” in the queen of the drawing-room 43 as in the prostitute of the gutter. Henceforth he only recognises a love whose pleasures are to be reckoned amongst the horrors of death. His works could be shown to no lady, and yet they are in no sense frivolous: they are terrible and puritanic.

If Daumier by preference showed mastery in his men, Gavarni showed it in his women as no other has done. He is not the powerful draughtsman that Daumier is; he has not the feeling for large movement, but with what terrible directness he analyses faces! He has followed woman through all seasons of life and in every grade, from youth to decay, and from brilliant wealth to filthy misery, and he has written the story of the lorette in monumental strophes: café chantant, villa in the Champs Elysées, equipage, grooms, Bois de Boulogne, procuress, garret, and radish-woman, that final incarnation which Victor Hugo called the sentence of judgment.

And Gavarni went further on this road. His glance became sharper and sharper, and the seriousness of meditation subdued his merriment; he came to the study of his age with the relentless knife of a vivisectionist. Fate had taught him the meaning of the struggle for existence. A journal he had founded in the thirties overwhelmed him with debts. In 1835 he sat in the prison of Clichy, and from that time he meditated on the miserable, tattered creatures whom he saw around him, with other eyes. He studied the toiling masses, and roamed about in slums and wine-caves amongst pickpockets and bullies. And what Paris had not yet revealed to him, he learnt in 1849 in London. Even there he was not the first-comer. Géricault, who as early as 1821 dived into the misery of the vast city, and brought out a series of lithographs, showed him the way. Beggars cowering half dead with exhaustion at a 44 baker’s door, ragged pipers slouching round deserted quarters of the town, poor crippled women wheeled in barrows by hollow-eyed men past splendid mansions and surrounded by the throng of brilliant equipages—these are some of the scenes which he brought home with him from London. But Gavarni excels him in trenchant incisiveness. “What is to be seen in London gratis,” runs the heading of a series of sketches in which he conjures up on paper, in such a terrible manner, the new horrors of this new period: the starvation, the want, and the measureless suffering that hides itself with chattering teeth in the dens of the great city. He went through Whitechapel from end to end, and studied its drunkenness and its vice. How much more forcible are his beggars than those of Callot! The grand series of “Thomas Vireloque” is a dance of death in life; and in it are stated all the problems which have since disturbed our epoch. By this work Gavarni has come down to us as a contemporary, and by it he has become a pioneer. The enigmatical figure of “Thomas Vireloque” starts up in these times, following step by step in the path of his prototype: he is the philosopher of the back streets, the ragged scoundrel with dynamite in his pocket, the incarnation of the bête humaine, of human misery and human vice. Here Gavarni stands far above Hogarth and far above Callot. The ideas on social politics of the first half of the century are concentrated in “Thomas Vireloque.”

Of course the assumption of government by Napoleon III marked a new phase in French caricature. It became more mundane and more highly civilised. All the piquancy and brilliance, waywardness and corruption, looseness and amenity, mirth and affectation of this refined city life, which in those days threw its dazzling splendour over all Europe, found intelligent and subtle interpreters in the young generation of draughtsmen. The Journal pour rire comes under consideration as the leading paper. It was founded in 1848, and in 1856 assumed the title of Journal amusant, under which it is known at the present day.

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47 Gustave Doré, to the lessening of his importance, moved on this ground only in his earliest period. He was barely sixteen and still at school in his native town Burg, in Alsace, when he made an agreement with Philippon, who engaged him for three years on the Journal pour rire. His first drawings date from 1844: “Les animaux socialistes,” which were very suggestive of Grandville, and “Désagréments d’un voyage d’agrément”—something like the German Herr und Frau Buchholz in der Schweiz—which made a considerable sensation by their grotesque wit. In his series “Les différents publics de Paris” and “La Ménagerie Parisienne” he represented with an incisive pencil the opera, the Théâtre des Italiens, the circus, the Odéon and the Jardin des Plantes. But since that time the laurels of historical painting have given him no rest. He turned away from his own age as well as from caricature, and made excursions into all zones and all periods. He visited the Inferno with Dante, lingered in Palestine with the patriarchs of the Old Testament, and ran through the world of wonders with Perrault. The facility of his invention was astonishing, and so too was the aptness with which he seized for illustration on the most vivid scenes from all authors. But he has too much Classicism to be captivating for very long. His compositions dazzle by an appearance of the grand style, but attain only an outward and scenical effect. His figures are academic variations of types originally established by the Greeks and the Cinquescentisti. He forced his talent when he soared into regions where he could not stand without the support of his predecessors. Even in his “Don Quixote” the figures lose in character the larger they become. Everything in Doré is calligraphic, judicious, without individuality, without movement and life, composed in accordance with known rules. There is a touch of Wiertz in him, both in his imagination and in his design, and his youthful works, such as the “Swiss Journey,” in which he merely drew from observation without pretensions to style, will probably last the longest.

In broad lithographs and charming woodcuts, Cham has been the most exhaustive in writing up the diary of modern Parisian life during the period 1848-78. The celebrated caricaturist—he has been called the most brilliant man in France under Napoleon III—had worked in the studio of Delaroche at the same time as Jean François Millet. After 1842 he came forward as Cham (his proper name was Count Amadée de Noë) with drawings which soon made him the artist most in demand on the staff of the Charivari. Neither so profound nor so serious as Gavarni, he has a constant sparkle of vivacity, and is a draughtsman of wonderful verve. In his reviews of the month and of the year, everything which interested Paris in the provinces of invention and fashion, art and literature, science and the theatre, passes before us in turn: the omnibuses with their high imperials, table-turning and spirit-rapping, the opening of the Grands Magasins du Louvre, Madame Ristori, the completion of the Suez Canal, the first newspaper kiosks, New Year’s Day in Paris, the invention of ironclads, the tunnelling of Mont Cenis, Gounod’s Faust, Patti and Nilsson, the strike of the tailors and hat-makers, jockeys and racing. 48 Everything that excited public attention had a close observer in Cham. His caricatures of the works of art in the Salon were full of spirit, and the International Exhibition of 1867 found in him its classic chronicler. Here all the mysterious Paris of the third Napoleon lives once more. Emperors and kings file past, the band of Strauss plays, gipsies are dancing, equipages roll by, and every one lives, loves, flirts, squanders money, and whirls round in a maëlstrom. But the end of the exhibition betokened the end of all that splendour. In Cham’s plates which came next one feels that there is thunder in the air. Neither fashions nor theatres, neither women nor pleasure, could prevent politics from predominating more and more: the fall of Napoleon was drawing near.

There was a greater division of labour amongst those who followed Cham, 49 since one chose “little women” as a speciality, another the theatre, and another high-life. Assisted by photography, Nadar turned again to portraiture, which had been neglected since Daumier, and enjoyed a great success with his series “Les Contemporains de Nadar.” Marcellin is the first who spread over his sketches from the world of fashions and the theatre all the chic and fashionable glitter which lives in the novels of those years. He is the chronicler of the great world, of balls and soirées; he shows the opera and the Théâtre des Italiens, tells of hunting and racing, attends the drives in the Corso, and at the call of fashion promptly deserts the stones of Paris to look about him in châteaux and country-houses, seaside haunts in France, and the little 50 watering-places of Germany, where the gaming-tables formed at that time the rendezvous of well-bred Paris. Baden-Baden, where all the lions of the day, the politicians and the artists and all the beauties of the Paris salons, met together in July, offered the draughtsman a specially wide field for studies of fashion and chic. Here began the series “Histoires des variations de la mode depuis le XVI siècle jusqu’à nos jours.” In a place where all classes of society, the great world and the demi-monde, came into contact, Marcellin could not avoid the latter, but even when he verged on this province he always knew how to maintain a correct and distinguished bearing. He was peculiarly the draughtsman of “society,” of that brilliant, pleasure-loving, tainted, and yet refined society of the Second Empire which turned Paris into a great ball-room.

Randon is as plebeian as Marcellin is aristocratic. His speciality is the stupid recruit who is marched through the streets with his “squad,” or the retired tradesman of small means, as Daudet has hit him off in M. Chèbe, the old gentleman seated on a bench in the Bois de Boulogne: “Let the little ones come to me with their nurses.” His province includes everything that has nothing to do with chic. The whole life of the Parisian people, the horse-fairs, the races at Poissy, and all the more important occurrences by which the appearance of the city has been transformed, may be followed in his drawings. When he travelled he did not go to watering-places, but to the provinces, to Cherbourg and Toulon, or to the manufacturing towns of Belgium and England, where he observed life at the railway stations and the custom-house, at markets and in barracks, at seaports and upon the street. Goods that are being piled together, sacks that are being hoisted, ships being brought to anchor, storehouses, wharfs, and docks—everywhere there is as much life in his sketches as in a busy beehive. Nature is a great manufactory, and man a living machine. The world is like an ant-hill, the dwelling of curious insects furnished with teeth, feelers, indefatigable feet, and marvellous organs proper for digging, sawing, building, and all things possible, but furnished also with an incessant hunger.

Soon afterwards there came Hadol, who made his début in 1855, with 51 pictures of the fashions; Stop, who specially represented the provinces and Italy; Draner, who occupied himself with the Parisian ballet and designed charming military uniforms for little dancing girls. Léonce Petit drew peasants and sketched the charms of the country in a simple, familiar fashion—the mortal tedium of little towns, poor villages, and primitive inns, the gossip of village beldames before the house-door, the pompous dignity of village magistrates or of the head of the fire brigade. He is specially noteworthy as a landscape artist. The trees on the straight, monotonous road rise softly and delicately into the air, and the sleepy sameness of tortuous village streets is pregnantly rendered by a few strokes of the pencil. The land is like a great kitchen garden. The fields and the arable ground with their dusty, meagre soil chant a mighty song of hard labour, of the earnest, toilsome existence of the peasant folk.

Andrieux and Morland discovered the femme entretenue, though afterwards her best known delineator was Grévin, an able, original, facile, and piquant draughtsman, whom some—exaggerating beyond a doubt—called the direct successor of Gavarni. Grévin’s women are a little monotonous, with their ringleted chignons, their expressionless eyes which try to look big, their perverse little noses, their defiant, pouting lips, and the cheap toilettes which they wear with so much chic. But they too have gone to their rest with the grisettes of Monnier and Gavarni, and have left the field to the women of Mars and Forain. In these days Grévin’s work seems old-fashioned, since it is no longer modern and not yet historical; nevertheless it marks an epoch, like that of Gavarni. The bals publics, the bals de l’Opéra, those of the Jardin Mabille, the Closerie des Lilas, the races, the promenades in the Bois de Vincennes, the seaside resorts, all places where the demi-monde pitched its tent 52 in the time of Napoleon III, were also the home of the artist. “How they love in Paris” and “Winter in Paris” were his earliest series. His finest and greatest drawings, the scenes from the Parisian hotels and “The English in Paris,” appeared in 1867, the year of the Exhibition. His later series, published as albums—“Les filles d’Ève,” “Le monde amusant,” “Fantaisies parisiennes,” “Paris vicieux,” “La Chaîne des Dames”—are a song of songs upon the refinements of life.

It does not lie within the plan of this book to follow the history of drawing any further. Our intention was merely to show that painting had to follow the path trodden by Rowlandson and Cruikshank, Erhard and Richter, Daumier and Gavarni, if it was to be art of the nineteenth century, and not to remain for ever dependent on the old masters. Absolute beauty is not good food for art; to be strong it must be nourished on the ideas of the century. When the world had ceased to draw inspiration from the masterpieces of the past merely with the object of depicting by their aid scenes out of long-buried epochs, there was for the first time a prospect that mere discipleship would be overcome, and that a new and original painting would be developed through the fresh and independent study of nature. The passionate craving of the age had to be this: to feel at home on the earth, in this long-neglected world of reality, which hides the unsuspected treasure of vivid works of art. The rising sun is just as beautiful now as on the first day, the streams flow, the meadows grow green, the vibrating passions are at war now as in other times, the immortal heart of nature still beats beneath its rough covering, and its pulsation finds an echo in the heart of man. It was necessary to descend from ideals to existing fact, and the world had to be once more discovered by painters as in the days of the first Renaissance. The question was how by the aid of all the devices of colour to represent the multifarious forms of human activity: the phases and conditions of life, fashion as well as misery, work and pleasure, the drawing-room and the street, the teeming activity of towns and the quiet labour of peasants. The essential thing was to write the entire natural history of the age. And this way, the way from museums to nature, and from the past to the world of living men, was shown by the English to the French and German painters.

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CHAPTER XVII

ENGLISH PAINTING TO 1850

“The English school has an advantage over others in being young: its tradition is barely a century old, and, unlike the Continental schools, it is not hampered by antiquated Greek and Latin theories. What fortunate conditions it has for breaking away into really modern work! whereas in other nations the weight of tradition presses hard on the boldest innovators. The English do not look back; on the contrary, they look into life around them.” So wrote Burger-Thoré in one of his Salons in 1867.

Yet England was not unaffected by the retrospective tendency on the Continent. Perhaps it might even be demonstrated that this movement had its earliest origin on British soil. England had its “Empire style” in architecture fifty years before there was any empire in France; it had its Classical painting when David worked at Cupids with Boucher, and it gave the world a Romanticist at the very time when the literature of the Continent became “Classical.” The Lady of the Lake, Marmion, The Lord of the Isles, The Fair Maid of Perth, Old Mortality, Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, who is there that does not know these names by heart? We have learnt history from Walter Scott, and that programme of the artistic crafts which Lorenz Gedon drew up in 1876, when he arranged the department Works of our Fathers in the Munich Exhibition, had been carried out by Scott as early as 1816. For Scott laid out much of the money he received for his romances in building himself a castle in the style of the baronial strongholds of the Middle Ages: “Towers and turrets all imitated from a royal building in Scotland, windows and gables painted with the arms of the clans, with lions couchant,” rooms “filled with high sideboards and carved chests, targes, plaids, Highland broadswords, halberts, and suits of armour, and adorned with antlers hung up as trophies.” Here was a Makartesque studio very many years before Makart.

Amongst the painters there were Classicists and Romanticists; but they were neither numerous nor of importance. What England produced in the way of “great art” in the beginning of last century could be erased from the complete chart of British painting without any essential gap being made in the course of its development. Reynolds had had to pay dear for approaching the Italians in his “Ugolino,” his “Macbeth,” and his “Young Hercules.” And a yet more arid mannerism befell all the others who followed him on the way to Italy, among them James Barry, who, after studying for years in Italy, 54 settled down in London in 1771, with the avowed intention of providing England with a classical form of art. He believed that he had surpassed his own models, the Italian classic painters, by six pompous representations of the “Culture and Progress of Human Knowledge,” which he completed in 1783, in the theatre of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts. The many-sided James Northcote, equally mediocre in everything, survives rather by his biographies of Reynolds and Titian than by the great canvases which he painted for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. That which became best known was “The Murder of the Children in the Tower.” Henry Fuseli, who was also much occupied with authorship and as preceptor Britanniæ, always mentioned with great respect by his numerous pupils, produced a series of exceedingly thoughtful and imaginative works, to which he was incited by Klopstock and Lavater. By preference he illustrated Milton and Shakespeare, and amongst this series of pictures his painting of “Titania with the Ass,” from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the London National Gallery, is probably the best. His pupil William Etty was saturated with the traditions of the Venetian school; he is the British Makart, and followed rather heavily and laboriously in the track of Titian, exploring the realms of nude beauty, and toiling to discover that secret of blooming colour which gleams from the female forms of the Venetians. The assiduous Benjamin Robert Haydon, a spirit ever seeking, striving, and reflecting, became, like Gros in France, a victim of the grand style. He would naturally have preferred to paint otherwise, and more simply. The National Gallery possesses a charming picture by him of a London street (for some years past on loan at Leicester), which represents a crowd watching a Punch and Judy show. But, like Gros, he held it a sin against the grand style to occupy himself with such matters. He thought it only permissible to paint sacred subjects or subjects from ancient history upon large spaces of canvas; and he sank ever deeper into his theories, reaching the profoundest abyss of abstract science when he made diligent anatomical studies of the muscles of a lion, in order to fashion the heroic frames of warriors on the same plan. His end, on 26th June 1846, was like that of the Frenchman. There was found beside his body a paper on which he had written: “God forgive me. Amen. Finis,” with the quotation from Shakespeare’s Lear: “Stretch me no longer on the rack of this rough world.” All these masters are more interesting for their human qualities than for their works, which, with their extravagant colour, forced gestures, and follies of every description, contain no new thing worthy of further development. Even when they sought to make direct copies from Continental performances, they did not attain the graceful sweep of their models. The refinements which they imitated became clumsy and awkward in their hands, and they remained half bourgeois and half barbaric.

The liberating influence of English art was not found in the province of the great painting, and it is probably not without significance that the few who tried to import it came to grief in the experiment. There can be no doubt 55 that such art goes more against the grain of the English nature than of any other. Even in the days of scholastic philosophy the English asserted the doctrine that there are only individuals in nature. In the beginning of modern times a new era, grounded on the observation of nature, was promulgated from England. Bacon had little to say about beauty: he writes against the proportions and the principle of selection in art, and therefore against the ideal. Handsome men, he says, have seldom possessed great qualities. And in the same way the English stage had just as little bent for the august and rhythmical grandeur of classical literature. When he stabbed Polonius, Garrick never dreamed of moving according to the taste of Boileau, and was probably as different from the Greek leader of a chorus as Hogarth from David. The peculiar merits of English literature and science have been rooted from the time of their first existence in their capacity for observation. This explains the contempt for regularity in Shakespeare, the feeling for concrete fact in Bacon. English philosophy is positive, exact, utilitarian, and highly moral. Hobbes and Locke, John Stuart Mill and Buckle, in England take the place of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Kant upon the Continent. Amongst English historians Carlyle is the only poet: all the rest are learned prose-writers who collect observations, combine experiences, arrange dates, weigh possibilities, reconcile facts, discover laws, and hoard and increase positive knowledge. The eighteenth century had seen the rise of the novel as the picture of contemporary life; in Hogarth this national spirit was first turned to account in painting. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, again, the good qualities of English art consisted not in bold ideality, but in sharpness of observation, sobriety, and flexibility of spirit.

Their proper domain was still to be found in portraiture, and if none of the new portrait painters can be compared with the great ancestors of English art, they are none the less superior to all their contemporaries on the Continent. George Romney, who belongs rather to the eighteenth century, holds the mean course between the refined classic art of Sir Joshua and the 56 imaginative poetic art of Thomas Gainsborough. Less personal and less profound in characterisation, he was, on the other hand, the most dexterous painter of drapery in his age: a man who knew all the secrets of the trade, and possessed, at the same time, that art which is so much valued in portrait painters—the art of beautifying his models without making his picture unlike the original. Professional beauties beheld themselves presented in their counterfeit precisely as they wished to appear, and accorded him, therefore, a fervent adoration. And after his return from Italy in 1775 his fame was so widespread that it outstripped Gainsborough’s and equalled that of Reynolds. Court beauties and celebrated actresses left no stone unturned to have their portraits introduced into one of his “compositions”; for Romney eagerly followed the fashion of allegorical portraiture which had been set by Reynolds, representing persons with the emblem of a god or of one of the muses. Romney has painted the famous Lady Hamilton, to say nothing of others, as Magdalen, Joan of Arc, a Bacchante, and an Odalisque.

Great as his reputation had been at the close of the eighteenth century, it was outshone twenty years later by that of Sir Thomas Lawrence. Born in Bristol in 1769, Lawrence had scarcely given up the calling of an actor before he saw all England in raptures over his genius as a painter. The catalogue of his portraits is a complete list of all who were at the time pre-eminent for talent or beauty. He received fabulous sums, which he spent with the grace of a man of the world. In 1815 he was commissioned to paint for the Windsor Gallery the portraits of all the “Victors of Waterloo,” from the Duke of Wellington to the Emperor Alexander. The Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle gave him an opportunity for getting the portraits of representatives of the various Courts. All the capitals of Europe, which he visited for this purpose, received him with princely honours. He was member of all the Academies under the sun, and President of that in London; but, as a natural reaction, this over-estimation of earlier years has been followed by an equally undeserved undervaluation of his works in these days. Beneath the fashionable exterior of his ceremonial pictures naturalness and simplicity are often wanting, and so too are the deeper powers of characterisation, firm drawing, and real 57 vitality. A feminine coquetry has taken the place of character. His drawing has a banal effect, and his colouring is monotonous in comparison with that realism which Reynolds shares with the old masters. It is easy to confound the majority of his pictures of ceremonies with those of Winterhalter, and his smaller portraits with pretty fashion plates; yet one cannot but admire his ease of execution and nobility of composition. Several of his pictures of women, in particular, are touched by an easy grace and a fine charm of poetic sensuousness in which he approaches Gainsborough. Not many at that time could have painted such pretty children’s heads, or given young women such an attractive and familiar air of life. With what a girlish glance of innocence and melancholy does Mrs. Siddons look out upon the world from the canvas of Lawrence: how piquant is her white Greek garment, with its black girdle and the white turban. And what subtle delicacy there is in the portrait of Miss Farren as she flits with muff and fur-trimmed cloak through a bright green summer landscape. The reputation of Lawrence will rise once more when his empty formal pieces have found their way into lumber-rooms, and a greater number of his pictures of women—pictures so full of indescribable fascination, so redolent of mysterious charm—are accessible to the public.

As minor stars, the soft and tender John Hoppner, the attractively superficial William Beechey, the celebrated pastellist John Russell, and the vigorously energetic John Jackson had their share with him in public favour, whilst Henry Raeburn shone in Scotland as a star of the first magnitude.

He was a born painter. Wilkie says in one of his letters from Madrid, that the pictures of Velasquez put him in mind of Raeburn; and certain works of the Scot, such as the portrait of Lord Newton, the famous bon vivant and doughty drinker, are indeed performances of such power that comparison with this mighty name is no profanation. At a time when there was a danger that portrait painting would sink in the hands of Lawrence into an insipid 58 painting of prettiness, Raeburn stood alone by the simplicity and naturalistic impressiveness of his portraiture. The three hundred and twenty-five portraits by him which were exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy in 1876, gave as exhaustive a picture of the life of Edinburgh at the close of the century as those of Sir Joshua gave of the life of London. All the celebrated Scotchmen of his time—Robertson, Hume, Ferguson, and Scott—were painted by him. Altogether he painted over six hundred portraits; and, small though the number may seem compared with the two thousand of Reynolds, Raeburn’s artistic qualities are almost the greater. The secret of his success lies in his vigorous healthiness, in the indescribable furia of his brush, in the harmony and truth of his colour-values. His figures are informed by a startling intensity of life. His old pensioners, and his sailors in particular, have something kingly in the grand air of their calm and noble countenances. Armstrong has given him a place between Frans Hals and Velasquez, and occasionally his conception of colour even recalls the modern Frenchmen, as it were Manet in his Hals period. He paints his models, just as they come into contact with him in life, in the frank light of day and without any attempt at the dusk of the old masters; of raiment he gives only as much as the comprehension of the picture demands, and depicts character in large and simple traits.

The importance of West and Copley, two Americans who were active in England, is that they were the first to apply the qualities acquired in English portrait painting to pictures on a large scale.

Benjamin West has undoubtedly been over-praised by his contemporaries, and by a critic of the present day he has, not unfairly, been designated “the king of mediocrity.” At his appearance he was interesting to Europeans merely as an anthropological curiosity,—as the first son of barbaric America who had used a paint brush. A thoroughly American puff preceded his 59 entry into the Eternal City in 1760. It was reported that as the son of a quaker farmer he had grown up amongst his father’s slaves in the immediate neighbourhood of the Indians, and had painted good portraits in Philadelphia and New York without having ever seen a work of art. People were delighted when, on being brought into the Vatican, he clapped his hands and compared the Apollo Belvidere to an Indian chief. In the art of making himself interesting “the young savage” was ahead of all his patrons; and as he followed the ruling classical tendency with great aptitude, within the course of a year he was made an honorary member of the Academies of Parma, Bologna, and Florence, and praised by the critics of Rome as ranking with Mengs as the first painter of his day. In 1763, at a time when Hogarth and Reynolds, Wilson and Gainsborough, were in the fulness of their powers, he went to London; and as people are always inclined to value most highly what they do not possess, he soon won an important position for himself, even beside these masters. Hogarth produced nothing but “genre pictures,” Wilson only landscapes, and Reynolds and Gainsborough portraits: West brought to the English what they did not as yet possess—a “great art.”

His first picture—in the London National Gallery—“Pylades and Orestes brought as Hostages before Iphigenia,” is a tiresome product of that Classicism which upon the Continent found its principal representatives in Mengs and David: it is stiff in drawing, its composition is suggestive of a bas-relief, and its cold grey colouring is classically academic. His other pictures from antique and sacred history stand much on the same level as those of Wilhelm Kaulbach, with whose works they share their stilted dignity, their systematically antiquarian structure, and their mechanical combination of forms borrowed in a spiritless fashion from the Cinquecentisti.

Fortunately West has left behind him something different from these ambitious attempts; for on the occasions when he turned away from the great style he created works of lasting importance. This is specially true 60 of some fine historical pictures dealing with his own age, which will preserve his name for ever. “The Death of General Wolfe” at the storming of Quebec on 13th September 1759—exhibited at the opening of the Royal Academy in 1768—is by its very sobriety a sincere, honest, and sane piece of work, which will maintain its value as an historical document. It was just at this time that so great a part was played by the question of costume, and West encountered the same difficulties which Gottfried Schadow was obliged to face when he represented Ziethen and the Old Dessauer in the costume of their age. The connoisseurs held that such a sublime theme would only admit of antique dress. If West in their despite represented the general and his soldiers in their regulation uniform, it seems at the present time no more than the result of healthy common sense, but at that time it was an artistic event of great importance, and one which was only accomplished in France after the work of several decades. In that country Gérard and Girodet still clung to the belief that they could only raise the military picture to the level of the great style by giving the soldiers of the Empire the appearance of Greek and Roman statues. Gros is honoured as the man who first ceased from giving modern soldiers an air of the antique. But the American Englishman had anticipated him by forty years. As in Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” it was only the pyramidal composition in West’s picture that betrayed the painter’s alliance with the Classical school; in other respects it forecast the realistic programme for decades to come, and indicated the course of development which leads through Gros onwards. If in Gros men are treated purely as accessories to throw a hero into relief, in West they stand out in action. They behave in the picture spontaneously as they do in life. That is to say, there is in West’s work of 1768 the element through which Horace Vernet’s pictures of 1830 are to be distinguished from those of Gros.

This realistic programme was carried out with yet greater consistency by West’s younger compatriot John Singleton Copley, who after a short sojourn in Italy migrated to England in 1775. His chief works in the London National Gallery depict in the same way events from contemporary history—“The Death of the Earl of Chatham, 7th April 1778” and “The Death of Major Pierson, 6th January 1781,”—and it is by no means impossible that when David, in the midst of the classicising tendencies of his age, ventured to paint “The Death of Marat” and “The Death of Lepelletier,” he was led to do so by engravings after Copley. In the representation of such things other painters of the epoch had draped their figures in antique costume, called genii and river-gods into action, and given a Roman character to the whole. Copley, like West, offers a plain, matter-of-fact representation of the event, without any rhetorical pathos. And what raises him above West is his liquid, massive colour, suggestive of the old masters. In none of his works could West set himself free from the dead grey colour of the Classical school, whereas Copley’s “Death of William Pitt” is the result of intimate studies of Titian and the Dutch. The way the light falls on the perukes of the men and the brown, wainscoted walls puts one in mind of Rembrandt’s “Anatomical Lecture”; only, instead of a pathetic scene from the theatre, we have a collection of good portraits in the manner of the Dutch studies of shooting matches.

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That this unhackneyed conception of daily life has its special home in England is further demonstrated by the work of Daniel Maclise, who depicted “The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher,” “The Death of Nelson,” and other patriotic themes upon walls and canvases several yards square, with appalling energy, promptitude, and expenditure of muscle. By these he certainly did better service to national pride than to art. Nevertheless, with their forcible, healthy realism they contrast favourably with the mythological subjects so universally produced on the Continent at that time.

Beside the portrait painters of men stand the portrait painters of animals. Since the days of Elias Riedinger animal painting had fallen into general disesteem on the Continent. Thorwaldsen, the first of the Classicists who allowed animals to appear in his works (as he did in his Alexander frieze), dispensed with any independent studies of nature, and contented himself with imitating the formal models on the frieze of the Parthenon; or, in lack of a Grecian exemplar, simply drew out of the depths of his inner consciousness. Especially remarkable is the sovran contempt with which he treated the most familiar domestic creatures. German historical painting knew still less what to make of the brute creation, because it only recognised beauty in the profundity of ideas, and ideas have nothing to do with beasts. Its four-footed creatures have a philosophic depth of contemplation, and are bad studies after nature. Kaulbach’s “Reinecke” and the inclination to 64 transplant human sentiments into the world of brutes delayed until the sixties any devoted study of the animal soul. France, too, before the days of Troyon, had nothing to show worth mentioning. But in England, the land of sport, animal painting was evolved directly from the old painting of the chase, without being seduced from its proper course. Fox-hunting has been popular in England since the time of Charles I. Racing came into fashion not long after, and with racing came that knowledge of horseflesh which has been developed in England further than elsewhere. Since the seventeenth century red deer have been preserved in the English parks. It is therefore comprehensible that English art was early occupied with these animals, and since it was sportsmen who cared most about them, the painter was at first their servant. He had not so much to paint pictures as reminiscences of sport and the chase. His first consideration in painting a horse was to paint a fine horse; as to its being a fine picture, that was quite a secondary matter. John Wootton and George Stubbs were in this sense portrayers of racehorses. The latter, however, took occasion to emancipate himself from his patrons by representing the noble animal, not standing at rest by his manger, or with a groom on his back and delighting in the consciousness of his own beauty, but as he was in action and amongst pictorial surroundings.

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Soon afterwards George Morland made his appearance. He made a specialty of old nags, and was perhaps the most important master of the brush that the English school produced at all. His pictures have the same magic as the landscapes of Gainsborough. He painted life on the high-road and in front of village inns—scenes like those which Isaac Ostade had represented a century before: old horses being led to water amid the sunny landscape of the downs, market carts rumbling heavily through the rough and sunken lanes, packhorses coming back to their stalls of an evening tired out with the day’s exertions, riders pulling up at the village inn or chatting with the pretty landlady. And he has done these things with the delicacy of an old Dutch painter. It is impossible to say whether Morland had ever seen the pictures of Adriaen Brouwer; but this greatest master of technique amongst the Flemings can alone be compared with Morland in verve and artistic many-sidedness; and Morland resembled him also in his adventurous life and his early death. To the spirit and dash of Brouwer he joins the refinement of Gainsborough in his landscapes, and Rowlandson’s delicate feeling for feminine beauty in his figures. He does not paint fine ladies, but women in their everyday clothes, and yet they are surrounded by a grace recalling Chardin: young mothers going to see their children who are with the nurse, smart little 68 tavern hostesses in their white aprons and coquettish caps busily serving riders with drink, and charming city madams in gay summer garb sitting of a Sunday afternoon with their children at a tea-garden. Over the works of Morland there lies all the chivalrous grace of the time of Werther, and that fine Anglo-Saxon aroma exhaled by the works of English painters of the present day. Genuine as is the fame which he enjoys as an animal painter, it is these little social scenes which show his finest side; and only coloured engraving, which was brought to such a high pitch in the England of those days, is able to give an idea of the delicacy of hue in the originals.

Morland’s brother-in-law, the painter and engraver James Ward, born in 1769 and dying in 1859, united this old English school with the modern. The portrait which accompanies the obituary notice in the Art Journal is that of a very aged gentleman, with a grey beard and thick, white, bristly hair. The pictures which he painted when he had this appearance—and they are the most familiar—were exceedingly weak and insipid works. In comparison with Morland’s broad, liquid, and harmonious painting, that of Ward seems burnished, sparkling, flaunting, anecdotic, and petty. But James Ward was not always old James Ward. In his early days he was one of the greatest and manliest artists of the English school, with whom only Briton Rivière can be compared amongst the moderns. When his “Lioness” appeared in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1816 he was justly hailed as the best animal painter after Snyders, and from that time one masterpiece followed another for ten long years. What grace and power there are in his 69 horses and dogs! In pictures of this sort Stubbs was graceful and delicate; Ward painted the same horse in as sporting a manner and with the same knowledge, but with an artistic power such as no one had before him. His field of work was wide-reaching. He painted little girls with the thoroughly English feeling of Morland, and had the whole animal world for his domain. Lions, snakes, cats, pigs, oxen, cows, sheep, swans, fowls, frogs are the characters in his pictures. And characters they were, for he never humanised the looks of his four-footed models, as others did later. The home of his animals is not the drawing-room, but the woods and meadows, the air and the gardens. His broad, weighty manner was transformed first into extravagant virtuosity and then into pettiness of style during the last thirty years of his life, when he became senile. His reputation paled more than he deserved before the star of the world-famous Landseer.

The most popular animal painter, not merely of England but of the whole century, was Edwin Landseer. For fifty years his works formed the chief features of attraction in the Royal Academy. Engravings from him had such a circulation in the country that in the sixties there was scarcely a house in which there did not hang one of his horses or dogs or stags. Even the Continent was flooded with engravings of his pictures, and Landseer suffered 70 greatly from this popularity. He is much better than the reproductions with their fatal gloss allow any one to suppose, and his pictures can be judged by them just as little as can Raphael’s “School of Athens” from Jacobi’s engraving.

Edwin Landseer came of a family of artists. His father, who was an engraver, sent him out into the free world of nature as a boy, and made him sketch donkeys and goats and sheep. When he was fourteen he went to Haydon, the prophet on matters of art; and, on the advice of this singular being, studied the sculptures of the Parthenon. He “anatomised animals under my eyes,” writes Haydon, “copied my anatomical drawings, and applied my principles of instruction to animal painting. His genius, directed in this fashion, has, as a matter of fact, arrived at satisfactory results.” Landseer was the spoilt child of fortune. There is no other English painter who can boast of having been made a member of the Royal Academy at twenty-four. In high favour at Court, honoured by the fashionable world, and tenderly treated by criticism, he went on his way triumphant. The region over which he held sway was narrow, but he stood out in it as in life, powerful and commanding. The exhibition of his pictures which took place after his death in 1873 contained three hundred and fourteen oil paintings and one hundred and forty-six sketches. The property which he left amounted to £160,000; and a further sum of £55,000 was realised by the sale of his unsold pictures. Even Meissonier, the best paid painter of the century, did not leave behind him five and a half million francs.

One reason of Landseer’s artistic success is perhaps due to that in him which was inartistic—to his effort to make animals more beautiful than they really are, and to make them the medium for expressing human sentiment. All the dogs and horses and stags which he painted after 1855, and through which he was made specially familiar to the great public, are arrayed in their Sunday clothes, 71 their glossiest hide and their most magnificent horns. And in addition to this he “Darwinises” them: that is to say, he tries to make his animals more than animals; he lends a human sentimental trait to animal character; and that is what distinguishes him to his disadvantage from really great animal painters like Potter, Snyders, Troyon, Jadin, and Rosa Bonheur. He paints the human temperament beneath the animal mask. His stags have expressive countenances, and his dogs appear to be gifted with reason and even speech. At one moment there is a philosophic dignity in their behaviour, and at another a frivolity in their pleasures. Landseer discovered the sentimentality of dogs, and treated them as capable of culture. His celebrated picture “Jack in Office” is almost insulting in its characterisation: there they are, Jack the sentry, an old female dog like a poor gentlewoman, another dog like a professional beggar, and so on. And this habit of bringing animals on the stage, as if they were the actors of tragical, melodramatic, or farcical scenes, made him a peculiar favourite with the great mass of people. Nor were his picture-stories merely easy to read and understand; the characteristic titles he invented for each of them—“Alexander and Diogenes,” “A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society,” and the like—excited curiosity as much as the most carefully selected name of a novel. But this search 72 after points and sentimental anecdotes only came into prominence in his last period, when his technique had degenerated and given way to a shiny polish and a forced elegance which obliged him to provide extraneous attractions. His popularity would not be so great, but his artistic importance would be quite the same, if these last pictures did not exist at all.

But the middle period of Landseer, ranging from 1840 to 1850, contains masterpieces which set him by the side of the best animal painters of all times and nations. The well-known portrait of a Newfoundland dog of 1838; that of the Prince Consort’s favourite greyhound of 1841; “The Otter Speared” of 1844, with its panting and yelping pack brought to a standstill beneath a high wall of rock; the dead doe which a fawn is unsuspectingly approaching, in “A Random Shot,” 1848; “The Lost Sheep” of 1850, that wanders frightened and bleating through a wide and lonely landscape covered with snow,—these and many other pictures, in their animation and simple naturalness, are precious examples of the fresh and delicate observation peculiar to him at that time. Landseer’s portrait reveals to us a robust and serious man, with a weather-beaten face, a short white beard, and a snub bulldog nose. Standing six feet high, and having the great heavy figure of a Teuton stepping out of his aboriginal forest, he was indeed much more like a country gentleman than a London artist. He was a sportsman who wandered about all day long in the air with a gun on his arm, and he painted his animal pictures with all the love and joy of a child of nature. That accounts for their strength, their convincing power, and their vivid force. It is as if he had become possessed of a magic cap with which he could draw close to animals without being observed, and surprise their nature and their inmost life.

Landseer’s subject-matter and conception of life are indicated by the pictures which have been named. Old masters like Snyders and Rubens had represented the contrast between man and beast in their boar and lion hunts. It was not wild nature that Landseer depicted, but nature tamed. Rubens, Snyders, and Delacroix displayed their horses, dogs, lions, and tigers in bold action, or in the flame of passion. But Landseer generally introduced his animals in quiet situations—harmless and without fear—in the course of their ordinary life.

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Horses, which Leonardo, Rubens, Velasquez, Wouwerman, and the earlier English artists delighted to render, he painted but seldom, and when he painted them it was with a less penetrating comprehension. But lions, which had been represented in savage passion or in quiet dignity by artists from Rubens to Decamps, were for him also a subject of long and exhaustive studies, which had their results in the four colossal lions round the base of the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square. Here the Englishman makes a great advance on Thorwaldsen, who designed the model for the monument in Lucerne without ever having seen a lion. Landseer’s brutes, both as they are painted and as they are cast in bronze, are genuine lions, cruel and catlike, although in savageness and bold passion they are not to be compared with those of Delacroix, nor with those of his elder compatriot, James Ward. On the other hand, stags and roes were really first introduced into painting by Landseer. Those of Robert Hills, who had previously been reckoned the best painter of stags, are timid, suspicious creatures, while Landseer’s are the true kings of the forest, the shooting of which ought to be punished as an act of assassination. His principal field of study was the Highlands. Here 74 he painted these proud creatures fighting on the mountain slopes, swimming the lake, or as they stand at a gaze in their quiet beauty. With what a bold spirit they raise their heads to snuff the mountain air, whilst their antlers show their delight in battle and the joy of victory. And how gentle and timid is the noble, defenceless roe in Landseer’s pictures.

He had also a delight in painting sheep lost in a snow-storm. But dogs were his peculiar specialty. Landseer discovered the dog. That of Snyders was a treacherous, snarling cur; that of Bewick a robber and a thief. Landseer has made the dog the companion of man, an adjunct of human society, the generous friend and true comrade who is the last mourner at the shepherd’s grave. Landseer first studied his noble countenance and his thoughtful eyes, and in doing so he opened a new province to art, in which Briton Rivière went further at a later period.

But yet another and still wider province was opened to continental nations by the art of England. In an epoch of archæological resuscitations and romantic regrets for the past, it brought French and German painters to a consciousness that the man of the nineteenth century in his daily life might be a perfectly legitimate subject for art. Engravings after the best pictures of Wilkie hang round the walls of Louis Knaus’s reception-room in Berlin. And that in itself betrays to us a fragment of the history of art. The painters who saw the English people with the eyes of Walter Scott, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Dickens were a generation in advance of those who depicted the German people in the spirit of Immermann, Auerbach, Gustav Freytag, and Fritz Reuter. The English advanced quietly on the road trodden by Hogarth in the eighteenth century, whilst upon the Continent the nineteenth century had almost completed half its course before art left anything which will allow future generations to see the men of the period as they really were. Since the days of Fielding and Goldsmith the novel of manners had been continually 75 growing. Burns, the poet of the plough, and Wordsworth, the singer of rustic folk, had given a vogue to that poetry of peasant life and those village tales which have since gone the round of all Europe. England began at that time to become the richest country in the world, and great fortunes were made. Painters were thus obliged to provide for the needs of a new and wealthy middle class. This fact gives us the explanation both of the merits and the faults which are characteristic of English genre painting.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century David Wilkie, the English Knaus, was the chief genre painter of the world. Born in 1785 in the small Scotch village of Cults, where his father was the clergyman, he passed a happy childhood, and possibly had to thank his youthful impressions for the consistent cheerfulness, the good-humour and kindliness that smile out of his pictures, and make such a contrast with Hogarth’s biting acerbity. At fourteen he entered the Edinburgh School of Art, where he worked for four years under the historical painter John Graham. Having returned to Cults, he painted his landscapes. A fair which he saw in the neighbouring village gave the impulse for his earliest picture of country life, “Pitlessie Fair.” He sold it for five and twenty pounds, and determined in 1805 to try his luck with this sum in London. In the very next year his “Village Politicians” excited attention in the exhibition. From that time he was a popular artist. Every one of his numerous pictures—“The Blind Fiddler,” “The Card Players,” “The Rent Day,” “The Cut Finger,” “The Village Festival”—called forth a storm of applause. After a short residence in Paris, where the Louvre gave him a more intimate knowledge of the Dutch, came his masterpieces, “Blind-Man’s Buff,” “Distraining for Rent,” “Reading the Will,” “The Rabbit on the Wall,” “The Penny Wedding,” “The Chelsea Pensioners,” and so forth. Even later, after he had become an Academician, he kept to plain and simple themes, in spite of the reproaches of his colleagues, who thought that art was vulgarised by the treatment of subjects that contained so 76 little dignity. It was only at the end of his life that he became untrue to himself. His reverence for Teniers and Ostade was not sufficient to outweigh the impression made on him during a tour taken in 1825 through Italy, Spain, Holland, and Germany, by the artistic treasures of the Continent, and especially Murillo and Velasquez. He said he had long lived in darkness, but from that time forth could say with the great Correggio: “Anch’ io sono pittore.” He renounced all that he had painted before which had made him famous, and showed himself to be one of the many great artists of those years who had no individuality, or ventured to have none. He would have been the Burns of painting had he remained as he was. And thus he offered further evidence that the museums and the Muses are contradictory conceptions; since the modern painter always runs the risk of falling helplessly from one influence into another, where he is bent on combining the historical student of art with the artist. Of the pictures that he exhibited after his return in 1829, two dealt with Italian and three with Spanish subjects. The critics were loud in praise; he had added a fresh branch of laurel to his crown. Yet, historically considered, he would stand on a higher pedestal if he had never seen more than a dozen good pictures of Teniers, Ostade, Metsu, Jan Steen, and Brouwer. Now he began to copy his travelling sketches in a spiritless fashion; he only represented pifferari, smugglers, and monks, who, devoid of all originality, might have been painted by one of the Düsseldorfers. Even “John Knox Preaching,” which is probably the best picture of his last period, is no exception.

“He seemed to me,” writes Delacroix, who saw him in Paris after his return from Spain,—“he seemed to me to have been carried utterly out of his depth by the pictures he had seen. How is it that a man of his age can be so influenced by works which are radically opposed to his own? However, he died soon after, and, as I have been told, in a very melancholy state of mind.” Death overtook him in 1841, on board the steamer Oriental, just as he was returning from a tour in Turkey. At half-past eight in the evening the vessel was brought to, and as the lights of the beacon mingled with those of the stars the waters passed over the corpse of David Wilkie.

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79 In judging his position in the history of art, only those works come into consideration which he executed before that journey of 1825. Then he drew as a labour of love the familiar scenes of the household hearth, the little dramas, the comic or touching episodes that take place in the village, the festivals, the dancing, and the sports of the country-folk, and their meeting in the ale-house. At this time, when as a young painter he merely expressed himself and was ignorant of the efforts of continental painting, he was an artist of individuality. In the village he became a great man, and here his fame was decided; he painted rustics. Even when he first saw the old masters in the National Gallery their immediate effect on him was merely to influence his technique. And by their aid Wilkie gradually became an admirable master of technical detail. His first picture, “Pitlessie Fair,” in its hardness of colour recalled a Dutch painter of the type of Jan Molenaer; but from that time his course was one of constant progress. In “The Village Politicians” the influence of Teniers first made itself felt, and it prevailed until 1816. In this year, when he painted the pretty sketch for “Blind-Man’s Buff,” a warm gold hue took the place of the cool silver tone; and instead of Teniers, Ostade became his model. The works in his Ostade manner are rich in colour and deep and clear in tone. Finally, it was Rembrandt’s turn to become his guiding-star, and “The Parish Beadle,” in the National Gallery—a scene of arrest of the year 1822—clearly shows with what brilliant success he tried his luck with Rembrandt’s dewy chiaroscuro. It was only in his last period that he lost all these technical qualities. His “Knox” of 1832 is hard and cold and inharmonious in colour.

So long as he kept from historical painting, art meant for him the same thing as the portrayal of domestic life. Painting, he said, had no other aim than to reproduce nature and to seek truth. Undoubtedly this must be applied to Wilkie himself with considerable limitation. Wilkie painted simple fragments of nature just as little as Hogarth; he invented scenes. Nor was 80 he even gifted with much power of invention. But he had a fund of innocent humour, although there were times when it was in danger of becoming much too childlike. “Blind-Man’s Buff,” “The Village Politicians,” and “The Village Festival,” pictures which have become so popular through the medium of engraving, contain all the characteristics of his power of playful observation. He had no ambition to be a moralist, like Hogarth, but just as little did he paint the rustic as he is. He dealt only with the absurdities and minor accidents of life. His was one of those happy dispositions which neither sorrow nor dream nor excite themselves, but see everything from the humorous side: he enjoyed his own jests, and looked at life as at a pure comedy; the serious part of it escaped him altogether. His peasantry know nothing of social problems; free from want and drudgery, they merely spend their time over trifles and amuse themselves—themselves and the frequenters of the exhibition, for whom they are taking part in a comedy on canvas. If Hogarth had a biting, sarcastic, scourging, and disintegrating genius, Wilkie is one of those people who cause one no lasting excitement, but are always satisfied to be humorous, and laugh with a contented appreciation over their own jokes.

And in general such is the keynote of this English genre. All that was done in it during the years immediately following is more or less comprised in the works of the Scotch “little master”; otherwise it courts the assistance 81 of English literature, which is always rich in humorists and excellent writers of anecdote and story. In painting, as in literature, the English delight in detail, which by its dramatic, anecdotic, or humorous point is intended to have the interest of a short story. Or perhaps one should rather say that, since the English came to painting as novices, they began tentatively on that first step on which art had stood in earlier centuries as long as it was still “the people’s spelling-book.” It is a typical form of development, and repeats itself constantly. All painting begins in narrative. First it is the subject which has a fascination for the artist, and by the aid of it he casts a spell over his public. The simplification of motives, the capacity for taking a thing in at a single glance, and finding a simple joy in its essentially pictorial integrity, is of later growth. Even with the Dutch, who were so eminently gifted with a sense for what is pictorial, the picture of manners was at first epical. Church festivals, skating parties, and events which could be represented in an ample and detailed fashion were the original materials of the genre picture, which only later contented itself with a purely artistic study of one out of countless groups. This period of apprenticeship, which may be called the period of interesting subject-matter, was what England was now going through; and England had to go through it, since she had the civilisation by which it is invariably produced.

Just as the first genre pictures of the Flemish school announced the appearance of a bourgeoisie, so in the England of the beginning of the century a new 82 plebeian, middle-class society had taken the place of the patrons of earlier days, and this middle class set its seal upon manners and communicated its spirit to painting. Prosperity, culture, travel, reading, and leisure, everything which had been the privilege of individuals, now became the common property of the great mass of men. They prized art, but they demanded from it substantial nourishment. That two colours in connection with straight and curved lines are enough for the production of infinite harmonies was still a profound secret. “You are free to be painters if you like,” artists were told, “but only on the understanding that you are amusing and instructive; if you have no story to tell we shall yawn.” When they comply with these demands, artists are inclined to grow fond of sermonising and develop into censors of the public morals, almost into lay preachers.

Or, if the aim of painting lies in its narrative power, there is a natural tendency to represent the pleasant rather than the unpleasant facts of life, which is the cause of this one-sided character of genre painting. Everything that is not striking and out of the way—in other words, the whole poetry of ordinary life—is left untouched. Wilkie only paints the rustic on some peculiar occasion, at merry-making and ceremonial events; and he depicts him as a being of a different species from the townsman, because he seeks to gain his effects principally by humorous episodes, and aims at situations which are proper to a novel.

Baptisms and dances, funerals and weddings, carousals and bridal visits are his favourite subjects; to which may be added the various contrasts offered by peasant life where it is brought into contact with the civilisation of cities—the country cousin come to town, the rustic closeted with a lawyer, and the like. A continual roguishness enlivens his pictures and makes comical figures out of most of these good people. He amuses himself at their expense, exposes their little lies, their thrift, their folly, their pretensions, and the absurdities with which their narrow circle of life has provided them. He pokes fun, and is sly and farcical. But 83 the hard and sour labour of ordinary peasant life is left on one side, since it offers no material for humour and anecdote.

Through this limitation painting renounced the best part of its strength. To a man of pictorial vision nature is a gallery of magnificent pictures, and one which is as wide and far-reaching as the world. But whoever seeks salvation in narrative painting soon reaches the end of his material. In the life of any man there are only three or four events that are worth the trouble of telling; Wilkie told more, and he became tiresome in consequence. We are willing to accept these anecdotes as true, but they are threadbare. Things of this sort may be found in the gaily-bound little books which are given as Christmas presents to children. It is not exhilarating to learn that worldly marriages have their inconveniences, that there is a pleasure in talking scandal about one’s friends behind their backs, that a son causes pain to his mother by his excesses, and that egoism is an unpleasant failing. All that is true, but it is too true. We are irritated by the intrusiveness of this course of instruction. Wilkie paints insipid subjects, and by one foolery after another he has made painting into a toy for good children. And good children play the principal parts in these pictures.

As a painter, one of George Morland’s pupils, William Collins, threw the world into ecstasies by his pictures of children. Out of one hundred and twenty-one which he exhibited in the Academy in the course of forty years the principal are: the picture of “The Little Flute-Player,” “The Sale of the Pet Lamb,” “Boys with a Bird’s Nest,” “The Fisher’s Departure,” “Scene in a Kentish Hop-Garden,” and the picture of the swallows. The most popular were “Happy as a King”—a small boy whom his elder playmates have set upon a garden railing, from which he looks down laughing proudly—and “Rustic Civility”—children who have drawn up like soldiers, by a fence, so as to salute some one who is approaching. But it is clear from the titles 84 of such pictures that in this province English genre painting did not free itself from the reproach of being episodic. Collins was richer in ideas than Meyer of Bremen. His children receive earrings, sit on their mother’s knee, play with her in the garden, watch her sewing, read aloud to her from their spelling-book, learn their lessons, and are frightened of the geese and hens which advance in a terrifying fashion towards them in the poultry-yard. He is an admirable painter of children at the family table, of the pleasant chatter of the little ones, of the father watching his sleeping child of an evening by the light of the lamp, with his heart full of pride and joy because he has the consciousness of working for those who are near to him. Being naturally very fond of children, he has painted the life of little people with evident enjoyment of all its variations, and yet not in a thoroughly credible fashion. Chardin painted the poetry of the child-world. His little ones have no suspicion of the painter being near them. They are harmlessly occupied with themselves, and in their ordinary clothes. Those of Collins look as if they were repeating a copybook maxim at a school examination. They know that the eyes of all the sightseers in the exhibition are fixed upon them, and they are doing their utmost to be on their best behaviour. They have a lack of unconsciousness. One would like to say to them: “My dear children, always be good.” But no one is grateful to the painter for taking from children their childishness, and for bringing into vogue that codling which had its way for so long afterwards in the pictures of children.

Gilbert Stuart Newton, an American by birth, who lived in England from 1820 to 1835, devoted himself to the illustration of English authors. Like Wilkie, he has a certain historical importance, because he devoted himself with great zeal to a study of the Dutchmen of the seventeenth century and to the French painters of the eighteenth, at a time when these masters were entirely out of fashion on the Continent and sneered at as representatives of “the deepest corruption.” Dow and Terborg were his peculiar ideals; and although the colour of his pictures is certainly heavy and common compared with that of his models, it is artistic, and shows study when one thinks of contemporary productions on the Continent. His works (“Lear attended by Cordelia,” “The Vicar of Wakefield restoring his Daughter to her Mother,” “The Prince of Spain’s Visit to Catalina” from Gil Blas, and “Yorick and the Grisette” from Sterne), like the pictures of the Düsseldorfers, would most certainly have lost in actuality but for the interest provided by the literary passages; yet they are favourably distinguished from the literary illustrations of the Düsseldorfers by the want of any sort of idealism. While the painters of the Continent in such pictures almost invariably fell into a rounded, generalising ideal of beauty, Newton had the scene played by actors and painted them realistically. The result was a theatrical realism, but the way in which the theatrical effects are studied and the palpableness of the histrionic gestures are so convincingly true to nature that his pictures seem like records of stage art in London about the year 1830.

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Charles Robert Leslie, known as an author by his pleasant book on Constable and a highly conservative Handbook for Young Painters, had a similar repértoire, and rendered in oils Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Molière, with more or less ability. The National Gallery has an exceedingly prosaic and colourless picture of his, “Sancho Panza in the Apartment of the Duchess.” Some that are in the South Kensington Museum are better; for example, “The Taming of the Shrew,” “The Dinner at Mr. Page’s House” from The Merry Wives of Windsor, and “Sir Roger de Coverley.” His finest and best-known work is “My Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman,” which charmingly illustrates the pretty scene in Tristram Shandy: “’I protest, madam,’ said my Uncle Toby, ‘I can see nothing whatever in your eye.’ ‘It is not in the white!’ said Mrs. Wadman. My Uncle Toby looked with might and main into the pupil.” As in Newton’s works, so in Leslie’s too, there is such a strong dose of realism that his pictures will always keep their value as historical documents—not for the year 1630 but for 1830. As a colourist he was—in his 88 later works at any rate—a delicate imitator of the Dutch chiaroscuro; and in the history of art he occupies a position similar to that of Diez in Germany, and was esteemed in the same way, even in later years, when the young Pre-Raphaelite school began its embittered war against “brown sauce”—the same war which a generation afterwards was waged in Germany by Liebermann and his followers against the school of Diez.

Mulready, thirty-two of whose pictures are preserved in the South Kensington Museum, is in his technique almost more delicate than Leslie, and he has learnt a great deal from Metsu. By preference he took his subjects out of Goldsmith. “Choosing the Wedding Gown” and “The Whistonian Controversy” would make pretty illustrations for an édition de luxe of The Vicar of Wakefield. Otherwise he too had a taste for immortalising children, by turns lazy and industrious, at their tea or playing by the water’s edge.

From Thomas Webster, the fourth of these kindly, childlike masters, yet more inspiriting facts are to be obtained. He has informed the world that at a not very remote period of English history all the agricultural labourers were quite content with their lot. No one ever quarrelled with his landlord, or sat in a public-house and let his family starve. The highest bliss of these excellent people was to stay at home and play with their children by the light of a wax-candle. Webster’s rustics, children, and schoolmasters are the citizens of an ideal planet, but the little country is a pleasant world. His pictures are so harmless in intention, so neat and accurate in drawing, and so clear and luminous in colour that they may be seen with pleasure even at the present day.

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The last of the group, William Powell Frith, was the most copious in giving posterity information about the manners and costumes of his contemporaries, and would be still more authentic if life had not seemed to him so genial and roseate. His pictures represent scenes of the nineteenth century, but they seem like events of the good old times. At that period people were undoubtedly good and innocent and happy. They had no income-tax and no vices and worries, and all went to heaven and felt in good spirits. And so they do in Frith’s pictures, only not so naturally as in Ostade and Beham. For example, he goes on the beach at a fashionable English watering-place during the season, in July or August. The geniality which predominates here is quite extraordinary. Children are splashing in the sea, young ladies flirting, niggers playing the barrel-organ and women singing ballads to its strains; every one is doing his utmost to look well, and the pair of beggars who are there for the sake of contrast have long become resigned to their fate. In his racecourse pictures everything is brought together which on such occasions is representative of London life: all types, from the baronet to the ragman; all beauties, from the lady to the street-walker. A rustic has to lose his money, or a famished acrobat to turn his pockets inside out to assure himself that there is really nothing in them. His picture of the gaming-table in Homburg is almost richer in such examples of dry observation and humorous and spirited episode.

This may serve to exemplify the failures of these painters of genre. Not light and colour, but anecdote, comedy, and genial tale-telling are the basis of their labours. And yet, notwithstanding this attempt to express literary ideas through the mediums of a totally different art, their work is significant. While continental artists avoided nothing so much as that which might seem to approach nature, the English, revolting from the thraldom of theory, gathered subjects for their pictures from actual life. These men, indeed, pointed out the way to painters from every country; and they, once on the right road, were bound ultimately to arrive at the point from which they no longer looked on life through the glasses of the anecdotist, but saw it with the eye of the true artist.

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CHAPTER XVIII

THE MILITARY PICTURE

While English painting from the days of Hogarth and Wilkie embraced rustic and middle-class life, the victory of modernity on the Continent could only be accomplished slowly and by degrees. The question of costume played an important part in it. “Artists love antiquated costume because, as they say, it gives them greater sweep and freedom. But I should like to suggest that in historical representations of their own age an eye should be kept on propriety of delineation rather than on freedom and sweep. Otherwise one might just as well allow an historian to talk to us about phalanxes, battlements, triarii, and argyraspids in place of battalions, squadrons, grenadiers, and cuirassiers. The painters of the great events of the day ought, especially, to be more true to fact. In battle-pieces, for example, they ought not to have cavalry shooting and sabreing about them in leather collars, in round and plumed hats, and the vast jack-boots which exist no longer. The old masters drew, engraved, and painted in this way because people really dressed in such a manner at the time. It is said that our costume is not picturesque, and therefore why should we choose it? But posterity will be curious to know how we clothed ourselves, and will wish to have no gap from the eighteenth century to its own time.”

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These words, which the well-known Vienna librarian Denis wrote in 1797 in his Lesefrüchte, show how early came the problem which was at high-water mark for a generation afterwards. The painting of the nineteenth century could only become modern when it succeeded in recognising and expressing the characteristic side of modern costume. But to do that it took more than half a century. It was, after all, natural that to people who had seen the graceful forms and delicate colours of the rococo time, the garb of the first half of the century should seem the most unfortunate and the least enviable in the whole history of costume. “What person of artistic education is not of the opinion,” runs a passage in Putmann’s book on the Düsseldorf school in 1835,—“what person of artistic education is not of the opinion that the dress of the present day is tasteless, hideous, and ape-like? Moreover, can a true style be brought into harmony with hoop-petticoats and swallow-tail coats and such vagaries? In our time, therefore, art is right in seeking out those beautiful fashions of the past, about which tailors concern themselves so little. How much longer must we go about, unpicturesque beings, like ugly black bats, in swallow-tail coats and wide trousers? The peasant’s blouse, indeed, can be accepted as one of the few picturesque dresses which have yet been preserved in Germany from the inauspicious influence of the times.” The same plaint is sung by Hotho in his history of German and Netherlandish painting; the costume of his age he declares to be thoroughly prosaic and tiresome. It is revolting to painters and an offence to the educated eye. Art must necessarily seek salvation in the past, unless it is to wait, and give brush and palette a holiday, until that happy time when the costume of nations comes to its pictorial regeneration. Only one zone, the realm of blouse and military uniform, was beyond the domain of tail-coat and trousers, and still furnished art with rich material.

Since it was by working on uniform that plastic artists first learnt how to treat contemporary costume, so it was the military picture that first entered the circle of modern painting. By exalting the soldier into a warrior, and the warrior into a hero, it was here possible, even in the times of David and Carstens, to effect a certain compromise with the ruling classical ideas. Gérard, Girodet—to some extent even Gros—made abundant use of the mask of the Greek or Roman warrior, with the object of admitting the battle-piece into painting in the grand style. The real heroes of the Napoleonic epoch had not this plastic appearance nor these epic attitudes. Classicism altered their physiognomies and gave them, most illogically, the air of old marble statues. It was Horace Vernet who freed battle painting from this anathema. This, but little else, stands to his credit.

Together with his son-in-law Paul Delaroche, Horace Vernet is the most genuine product of the Juste-milieu period. The king with the umbrella founded the Museum of Versailles, that monstrous depôt of daubed canvas, 96 which is a horrifying memory to any one who has ever wandered through it. However, it is devoted à toutes les gloires de la France. In a few years a suite of galleries, which it takes almost two hours merely to pass through from end to end, was filled with pictures of all sizes, bringing home the history of the country, from Charlemagne to the African expedition of Louis Philippe, under all circumstances which are in any way flattering to French pride. For miles numberless manufacturers of painting bluster from the walls. As pictor celerrimus Horace Vernet had the command-in-chief, and became so famous by his chronicle of the conquest of Algiers that for a long time he was held by trooper, Philistine, and all the kings and emperors of Europe as the greatest painter in France. He was the last scion of a celebrated dynasty of artists, and had taken a brush in his hand from the moment he threw away his child’s rattle. A good deal of talent had been given him in his cradle: sureness of eye, lightness of hand, and an enviable memory. His vision was correct, if not profound; he painted his pictures without hesitation, and is favourably distinguished from many of his contemporaries by his independence: he owes no one anything, and reveals his own qualities without arraying himself in those of other people. Only these qualities are not of an order which gives his pictures artistic interest. The spark of Géricault’s genius, which seems to have been transmitted to him in the beginning, was completely quenched in his later years. Having swiftly attained popularity by the aid of lithography which circulated his “Mazeppa” through the whole world, he became afterwards a bad and vulgar painter, without poetry, light, or colour; a reporter who expressed himself in banal prose and wounded all the finer spirits of his age. “I loathe this man,” said Baudelaire, as early as 1846.

Devoid of any sense of the tragedy of war, which Gros possessed in such a high degree, Vernet treated battles like performances at the circus. His pictures have movement without passion, and magnitude without greatness. If it had been required of him, he would have daubed all the boulevards; his picture of Smala is certainly not so long, but there would have been no serious difficulty in lengthening it by half a mile. This incredible stenographical talent won for him his popularity. He was decorated 97 with all the orders in the world. The bourgeois felt happy when he looked at Vernet’s pictures, and the paterfamilias promised to buy a horse for his little boy. The soldiers called him “mon colonel,” and would not have been surprised if he had been made a Marshal of France. A lover of art passes the pictures of Vernet with the sentiment which the old colonel owned to entertaining towards music. “Are you fond of music, colonel?” asked a lady. “Madame, I am not afraid of it.”

The trivial realism of his workmanship is as tedious as the unreal heroism of his soldiers. In the manner in which he conceived the trooper, Vernet stands between the Classicists and the moderns. He did not paint ancient warriors, but French soldiers: he knew them as a corporal knows his men, and by this respect for prescribed regulation he was prevented from turning them into Romans. But though he disregarded Classicism, in outward appearance, he did not drop the heroic tone. He always saw the soldier as the bold defender of his country, the warrior performing daring deeds, as in the “Battle of Alexander”; and in this way he gave his pictures their unpleasant air of bluster. For neither modern tactics nor modern cannon admit of the prominence of the individual as it is to be seen in Vernet’s pictures. The soldier of the nineteenth century is no longer a warrior, but the unit in a 98 multitude; he does what he is ordered, and for that he has no need of the spirit of an ancient hero; he kills or is killed, without seeing his enemy or being seen himself. The course of a battle advances, move by move, according to mathematical calculation. It is therefore false to represent soldiers in heroic attitudes, or even to suggest deeds of heroism on the part of those in command. In giving his orders and directing a battle a general has to behave pretty much as he does at home at his writing-table. And he is never in the battle, as he is represented by Horace Vernet; on the contrary, he remains at a considerable distance off. Therefore, even with the dimensions of which Vernet availed himself, the exact portrait of a modern battle is exclusively an affair for panorama, but never for the flat surface of a picture. A picture must confine itself, either to the field-marshal directing the battle from a distance upon a hill in the midst of his staff, or else to little pictorial episodes in the individual life of the soldier. The gradual development from unreal battle-pieces to simple episodic paintings can be followed step by step in the following works.

What was painted for the Versailles Museum in connection with deeds of arms in the Crimean War and the Italian campaign kept more or less to the blustering official style of Horace Vernet. In the galleries of Versailles the battles of Wagram, Loano, and Altenkirche (1837-39), and an episode from the retreat from Russia (1851), represent the work of Hippolyte Bellangé. These are huge lithochromes which have been very carefully executed. Adolphe 99 Yvon, who is responsible for “The Taking of Malakoff,” “The Battle of Magenta,” and “The Battle of Solferino,” is a more tedious painter, and remained during his whole life a pupil of Delaroche; he laid chief stress on finished and rounded composition, and gave his soldiers no more appearance of life than could be forced into the accepted academic convention. The fame of Isidor Pils, who immortalised the disembarkation of the French troops in the Crimea, the battle of Alma, and the reception of Arab chiefs by Napoleon III, has paled with equal rapidity. He could paint soldiers, but not battles, and, like Yvon, he was too precise in the composition of his works. In consequence they have as laboured an effect in arrangement as they have in colour. He was completely wanting in sureness and spontaneity. It is only his water-colours that hold one’s attention; and this they do at any rate by their unaffected actuality, and in spite of their dull and heavy colour. Alexandre Protais verged more on the sentimental. He loved soldiers, and therefore had the less toleration for war, which swept the handsome young fellows away. Two pendants, “The Morning before the Attack” and “The Evening after the Battle,” founded his reputation in 1863. The first showed a group of riflemen waiting in excitement for the first bullets of the enemy; the second represented the same men in the evening delighted with their victory, but at the same time—and here you have the note of Protais—mournful over the loss of their comrades. “The Prisoners” and “The Parting” 100 of 1872 owed their success to the same lachrymose and melodramatic sensibility.

A couple of mere lithographists, soldiers’ sons, in whom a repining for the Napoleonic legend still found its echo, were the first great military painters of modern France. “Charlet and Raffet,” wrote Bürger-Thoré in his Salon of 1845, “are the two artists who best understand the representation of that almost vanished type, the trooper of the Empire; and after Gros they will assuredly endure as the principal historians of that warlike era.”

Charlet, the painter of the old bear Napoleon I, might almost be called the Béranger of painting. The “little Corporal,” the “great Emperor” appears and reappears in his pictures and drawings without intermission; his work is an epic in pencil of the grey coat and the little hat. From his youth he employed himself with military studies, which were furthered in Gros’ studio, which he entered in 1817. The Græco-Roman ideal did not exist for him, and he was indifferent to beauty of form. His was one of those natures which have a natural turn for actual fact; he had a power for characterisation, and in his many water-colours and lithographs he was merely concerned with the proper expression of his ideas. How it came that Delacroix had so great a respect for him was nevertheless explained when his “Episode 101 in the Retreat from Russia,” in the World Exhibition of 1889, emerged from the obscurity of the Lyons Museum; it is perhaps his best and most important picture. When it appeared in the Salon of 1836, Alfred de Musset wrote that it was “not an episode but a complete poem”; he went on to say that the artist had painted “the despair in the wilderness,” and that, with its gloomy heaven and disconsolate horizon, the picture gave the impression of infinite disaster. After fifty years it had lost none of its value. Since the reappearance of this picture it has been recognised that Charlet was not merely the specialist of old grey heads with their noses reddened with brandy, the Molière of barracks and canteens, but that he understood all the tragical sublimity of war, from which Horace Vernet merely produced trivial anecdotes.

Beside him stands his pupil Raffet, the special painter of the grande armée. He mastered the brilliant figure of Napoleon; he followed it from Ajaccio to St. Helena, and never left it until he had said everything that was to be said about it. He showed the “little Corsican” as the general of the Italian campaign, ghastly pale and consumed with ambition; the Bonaparte of the Pyramids and of Cairo; the Emperor Napoleon on the parade-ground reviewing his Grenadiers; the triumphal hero of 1807 with the Cuirassiers dashing past, brandishing their sabres with a hurrah; the Titan of Beresina riding slowly over the waste of snow, and, in the very midst of disaster, spying a new star of fortune; the war-god of 1813, the great hypnotiser greeted even by the dying with a cry of “Long life to the Emperor”; the adventurer of 1814, riding at the head of shattered troops over a barren wilderness; the vanquished hero of 1815, who, in the midst of his last square, in the thick of his beloved battalions, calls fickle fate once more into the lists; and the captive lion who, from the bridge of the ship, casts a last look on the coast of France as it fades in the mist. He has called the Emperor from the grave, as a ghostly power, to hold a midnight review of the grande armée. And with love and passion and enthusiasm he has followed the instrument of these victories, the French soldiers, the swordsmen of seven years’ service, through bivouac and battle, on the march and on parade, as patrols and outposts. 102 The ragged and shoeless troops of the Empire are portrayed in his plates, with a touch of real sublimity, in defeat and in victory. The empty inflated expression of martial enthusiasm has been avoided by him; everything is true and earnest.

In a masterly fashion he could make soldiers deploy in masses. No one has known in the same way how to render the impression of the multitude of an army, the notion of men standing shoulder to shoulder, the welding of thousands of individuals into one complete entity. In Raffet a regiment is a thousand-headed living being that has but one soul, one moral nature, one spirit, one sentiment of willing sacrifice and heroic courage. His death was as adventurous as his life; he passed away in a hotel in Genoa, and was brought back to French soil as part of the cargo of a merchant ship. For a long time his fame was thrown into the shade, at first by the triumphs of Horace Vernet, and then by those of Meissonier, until at length a fitting record was devoted to him by the piety of his son Auguste.

Never had Ernest Meissonier to complain of want of recognition. After his rococo pictures had been deemed worth their weight in gold he climbed to the summit of his fame, his universal celebrity and his popularity in France, when he devoted himself in the sixties to the representation of French military history. The year 1859 took him to Italy in the train of Napoleon III. Meissonier was chosen to spread the martial glory of the Emperor, and, as the nephew was fond of drawing parallels between himself and his mighty uncle, Meissonier was obliged to depict suitable occasions from the life of the first Napoleon. His admirers were very curious to know how the great “little painter” would acquit himself in such a monumental task. First came the “Battle of Solferino,” that picture of the Musée Luxembourg which represents Napoleon III overlooking the battle from a height in the midst of his staff. After lengthy preparations it appeared in the Salon of 1864, and showed that the painter had not been untrue to himself: he had simply adapted the minute technique of his rococo pictures to the painting of war, and he remained the Dutch “little master” in all the battle-pieces which followed.

Napoleon III had no further deeds of arms to record, so the intended parallel series was never accomplished. It is true, indeed, that he took the painter with the army in 1870; but after the first battle was lost, Meissonier went home: he did not wish to immortalise the struggles of a retreat. Henceforward his brush was consecrated to the first Napoleon. “1805” depicts the triumphant advance to the height of fame; “1807” shows Napoleon when the summit has been reached and the soldiers are cheering their idol in exultation; “1814” represents the fall: the star of fortune has vanished; victory, so long faithful to the man of might, has deserted his banners. There is still a look of indomitable energy on the pale face of the Emperor, as, in utter despair, he aims his last shot against the traitor destiny; but his eyes seem weary, his mouth is contorted, and his features are wasted with fever.

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Meissonier has treated all these works with the carefulness which he expended on his little rococo pictures. To give an historically accurate representation of Napoleon’s boots he did not content himself with borrowing them from the museum. Walking and riding—for he was a passionate horseman—he wore for months together boots of the same make and form as those of the “little Corporal.” To get the colour of the horses of the Emperor and his marshals, in their full-grown winter coat, and to paint them just as they must have appeared after the hardships and negligence of a campaign, he bought animals of the same race and colour as those ridden by the Emperor and his generals, according to tradition, and picketed them for weeks in the snow and rain. His models were forced to wear out the uniforms in sun and storm before he painted them; he bought weapons and harness at fancy prices when he could not borrow them from museums. And there is no need to say that he copied all the portraits of Napoleon, Ney, Soult, and the other generals that were to be had, and read through whole libraries before beginning his Napoleon series. To paint the picture “1814,” which is generally reckoned his greatest performance—Napoleon at the head of his staff riding through a snow-clad landscape—he first prepared the scenery on a spot in the plain of Champagne, corresponding to the original locality, just as he did in earlier years with his interiors of the rococo period; he even had the road laid out on which he wished to paint the Emperor advancing. Then he waited for the first fall of snow, and had artillery, cavalry, and infantry to march for him upon this snowy path, and actually contrived that overturned transport waggons, discarded arms, and baggage should be decoratively strewn about the landscape.

From these laborious preparations it may be understood that he spent almost as many millions of francs upon his pictures as he received. In his article, What an Old Work of Art is Worth, Julius Lessing has admirably dealt with the hidden ways of taste and commerce applied to art. Amongst all 106 painters of modern times Meissonier is the only one whose pictures, during his own lifetime, fetched prices such as are only reached by the works of famous old masters of the greatest epochs. And yet he sold them straight from his easel, and never to dealers. Meissonier avenged himself magnificently for the privations of his youth. In 1832, when he gave up his apprenticeship with Menier, the great chocolate manufacturer, to become a painter, he had fifteen francs a month to spend. He had great difficulty in disposing of his drawings and illustrations for five or ten francs, and was often obliged to console himself with a roll for the want of a dinner. Only ten years later he was able to purchase a small place in Poissy, near St. Germain, where he went for good in 1850, to give himself up to work without interruption. Gradually this little property became a pleasant country seat, and in due course of time the stately house in Paris, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, was added to it. His “Napoleon, 1814,” for which the painter himself received three hundred thousand francs, was bought at an auction by one of the owners of the “Grands Magasins du Louvre” for eight hundred and fifty thousand francs; “Napoleon III at Solferino” brought him two hundred thousand, and “The Charge of the Cuirassiers” three hundred thousand. And in general, after 1850, he only painted for such sums. It was calculated that he received about five thousand francs for every centimetre of painted canvas, and left behind him pictures which, according to present rate, were worth more than twenty million francs, without having really become a rich man; for, as a rule, every picture that he painted cost him several thousand.

And Meissonier never sacrificed himself to money-making and the trade. He never put a stroke on paper without the conviction that he could not make it better, and for this artistic earnestness he was universally honoured, even by his colleagues, to his very death. As master beyond dispute he let the Classicists, Romanticists, Impressionists, and Symbolists pass by the window of his lonely studio, and always remained the same. A little man with a firm step, an energetic figure, eyes that shone like coals, thick, closely cropped hair, and the beard of a river-god, that always seemed to grow longer, at eighty years of age he was as hale and active as at thirty. By a systematic routine of life he kept his physique elastic, and was able to maintain that unintermittent activity under which another man would have broken down. During long years Meissonier went to rest at eight every evening, slept till midnight, and then worked at his drawings by lamplight into the morning. In the course of the day he made his studies from nature and painted. Diffident in society and hard of access, he did not permit himself to be disturbed in his indefatigable diligence by any social demands. A sharp ride, a swim or a row was his only relaxation. In 1848, as captain of the National Guard, he had taken part in the street and barricade fighting; and again in 1871, when he was sixty-six, he clattered through the streets of the capital, with the dangling sword he had so often painted and a gold-laced cap stuck jauntily 107 on one side, as a smart staff-officer. Even the works of his old age showed no exhaustion of power, and there is something great in attaining ripe years without outliving one’s reputation. As late as the spring of 1890, only a short time before his death, he was the leader of youth, when it transmigrated from the Palais des Champs Elysées to the Champ de Mars; and he exhibited in this new Salon his “October 1806,” with which he closed his Napoleonic epic and his general activity as a painter. Halting on a hill, the Emperor in his historical grey coat, mounted on a powerful grey, is thoughtfully watching the course of the battle, without troubling himself about the Cuirassiers who salute him exultantly as they storm by, or about the brilliant staff which has taken up position behind him. Not a feature moves in the sallow, cameo-like face of the Corsican. The sky is lowering and full of clouds. In the foreground lie a couple of dead soldiers, in whose uniform every button has been painted with the same conscientious care that was bestowed on the buttons of the rococo coats of fifty years before.

Beyond this inexhaustible correctness I can really see nothing that can be said for Meissonier’s fame as an artist. He, whose name is honoured in both hemispheres, was most peculiarly the son of his own work. The genius for the infinitesimal has never been carried further. He knew everything that a man can learn. The movements in his pictures are correct, the physiognomies interesting, the delicacy of execution indescribable, and his horses have been so exactly studied that they stand the test of instantaneous photography. But painter, in the proper sense, he never was. Precisely through their marvellous minuteness of execution—a minuteness which is merely attractive as a trial of patience and as an example of what the brush can do—his pictures are wanting in unity of conception, and they leave one cold by the hardness of their contours, the aridness of their colour, and the absence of all vibrating, nervous feeling. In a cavalry charge, with the whirling dust and the snorting horses, who thinks of costume? And who thinks of anything else when Meissonier paints a charge? Here are life and movement, and there a museum of military uniforms. When Manet saw Meissonier’s “Cuirassiers” he said, “Everything is iron here except the cuirasses.”

His rococo pictures are probably his best 108 performances; they even express a certain amount of temperament. His military pictures make one chilly. Reproduced in woodcuts they are good illustrations for historical works, but as pictures they repel the eye, because they lack air and light and spirit. They rouse nothing except astonishment at the patience and incredible industry that went to the making of them. One sees everything in them—everything that the painter can have seen—to the slightest detail; only one does not rightly come into contact with the artist himself. His battle-pieces stand high above the scenic pictures of Horace Vernet and Hippolyte Bellangé, but they have nothing of the warmth of Raffet or the vibrating life of Neuville. There is nothing in them that is contagious and carries one away, or that appeals to the heart. Patience is a virtue: genius is a gift. Precious without originality, intelligent without imagination, dexterous without verve, elegant without charm, refined and subtile without delicacy, Meissonier has all the qualities that interest, and none of those which lay hold of one. He was a painter of a distinctness which causes astonishment, but not admiration; an artist for epicures, but for those of the second order, who pay the more highly for works of art in proportion as they value their artifice. His pictures recall the unseasonable compliment which Charles Blanc made to Ingres: “Cher maître, vous avez deviné la photographie trente ans avant qu’il y eut des photographes.” Or else one thinks of that malicious story of which Jules Dupré is well known as the author. “Suppose,” said he, “that you are a great personage who has just bought a Meissonier. Your valet enters the salon where it is hanging. ‘Ah! Monsieur,’ he cries, ‘what a beautiful picture you have bought! That is a masterpiece!’ Another time you buy a Rembrandt, and show it to your valet, in the expectation that he will at any rate be overcome by the same raptures. Mais non! This time the man looks embarrassed. ‘Ah! Monsieur,’ he says, ‘il faut s’y connaître,’ and away he goes.”

Guillaume Regamey, who is far less known, supplies what is wanting in Meissonier. Sketchy and of a highly strung nervous temperament, he could not adapt himself to the picture-market; but the history of art honours him as the most spirited draughtsman of the French soldier, after Géricault and Raffet. He did not paint him turned out for parade, ironed and smartened up, but in the worst trim. Syria, the Crimea, Italy, and the East are mingled with the difference of their types and the brightness of their exotic costumes. He had a great love for the catlike, quick-glancing chivalry of Turcos and Sapphis; but especially he loved the cavalry. His “Chasseurs d’Afrique” are part and parcel of their horses, like centaurs, and many of his cavalry groups recall the frieze of the Parthenon. Unfortunately he died at thirty-eight, shortly before the war of 1870, the historians of which were the younger painters, who had grown up in the shadow of Meissonier.

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The most important of the group, Alphonse de Neuville, had looked at war very closely as an officer during the siege of Paris, and in this way he made himself a fine illustrator, who in his anecdotic pictures specially understood the secret of painting powder-smoke and the vehemence of a fusillade. The “Bivouac before Le Bourget” brought him his first success. “The Last Cartridges,” “Le Bourget,” and “The Graveyard of Saint-Privat” made him a popular master. Neuville is peculiarly the French painter of fighting. He did not know, as Charlet did, the soldier in time of peace, the peasant lad of yesterday who only cares about his stomach and has little taste for martial adventure. His soldier is an elegant and enthusiastic youthful hero. He even neglected the troops of the line; his preference was for the Chasseur, whose cap is stuck jauntily on his head and whose trousers fall better. He loved the plumes, the high boots of the officers, the sword-knots, canes, and eye-glasses. Everything received grace from his dexterous hand; he even saw in the trooper a gallant and ornamental bibelot, which he painted with chivalrous verve.

The pictures of Aimé Morot, the painter of “The Charge of the Cuirassiers,” possibly smell most of powder. Neuville’s frequently over-praised rival, Meissonier’s favourite pupil, Edouard Détaille, after he had started with pretty little costume pictures from the Directoire period, went further on the way of his teacher with less laboriousness and more lightness, with less calculation and more sincerity. The best of his works was “Salut aux Blessés”—the representation of a troop of wounded Prussian officers and soldiers on a 112 country road, passing a French general and his staff, who with graceful chivalry lift their caps and salute the wounded men. Détaille’s great pictures, such as “The Presentation of the Colours,” and his panoramas were as accurate as they were tedious and arid, although they are far superior to most of the efforts which the Germans made to depict scenes from the war of 1870.

In Germany the great period of the wars of liberation first inspired a group of painters with the courage to enter the province of battle-painting, which had been so much despised by their classical colleagues. Germany had been turned into a great camp. Prussian, French, Austrian, Russian, and Bavarian troops passed in succession through the towns and villages: long trains of cannon and transport waggons came in their wake, and friends and foes were billeted amongst the inhabitants; the Napoleonic epoch was enacted. Such scenes followed each other like the gay slides in a magic lantern, and once more gave to some among the younger generation eyes for the outer world. There was awakened in them the capacity for receiving impressions of reality and transferring them swiftly to paper. Two hundred years before, the emancipation of Dutch art from the Italian house of bondage had been accomplished in precisely the same fashion. The Dutch struggle for freedom and the Thirty Years’ War had filled Holland with numbers of soldiery. The 113 doings of these mercenaries, daily enacted before them in rich costume and with manifold brightness, riveted the pictorial feeling of artists. Echoes of war, fighting scenes, skirmishes and tumult, the incidents of camp life, arming, billeting, and marauding episodes are the first independent products of the Dutch school. Then the more peaceable doings of soldiers are represented. At Haarlem, in the neighbourhood of Frans Hals, were assembled the painters of social pieces, as they are called; pieces in which soldiers, bold and rollicking officers, make merry with gay maidens at wine and play and love. From thence the artist came to the portrayal of a peasantry passing their time in the same rough, free and easy life, and thence onward to the representation of society in towns.

German painting in the nineteenth century took the same road. Eighty years ago foreign troops, and the extravagantly “picturesque and often ragged uniforms of the Republican army, the characteristic and often wild physiognomies of the French soldiers,” gave artists their first fresh and variously hued impressions. Painters of military subjects make their studies, not in the antiquity class of the academy, but upon the parade-ground and 114 in the camp. Later, when the warlike times were over, they passed from the portrayal of soldiers to that of rustics; and so they laid the foundation on which future artists built.

In Berlin Franz Krüger and in Munich Albrecht Adam and Peter Hess were figures of individual character, belonging to the spiritual family of Chodowiecki and Gottfried Schadow; and, entirely undisturbed by classical theories or romantic reverie, they penetrated the life around them with a clear and sharp glance. They lacked, indeed, the temperament to comprehend either the high poetic tendencies of the old Munich school or the sentimental enthusiasm of the old Düsseldorf.

On the other hand, they were unhackneyed artists, facing facts in a completely unprejudiced spirit: entirely self-reliant, they refused to form themselves upon any model derived from the old masters; they had never had a teacher and never enjoyed academic instruction. This naïve straightforwardness makes their painting a half-barbaric product; something which has been allowed to run wild. But in a period of archæological resuscitations, pedantic brooding over the past and slavish imitation of the ancients, it seems, for this very reason, the first independent product of the nineteenth century. As vigorous, matter-of-fact realists they know nothing of more delicate charms, but represented fact for all it was worth and as honestly and conscientiously as was humanly possible. They are lacking in the distinctively pictorial character, but they are absolutely untouched by the Classicism of the epoch. 115 They never dream of putting the uniforms of their warriors upon antique statues. It is this downright honesty that renders their pictures not merely irreplaceable as documents for the history of civilisation, and in spite of their unexampled frigidity, hardness, and gaudiness, lends them, even from the standpoint of art, a certain innovating quality. In a pleasantly written autobiography Albrecht Adam has himself described the drift of historical events which made him a painter of battles.

He was a confectioner’s apprentice in Nördlingen when, in the year 1800, the marches of the French army began in the neighbourhood. In an inn he began to sketch sergeants and Grenadiers, and went proudly home with the pence that he earned in this way. “Adam, when there’s war, I’ll take you into the field with me,” said an old major-general, who was the purchaser of his first works. That came to pass in 1809, when the Bavarians went with Napoleon against Austria. After a few weeks he was in the thick of raging battle. He saw Napoleon, the Crown-Prince Ludwig, and General Wrede, was present at the battles of Abensberg, Eckmühl, and Wagram, and came to Vienna with his portfolios full of sketches. There his portraits and pictures of the war found favour with the officers, and Eugène Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, took him to Upper Italy and afterwards to Russia. He was an eye-witness of the battles at Borodino and on the Moskwa, and saved himself from the conflagration of Moscow by his courage and determination. A true soldier, he mounted a horse when he was sixty-two years of age to be present on the Italian expedition of the Austrian army under Radetzky in 1848. His battle-pieces are therefore the result of personal experience. When campaigning he led the same life as the soldiers whom he portrayed, and as he proceeded in this portrayal with the objective quietness and fidelity of an historian, his artistic productions are invaluable as documents. Even where he could not draw as an eye-witness he invariably made studies afterwards, endeavouring to collect the most reliable material upon the spot, and preparing it with the utmost conscientiousness. The ground occupied by bodies of troops, the marshalling of them, and the conflict of masses, together with the smallest episodes, are represented with simplicity and reality. In the portrayal of the soldier’s life in time of peace he was inexhaustible. Just as vividly could he render horses undergoing the strain of the march and in the tumult of battle as in the stall, the farm-horse of the transport waggon no less than the noble creature ridden for parade. That his colour was sharp and hard, and his pictures therefore devoid of harmony, is to be explained by the helplessness of the age in regard to colouring. Only his last pictures, such as “The Battle on the Moskwa,” have a certain harmony of hue; and there is no doubt that this is to be set to the account of his son Franz.

After Adam, the father of German battle-painters, Peter Hess made an epoch by the earnestness and actuality of his pictures. He too accompanied General Wrede on the 1813-15 campaigns, and has left behind him exceedingly 116 healthy, sane, and objectively viewed Cossack scenes, bivouacs, and the like, belonging to this period; though in his great pictures he aimed at totality of effect just as little as Adam. Confused by the complexity of his material, he only ventured to single out individual incidents, and then put them together on the canvas after the fashion of a mosaic; and, to make the nature of the action as clear as possible, he assumed as his standpoint the perspective view of a bird. Of course, pictures produced in this way make an effect which is artistically childish, but as the primitive endeavours of modern German art they will keep their place. The best known of his pictures are those inspired by the choice of Prince Otto of Bavaria as King of Greece, especially “The Reception of King Otto in Nauplia,” which is to be found in the new Pinakothek in Munich. In spite of its hard, motley, and quite impossible colouring, and its petty pedantry of execution, this is a picture which will not lose its value as an historical source.

Vigorous Franz Krüger had been long known in Berlin, by his famous pictures of horses, before the Emperor of Russia in 1829 commissioned him to paint, on a huge canvas, the great parade on the Opernplatz in Berlin, where he had reviewed his regiment of Cuirassiers before the King of Prussia. From that time such parade pictures became Krüger’s specialty; especially famous is the great parade of 1839, with the likenesses of those who at the time played a political or literary part in Berlin. In these works he has left a true reflection of old Berlin, and bridged over the chasm between Chodowiecki and Menzel: this is specially the case with his curiously objective water-colour portrait heads. Mention should be made of Karl Steffeck as a pupil of Krüger, and Theodor Horschelt—in addition to Franz Adam—as a pupil of Adam. By Steffeck, a healthy, vigorous realist, there are some well-painted portraits of horses, and by Th. Horschelt, who in 1858 took part in the fights of the Russians against the Circassians in the Caucasus, there survive some of the spirited and masterly pen-and-ink sketches which he published collectively in his Memories from the Caucasus. Franz Adam, who first published a collection of lithographs on the Italian campaign of 1848 in connection with Raffet, and in the Italian war of 1859 painted his first masterpiece, a scene from the battle of Solferino, owes his finest successes—although he had taken no part in it—to the war of 1870. In respect of harmony of colouring he is perhaps the finest painter of battle-pieces Germany has produced. As I shall later have no opportunity of doing so, I must mention here the works of Josef Brandt, the best of Franz Adam’s pupils. They are painted with verve and chivalrous feeling. There is a flame and a sparkle, both in the forms of his warriors and of his horses, in his pictures of old Polish cavalry battles. Everything is aristocratic: the distinction of the grey colouring no less than the ductile drawing with its chivalrous sentiment. In everything there breathes life, vigour, fire, and freshness: the East of Eugène Fromentin translated into Polish. Heinrich Lang, a spirited draughtsman, who had the 117 art of seizing the most difficult positions and motions of a horse, embodied the wild tumult of cavalry charges (“The Charge of the Bredow Brigade,” “The Charge at Floing,” etc.) in rapid pictures of incisive power, though otherwise the heroic deeds of the Germans in 1870 resulted in but few heroic deeds in art.

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CHAPTER XIX

ITALY AND THE EAST

In the beginning of the century the man who did not wear a uniform was not a proper subject for art unless he lived in Italy as a peasant or a robber. That is to say, painters were either archæologists or tourists; when they did not dive into the past they sought their romantic ideal in the distance. Italy, where monumental painting had first seen the light, was the earliest goal for travellers, and satisfied the desire of artists, since, for the rest of the world, it was still enveloped in poetic mystery. Only in Rome, in Naples, and in Tuscany was it thought possible to meet with human beings who had not become vulgar and hideous under the influence of civilisation. There they still preserved something of the beauty of Grecian statues. There artists were less afraid of being diverted from absolute beauty by the study of nature, and thus an important principle was carried. Instead of copying directly from antique statues, as David and Mengs had done before them, painters began to study the descendants of those who had been the models of the old Roman sculptors; and so it was that, almost against their will, they turned from museums to look rather more closely into nature, and from the past to cast a glance into the present.

To Leopold Robert belongs the credit of having opened out this new province to an art which was enclosed in the narrow bounds of Classicism. He owes his success with the public of the twenties and his place in the history of art entirely to the fact that in spite of his strict classical training he was one of the first to interest himself, however little, in contemporary life. Hundreds of artists had wandered into Italy and seen nothing but the antique until this young man set out from Neufchâtel in 1818 and became the painter of the Italian people. What struck him at the first glance was the character of the people, together with their curious habits and usages, and their rude and picturesque garb. “He wished to render this with all fidelity,” and especially “to do honour to the absolute nobility of that people which still bore a trace of the heroic greatness of their forefathers.” Above all, he fancied that he could find this phenomenon of atavism amongst the bandits; and as Sonnino, an old brigand nest, had been taken and the inhabitants removed to Engelsburg shortly after his arrival, a convenient opportunity was offered to him for making his studies in this place. The pictures of brigand life which he painted in the beginning of the twenties soon found a most profitable 119 market. “Dear M. Robert,” said the fashionable guests who visited his studio by the dozen, “could you paint a little brigand, if it is not asking too much?” Robbers with sentimental qualms were particularly prized: for instance, at the moment when they were fondling their wives, or praying remorsefully to God, or watching over the bed of a sick child.

From brigands he made a transition to the girls of Sorrento, Frascati, Capri, and Procida, and to shepherd lads, fishers, pilgrims, hermits, and pifferari. Early in the twenties, when he made an exhibition of a number of these little pictures in Rome, it effectually prepared the way for his fame; and when he sent a succession of larger pictures to the Paris Salon in 1824-31 he was held as one of the most brilliant masters of the French school, to whom Romanticists and Classicists paid the same honour. In the first of these pictures, painted in 1824, he had represented a number of peasants listening to a Neapolitan fisherman improvising to the accompaniment of a harmonica. “The Return from a Pilgrimage to the Madonna dell’ Arco” of 1827 is the painting of a triumphal waggon yoked with oxen. Upon it are seated lads and maidens adorned with foliage, and in their gay Sunday best. An old lazzarone is playing the mandolin, and girls are dancing with tambourines, whilst a young man springs round clattering his castanets, and a couple of boys, to complete the seasons of life, head the procession. His third picture, “The Coming of the Reapers to the Pontine Marshes,” was the chief work in the Salon of 1831 after the “Freedom” of Delacroix. Heine accorded him a classical passage of description, and the orthodox academical critics were liberal with most unmerited praise, treating the painter as a dangerous revolutionary who was seducing art into the undignified naturalism of Ribera and Caravaggio. Robert, the honest, lamblike man, who strikes us now as being a conscientious follower of the school of David!

How little did the artistic principles which he laid down in his letters accord with his own paintings! “I try,” he wrote to a friend in 1819, “to follow Nature in everything. Nature is the only teacher who should be heard. She alone inspires and moves me, she alone appeals to me: it is Nature that I seek to fathom, and in her I ever hope to find the special impulse for work.” She is a miracle to him, and one that is greater than any other, a book in which “the simple may read as well as the great.” He could not understand “how painters could take the old masters as their model instead of Nature, who is the only great exemplar!” What is to be seen in his pictures is merely an awkward transference of David’s manner of conception and representation to the painting of Italian 120 peasants—a scrupulously careful adaptation of classical rules to romantic subjects. He looked at modern Italians solely through the medium of antique statuary, and conducts us to an Italy which can only be called Leopold Robert’s Italy, since it never existed anywhere except in Robert’s map. All his figures have the movement of some familiar work of antique sculpture, and that expression of cherished melancholy which went out of fashion after the time of Ary Scheffer. Never does one see in his pictures a casual and unhackneyed gesture in harmony with the situation. It seems as if he had dressed up antique statues or David’s Horatii and his Sabine women in the costume of the Italian peasantry, and grouped them for a tableau vivant in front of stage scenery, and in accordance with Parisian rules of composition. His peasants and fishers make beautiful, noble, and often magnificent groups. But one can always give the exact academic rules for any particular figure standing here and not there, or in one position and not in another. His pictures are much too official, and obtrusively affect the favourite pyramid form of composition.

But as they are supposed to be pictures of Italian manners, the contrast between nature and the artificial construction is almost more irritating than it is in David’s mythological representations. It is as if Robert had really never seen any Italian peasants, though he maintains all the while that he is depicting their life. The hard outlines and the sharp bronze tone of his works are a ghastly evidence of the extent to which the sense of colour had become extinct in the school of David. It was merely form that attracted him; the 121 sun of Italy left him indifferent. The absence of atmosphere gives his figures an appearance of having been cut out of picture sheets. O great artists of Holland, masters of atmospheric effect and of contour bathed in light, what would you have said to such heartless silhouettes! In his youth Robert had been a line engraver, and he adapted the prosaic technique of line engraving to painting. However, he was a transitional painter, and as such he has an historical interest. He was a modern Tasso, too, and on the strength of the adventurous relationship to Princess Charlotte Napoleon, which ultimately drove him to suicide, he could be used with effect as the hero of a novel. Through the downfall of the school of David his star has paled—one more proof that only Nature is eternal, and that conventional painting falls into oblivion with the age that saw it rise. “I wished to find a genre which was not yet known, and this genre has had the fortune to please. It is always an advantage to be the first.” With these words he has himself indicated, in a way which is as modest as it is accurate, the ground of his reputation amongst contemporaries, and why it is that the history of art cannot quite afford to forget him.

Amongst the multitude of those who, incited by Robert’s brilliant successes, made the Spanish staircase in Rome the basis of their art, Victor Schnetz, by his “Vow to the Madonna” of 1831, specially succeeded in winning public favour. At a later time his favourite themes were the funerals of children, inundations, and the like; but his arid method of painting contrasts with the 122 sentimental melancholy of these subjects in a fashion which is not particularly agreeable.

It was Ernest Hébert who first saw Italy with the eyes of a painter. He might be called the Perugino of this group. He was the most romantic of the pupils of Delaroche, and owed his conception of colour to that painter. His spiritual father was Ary Scheffer. The latter has discovered the poetry of sentimentality; Hébert the poetry of disease. His pictures are invariably of great technical delicacy. His style has something femininely gracious, almost languishing: his colouring is delicately fragrant and tenderly melting. He is, indeed, a refined artist who occupies a place by himself, however mannered the melancholy and sickliness of his figures may be. In “The Malaria” of 1850 they were influenced by the subject itself. The barge gliding over the waters of the Pontine Marshes, with its freight of men, women, and children, seems like a gloomy symbol of the voyage of life; the sorrow of the passengers is that of resignation: dying they droop their heads like withering flowers. But later the fever became chronic in Hébert. The interesting disease returned even where it was out of place, as it does still in the pictures of his followers. The same fate befell the painters of Italy which befalls tourists. What Robert had seen in the country as the first comer whole generations saw after him, neither more nor less than that. The pictures were always variations on the old theme, until in the sixties Bonnat came with his individual and realistic vision.

In Germany, where “the yearning for Italy” had been ventilated in an immoderate quantity of lyrical poems ever since the time of Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen, August Riedel represented this phase of modern painting; and as Leopold Robert is still celebrated, Riedel ought not to be forgotten. Riedel lived too long (1800-1883), and, as he painted nothing but bad 123 pictures during the last thirty years of his life, what he had done in his youth was forgotten. At that time he was the first apostle of Leopold Robert in Germany, and as such he has his importance as an innovator. When he began his career in the Munich Academy in 1819 Peter Langer, a Classicist of the order of Mengs, was still director there. Riedel also painted classical subjects and church pictures—“Christ on the Mount of Olives,” “The Resurrection of Lazarus,” and “Peter and Paul healing the Lame.” But when he returned from Italy in 1823 he reversed the route which others had taken: the classic land set him free from Classicism, and opened his eyes to the beauty of life. Instead of working on saints in the style of Langer, he painted beautiful women in the costume of modern Italy. His “Neapolitan Fisherman’s Family” was for Germany a revelation similar to that which Robert’s “Neapolitan Improvisator” had been for France. The fisherman, rather theatrically draped, is sitting on the shore, while his wife and his little daughter listen to him playing the zither. The blue sea, dotted with white sails, and distant Ischia and Cape Missene, form the background; and a blue heaven, dappled with white clouds, arches above. Everything was of an exceedingly conventional beauty, but denoted progress in comparison with Robert. It already announced that search for brilliant effects of light which henceforward became a characteristic of Riedel, and gave him a peculiar position in his own day. “Even hardened connoisseurs,” wrote Emil Braun from Rome about this time, 124 “stand helpless before this magic of colouring. It is often long before they are able to persuade themselves that such glory of colour can be produced by the familiar medium of oil painting, and with materials that any one can buy at a shop where pigments are sold.” Riedel touched a problem—diffidently, no doubt—which was only taken up much later in its full extent. And if Cornelius said to him, “You have fully attained what I have avoided with the greatest effort during the course of my whole life,” it is none the less true that Riedel’s Italian girls in the full glow of sunlight have remained, in spite of their stereotyped smile, so reminiscent of Sichel, better able to stand the test of galleries than the pictures of the Michael-Angelo of Munich. Before his “Neapolitan Fisherman’s Family,” which went the world over like a melody from Auber’s Masaniello, before his “Judith” carrying the head of Holofernes in the brightest light of morning, before his “Girls Bathing” in the dimness of the forest, and before his “Sakuntala,” painted “with refined effects of light,” the cartoon painters mumbled and grumbled, and raised hue and cry over the desecration of German art; but Riedel’s friends were just as loud in proclaiming the witchery of his colour, and “the Southern sunlight which he had conjured on to his palette,” to be splendid beyond the powers of comprehension. It is difficult at the present day to understand the fame that he once 125 had as “a pyrotechnist in pigments.” But the results which he achieved by himself in colouring, long before the influence of the Belgians in Germany, will always give him a sure place in the history of German art. And these qualities were unconsciously inherited by his successors, who troubled their heads no further about the pioneer and founder.

Those who painted the East with its clear radiance, its interesting people, and its picturesque localities, stand in opposition to the Italian enthusiasts. They are the second group of travellers. Gros had given French art a vision of that distant magic land, but he had had no direct disciples. Painters were as yet in too close bondage to their classical proclivities to receive inspiration from Napoleon’s expedition into Egypt. But the travels of Chateaubriand and the verse of Byron, and then the Greek war of liberation, and, above all, the conquest of Algiers, once more aroused an interest in these regions, and, when the revolution of the Romanticists had once taken place, taught art a way into the East. Authors, journalists, and painters found their place in this army of travellers. The first view of men and women standing on the shore in splendid costume, with turbans or high sheepskin hats, and surrounded by black slaves, or mounted upon horses richly caparisoned, or listening to the roll of drums and the muezzin resounding from the minarets, was like a scene from The Arabian Nights. The bazaars and the harems, the quarters of the Janizaries and gloomy dungeons were visited in turn. Veiled women were seen, and mysterious houses where every sound was hushed. At first the Moors, obedient to the stern laws of the Koran, fled before the painters as if before evil spirits, but the Moorish women were all the more ready to receive these conquerors with open arms. Artists plunged with rapture into a new world; they anointed themselves with the oil of roses, and tasted all the sweets of Oriental life. The East was for the Byronic enthusiasts of 1830 what Italy had been for the 126 Classicists. Could anything be imagined more romantic? You went on board a steamer provided with all modern comforts and all the appliances of the nineteenth century, and it carried you thousands of years back in the history of the world; you set foot on a soil where the word progress did not exist—in a land where the inhabitants still sat in the sun as if cemented to the ground, and wore the same costumes in which their forefathers had sat there two thousand years ago. Here the Romanticists not only found nature decked in the rich hues which satisfied their passion for colour, but discovered a race of people possessed of that beauty which, according to the Classicists, was only to be seen in the Italian peasants. They beheld “men of innate dignity and remarkable distinction of pose and gesture.” Thus a new experience was added to life. There was the East, where splendour and simplicity, cruelty and beauty, softness of temper and savage austerity, and brilliant colour and blinding light are more completely mingled than anywhere else in the world; there was the East, where rich tints laugh in the midst of squalor and misery, the brightness of earlier days in the midst of outworn usages, and the pride of art in the midst of ruined villages. It was so great, so unfathomable, and so like a fairy tale that it gave every one the chance of discovering in it some new qualities.

For Delacroix, the Byron of painting, it was a splendid setting for passion in its unfettered wildness and its unscrupulous daring. He, who had lived exclusively in the past, now turned to the observation of living beings, as may be seen in his “Algerian Women,” his “Jewish Wedding,” his “Emperor of Morocco,” and his “Convulsionaries of Tangier.” Amongst the Orientals he also found the hotly flaming sensuousness and primitive wildness which beset his imagination with its craving for everything impassioned.

The great charmeur, the master of pictorial caprice, Decamps, found his province in the East, because its sun was so lustrous, its costume so bright, and its human figures so picturesque. If Delacroix was a powerful artist, Decamps was no more than a painter,—but painter he was to his finger-tips. He was indifferent to nothing in nature or history: he showed as much enthusiasm for a pair of tanned beggar-boys playing in the sunshine at the corner of a wall as for Biblical figures and old-world epics. He has painted hens pecking on a dung-heap, dogs on the chase and in the kennel, monkeys as scholars, and musicians in all the situations which Teniers and Chardin loved. His “Battle of Tailleborg” of 1837 has been aptly termed the only picture of a battle in the Versailles Museum. He looked on everything as material for painting, and never troubled as to how another artist would have treated the subject. There is an individuality in every one of his works; not an individuality of the first order, but one that is decidedly charming and that assures him a very high place amongst his contemporaries.

Having made a success in 1829 with an imaginary picture of the East, he had a wish to see how far the reality corresponded with his ideas of Turkey, and in the same year—therefore before Delacroix—he went on that journey 127 to the Greek Archipelago, Constantinople, and Asia Minor which became a voyage of discovery for French painting. In the Salon of 1831 was exhibited his “Patrol of Smyrna,” which at once made him one of the favourite French painters of the time. Soon afterwards came the picture of the “Pasha on his Rounds,” accompanied by a lean troop of running and panting guards, that of the great “Turkish Bazaar,” in which he gave such a charming representation of the gay and noisy bustle of an Oriental fair, those of the “Turkish School,” the “Turkish Café,” “The Halt of the Arab Horsemen,” and “The Turkish Butcher’s Shop.” In everything which he painted from this time forward—even in his Biblical pictures—he had before his eyes the East as it is in modern times. Like Horace Vernet, he painted his figures in the costume of modern Arabs and Egyptians, and placed them in landscapes with modern Arab buildings. But the largeness of line in these landscapes is expressive of something so patriarchal and Biblical, and of such a dreamy, mystical poetry, that, in spite of their modern garb, the figures seem like visions from a far distance.

Decamps’ painting never became trivial. All his pictures soothe and captivate the eye, however much they disappoint, on the first glance, the expectations which the older descriptions of them may have excited. Fifty years ago it was said that Delacroix painted with colour and Decamps with light; that his works were steeped in a bath of sunshine. This vibrating light, this transparent atmosphere, which contemporaries admired, is not to be found in Decamps’ pictures. Their brilliancy of technique is admirable, but he was no painter of light. The world of sunshine in which everything is dipped, the glow and lustre of objects in shining, liquid, and tremulous air, is what Gustave Guillaumet first learnt to paint a generation later. 128 Decamps attained the effect of light in his pictures by the darkening of shadows, precisely in the manner of the old school. To make the sky bright, he threw the foreground into opaque and heavy shade. And as, in consequence of the ground of bole used to produce his beautiful red tones, the dark parts of his pictures gradually became as black as pitch, and the light parts dead and spotty, he will rather seem to be a contemporary of Albert Cuyp than of Manet.

As draughtsman to a German baron making a scientific tour in the East, Prosper Marilhat, the third of the painters of Oriental life, was early in following this career. He visited Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and returned to Paris in 1833 intoxicated with the beauties of these lands. Especially dear to him was Egypt, and in his pictures he called himself, “Marilhat the Egyptian.” Decamps had been blinded by the sharp contrast between light and shadow in Oriental nature, by the vivid blaze of colour in its vegetation, and by the tropical glow of the Southern sky. Marilhat took novelties with a more quiet eye, and kept close to pure reality. He has not so much virtuosity as Decamps, and in colour he is less daring, but he is perhaps more poetic, and on that account, in the years 1833-44, he was prized almost more. The exhibition of 1844, in which eight of his pictures appeared, closed his career. He had expected the Cross of the Legion of Honour, but did not get it, and this disappointment affected him so deeply that he became first hypochondriacal and then mad. His early death at thirty-six set Decamps free from a powerful rival.

Eugène Fromentin went further in the same direction as Marilhat. He knew nothing of the preference for the glowing hues of the tropics nor of the fantastic colouring of the Romanticists. He painted in the spirit of a refined social period in which no loud voice is tolerated, but only light and familiar talk. The East gave him his grace; the proud and fiery nature of the Arab horse was revealed to him. In his portraits Fromentin looks like a cavalry officer. In his youth he had studied law, but that was before his acquaintance with the landscape painter Cabat brought him to his true calling, and a sojourn made on three different occasions—in 1845, 1848, and 1852—on the borders of Morocco decided for him his specialty. By his descriptions of travels, A Year in Sahel, which appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, he became known as a writer: it was only after 1857, however, that he became famous as a painter. Fromentin’s East is Algiers. While Marilhat tried to render the marvellous clearness of the Southern light, and Decamps depicted the glowing heat of the East, its dark brooding sky in the sultry hours of summer and the grand outlines of its landscape, Fromentin has tried—and perhaps with too much system—to express the grace and brilliant spirit of the East. Taste, refinement, ductility, distinction of colouring, and grace of line are his special qualities. His Arabs galloping on their beautiful white horses have an inimitable chivalry; they are true princes in every pose and movement. The execution of his pictures is always spirited, easy, and in keeping with their high-bred tone. Whatever he does has the nervous vigour of a sketch, with that degree of finish which satisfies the connoisseur. There is always a coquetry in his arrangement of colour, and his tones are light and delicate if they are not deep. In the landscape his little Arab riders have the effect of flowers upon a carpet.

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Afterwards, when naturalism was at its zenith, Fromentin was much attacked for this wayward grace. He was accused of making a superficial appeal to the eye, and of offering everything except truth. And for its substantive fidelity Fromentin’s “East” cannot certainly be taken very seriously. He was a man of fine culture, and in his youth he had studied the old Dutch masters more than nature; he even saw the light of the East through the Dutch chiaroscuro. His pictures are subtle works of art, nervous in drawing and dazzling in brilliancy of construction, but they are washed in rather than painted, and stained rather than coloured. In his book he speaks himself of the cool, grey shadows of the East. But in his pictures they turn to a reddish hue or to brown. An effort after beauty of tone in many ways weakened his Arab scenes. He looked at the people of the East too much with the eyes of a Parisian. And the more his recollections faded, the more did he begin to create for himself an imaginary Africa. He painted grey skies simply because he was tired of blue; he tinted white horses with rosy reflections, chestnuts with lilac, and dappled-greys with violet. The grace of his works 132 became more and more an affair of affectation, until at last, instead of being Oriental pictures, they became Parisian fancy goods, which merely recalled the fact that Algiers had become a French town.

But after all what does it matter whether pictures of the East are true to nature or not? Other people whose names are not Fromentin can provide such documents. In his works Fromentin has expressed himself, and that is enough. Take up his first book, L’été dans la Sahara: by its grace of style it claims a place in French literature. Or read his classic masterpiece, Les maîtres d’autrefois, published in 1876 after a tour through Belgium and Holland: it will remain for ever one of the finest works ever written on art. A connoisseur of such refinement, a critic who gauged the artistic works of Belgium and Holland with such subtlety, necessarily became in his own painting an epicure of beautiful tones. This man, who never made an awkward movement nor uttered a brutal word, this sensitive, distinguished spirit could be no more than a subtle artist who had eyes for nothing but the aristocratic side of Eastern life. As a painter, however, he might wish to be true to nature; he could be no more than this. His art, compact of grace and distinction, was the outcome of his own nature. He is a descendant of those delicately feminine, seductively brilliant, facile and spontaneous, sparkling and charming painters who were known in the eighteenth century as peintres des fêtes galantes. He is the Watteau of the East, and in this capacity one of the most winning and captivating products of French art.

Finally, Guillaumet, the youngest and last of the group, found in the East 133 peace: a scion of the Romanticists, there is none the less a whole world of difference between him and them. While the Romanticists, as sons of a flaccid, inactive period, lashed themselves into enthusiasm for the passion and wild life of the East, Guillaumet, the child of a hurried and neurotic epoch, sought here an opiate for his nerves. Where they saw contrasts he found harmony; and he did not find it, like Fromentin, in what is understood as chic. Manet’s conception of colour had taught him that nature is everywhere in accord and harmoniously delicate.

He writes: “Je commence à distinguer quelques formes: des silhouettes indécises bougent le long des murs enfumés sous des poutres luisantes de sui. Les détails sortent du demi-jour, s’animent graduellement avec la magie des Rembrandt. Même mystère des ombres, mêmes ors dans les reflets—c’est l’aube.... Des terrains poudreux inondés de soleil; un amoncellement de murailles grises sous un ciel sans nuage; une cité somnolente baignée d’une lumière égale, et dans le frémissement visible des atomes aériens quelques ombres venant ça et là détacher une forme, accuser un geste parmi les groupes en burnous qui se meuvent sur les places ... tel m’apparait le ksar, vers dix heures du matin....

“L’œil interroge: rien ne bouge. L’oreille écoute: aucun bruit. Pas un souffle, si ce n’est le frémissement presque imperceptible de l’air au-dessus du sol embrasé. La vie semble avoir disparu, absorbée par la lumière. C’est le milieu du jour.... Mais le soir approche.... Les troupeaux rentrent dans les douars; ils se pressent autour des tentes, à peine visibles, confondus sous cette teinte neutre du crépuscule, faite avec les gris de la nuit qui vient et les violets tendres du soir qui s’en va. C’est l’heure mystérieuse, où les couleurs se mèlent, où les contours se noient, où toute chose s’assombrit, où toute voix se tait, où l’homme, à la fin du jour, laisse flotter sa pensée devant ce qui s’éteint, s’efface et s’evanouit.”

This description of a day in Algiers in Guillaumet’s Tableaux algériens interprets the painter Guillaumet better than any critical appreciation could possibly do. For him the East is the land of dreams and melting softness, a far-off health-resort for neurotic patients, where one lies at ease in the sun and forgets the excitements of Paris. It was not what was brilliant and pictorial in sparkling jewels and bright costume that attracted him at all, but the silence, the mesmeric spell of the East, the vastness of the infinite horizon, the imposing majesty of the desert, and the sublime and profound peace of the nights of Africa. “The Evening Prayer in the Desert” was the name of the first picture that he brought back with him in 1863. There is a wide and boundless plain; the straight line of the horizon is broken by a 134 few mountain forms and by the figures of a party belonging to a caravan; but, bowed as they are in prayer, these figures are scarcely to be distinguished. The smoke of the camp ascends like a pillar into the air. The monotony of the wilderness seems to stretch endlessly to the right and to the left, like a grand and solemn Nirvana smiting the human spirit with religious delirium.

For Decamps and Marilhat the East was a great, red copper-block beneath a blue dome of steel; a beautiful monster, bright and glittering. Guillaumet has no wish to dazzle. His pictures give one the impression of intense and sultry heat. His light is really “le frémissement visible des atomes aériens.” Moreover, he did not see the chivalry of the East like Fromentin. The latter was fascinated by the nomad, the pure Arab living in tent or saddle, the true aristocrat of the desert, mounted on his white palfrey, hunting wild beasts through fair blue and green landscapes. Poor folk who never owned a horse are the models of Guillaumet. With their dogs—wild creatures who need nothing—they squat in the sun as if with their own kin: they are the lower, primitive population, the pariahs of the wilderness; tattered men whose life-long siesta is only interrupted by the anguish of death, animal women whose existence flows by as idly as in the trance of opium.

After the French Romanticists had shown the way, other nations contributed their contingent to the painters of Oriental subjects. In Germany poetry had discovered the East. Rückert imitated the measure and the ideas of the Oriental lyric, and the Greek war of liberation quickened all that passionate love for the soil of old Hellas which lives in the German soul. Wilhelm Müller sang his songs of the Greeks, and in 1825 Leopold Schefer brought out his tale Die Persierin. But just as the Oriental tale was a mere episode in German literature, an exotic grafted on the native stem, so the Oriental painting produced 135 no leading mind in the country, but merely a number of good soldiers who dutifully served in the troops of foreign commanders.

Kretszchmer of Berlin led the way with ethnographical representations, and was joined at a later time by Wilhelm Gentz and Adolf Schreyer of Frankfort. Gentz, a dexterous painter, and, as a colourist, perhaps the most gifted 136 of the Berlin school in the sixties, is, in comparison with the great Frenchmen who portrayed the East, a thoroughly arid realist. He brought to his task a certain amount of rough vigour and restless diversity, together with North German sobriety and Berlin humour. Schreyer, who lived in Paris, belonged to the following of Fromentin. The Arab and his steed interested him also. His pictures are bouquets of colour, dazzling the eye. Arabs in rich and picturesque costume repose on the ground or are mounted on their milk-white steeds, which rear and prance with tossing manes and wide-stretched nostrils. The desert undulates away to the far horizon, now pale and now caressed by the softened rays of the setting sun, which tip the waves of sand with burnished gold. Schreyer was—for a German—a man with an extraordinary gift for technique and a brilliantly effective sense of life. The latter remark is specially true of his sketches. At a later date—in 1875, after being with Lembach and Makart in Cairo—the Viennese Leopold Müller found the domain of his art beneath the clear sky, in the brightly coloured land of the Nile. Even his sketches are often of great delicacy of colour, and the ethnographical accuracy which he also possessed has long made him the most highly valued delineator of Oriental life and a popular illustrator of works on Egypt. The learned and slightly pedantic vein in his works he shares with 137 Gérôme, but by his greater charm of colour he comes still nearer to Fromentin.

The route to the East was shown to the English by the glowing landscapes of William Müller; but the English were just as unable to find a Byron amongst their painters. Frederick Goodall has studied the classical element in the East, and endeavoured to reconstruct the past from the present. Best known amongst these artists was J. F. Lewis, who died in 1876 and was much talked of in earlier days. For long years he wandered through Asia Minor, filling his portfolios with sketches and his trunks with Oriental robes and weapons. When he returned there was a perfect scramble for his pictures. They revealed a new world to the English then, but no one scrambles for them now. John Lewis was exceedingly diligent and conscientious; he studied the implements, the costumes, and the popular types of the East with incredible industry. In his harem pictures as in his representations of Arabian camp life everything is painted, down to the patterns of embroidery, the ornaments 138 of turbans, and the pebbles on the sand. Even his water-colours are triumphs of endurance; but patience and endurance are not sufficient to make an interesting artist. John Lewis stands in respect of colour, too, more or less on a level with Gentz. He has seized neither the dignity of the Mussulman nor the grace of the Bedouin, but has contented himself with a faithful though somewhat glaring reproduction of accessories. Houghton was the first who, moving more or less parallel with Guillaumet, succeeded in delicately interpreting the great peace and the mystic silence of the East.

The East was in this way traversed in all directions. The first comers who beheld it with eager, excited eyes collected a mass of gigantic legends, with no decided aim or purpose and driven by no passionate impulse, merely eager to pluck here or there an exotic flower, or lightly to catch some small part of the glamour that overspread all that was Eastern, piled up dreams upon dreams, and gave it a gorgeous and fantastic life. There were deserts shining in the sun, waves lashed by the storm, the nude forms of women, and all the Asiatic splendour of the East: dark-red satin, gold, crystal, and marble were heaped in confusion and executed in terrible fantasies of colour in the midst of darkness and lightning. After this generation had passed like a thunderstorm the chic of Fromentin was delicious. He profited by the taste which others had excited. Painters of all nationalities overran the East. The great dramas were transformed into elegies, pastorals, and idylls; even ethnographical representations had their turn. Guillaumet summed up the aims of that generation. His dreamy and tender painting was like a beautiful 139 summer evening. The radiance of the blinding sky was mitigated, and a peaceful sun at the verge of the horizon covered the steppes of sand, which it had scorched a few hours before, with a network of rosy beams.

They were all scions of the Romantic movement. The yearning which filled their spirits and drove them into distant lands was only another symptom of their dissatisfaction with the present.

Classicism had dealt with Greek and Roman history by the aid of antique statues, and next used the colours of the Flemish masters to paint Italian peasantry. Romanticism had touched the motley life of the Middle Ages and the richly coloured East; but both had anxiously held aloof from the surroundings of home and the political and social relations of contemporaries.

It was obvious that art’s next task was to bring down to earth again the ideal that had hovered so long over the domain of ancient history, and then winged its flight to the realms of the East. “Ah la vie, la vie! le monde est là; il rit, crie, souffre, s’amuse, et on ne le rend pas.” In these words the necessity of the step has been indicated by Fromentin himself. The successful delivery of modern art was first accomplished, the problem stated in 1789 was first solved, when the subversive upheaval of the Third Estate, which had been consummating itself more and more imperiously ever since the Revolution, found distinct expression in the art of painting. Art always moves on parallel lines with religious conceptions, with politics, and with manners. In the Middle Ages men lived in the world beyond the grave, and so the subjects of painting were Madonnas and saints. According to Louis XIV, everything was derived from the King, as light from the sun, and so royalty by the grace of God was reflected in the art of his epoch. The royal sun suffered total eclipse in the Revolution, and with this mighty change of civilisation art had to undergo a new transformation. The 1789 of painting had to follow on the politics of 1789: the proclamation of the liberty and equality of all individuals. Only painting which recognised man in his full freedom, no privileged class of gods and heroes, Italians and Easterns, could be the true child of the Revolution, the art of the new age. Belgium and Germany made the first diffident steps in this direction.

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CHAPTER XX

THE PAINTING OF HUMOROUS ANECDOTE

At the very time when the East attracted the French Romanticists, the German and Belgian painters discovered the rustic. Romanticism, driven into strange and tropical regions by its disgust of a sluggish, colourless and inglorious age, now planted a firm foot upon native soil. Amid rustics there was to be found a conservative type of life which perpetuated old usages and picturesque costume.

It is not easy for a dilettante to enter into sympathetic relationship with these early pictures of peasant life. They are gaudy in tone, smooth as metal, and the figures stand out hard against the atmosphere, as if they had been cut from a picture-sheet. But the historian has no right to be merely a dilettante. It would be unfair of him to make the artistic conceptions of the present time the means of depreciating the past. For, after all, works of the past are only to be measured with those of their own age, and when one once remembers what an importance these modest “little masters” had for their time it is no longer difficult to treat them with justice. In an age when futile and aimless intentions lost their way in theory and imitation of the “great painting” there blossomed here, and for the first time, a certain individuality of mind and temper. While Cornelius, Kaulbach, and their fellows formed a style which was ideal in a purely conventional sense, and epitomised the art of the great masters according to method, the “genre painters” seized upon the endless variety of nature, and, after a long period of purely reproductive painting, made the first diffident attempt to set art free from the curse of system and the servile repetition of antiquated forms.

Even as regards colour they have the honour of preparing the way for a restoration in the technique of painting. Their own defects in technique were not their fault, but the consequence of that fatal interference of Winckelmann through which art lost its technical traditions. They did not enjoy the advantages of issuing from a long line of ancestors. In a certain sense they had to make a beginning in the history of art by themselves; for between them and the older German painting they only met with men who held the ability to paint as a shame and a disgrace. With the example of the old Dutch and Flemish masters before them, they had to knit together the bonds which these men had cut; and considering the æsthetic ideas of the age, this reference to Netherlandish models was an event of revolutionary importance. 141 In doing this they may have been partially influenced by Wilkie, who made his tour in Germany in 1825, and whose pictures had a wide circulation through the medium of engraving. And from another side attention was directed to the old Dutch masters by Schnaase’s letters of 1834. While the entire artistic school which took its rise from Winckelmann gave the reverence of an empty, formal idealism to classical antiquity and the Cinquecento, applying their standards to all other periods, Schnaase was the first to give an impulse to the historical consideration of art. In this way he revealed wide and hitherto neglected regions to the creative activity of modern times. The result of his book was that the Netherlandish masters were no longer held to be “the apes of vulgar nature,” but took their place as exquisite artists from whom the modern painter had a great deal to learn.

In Munich the conditions of a popular, national art were supplied by the very site of the town. Since the beginning of the century Munich had been peculiarly the type of a peasant city, the capital of a peasant province; it had a peasantry abounding in old-fashioned singularities, gay and motley in costume as in their ways of life, full of bright and easy-going good-humour, and gifted with the Bavarian force of character. Here it was, then, that “the resort to national traits” was first made. And if, in the event, this painting of rustic life produced many monstrosities, it remained throughout the whole century an unfailing source from which the art of Munich drew fresh and vivid power.

Even in the twenties there was an art in Munich which was native to the soil, and in later years shot up all the more vigorously through being for a time cramped in its development by the exotic growths of the school of Cornelius. It was as different from the dominant historical painting as the “magots” of Teniers from the mythological machinery of Lebrun, and it was treated by official criticism with the same contempt. Cornelius and his school directed the attention of educated people so exclusively to themselves, and so entirely proscribed the literature of the day, that what took 142 place outside their own circle in Munich was but little discussed. The vigorous group of naturalists had not much to offer critics who wished to display their knowledge by picking to pieces historical pictures, interpreting philosophical cartoons, and pointing to similarities of style between Cornelius and Michael Angelo. But for the historian, seeking the seeds of the present in the past, they are figures worthy of respect. Setting their own straightforward conception of nature against the eclecticism of the great painters, they laid the foundation of an independent modern art.

The courtly, academic painting of Cornelius derived its inspiration from the Sistine Chapel; the naturalism of these “genre painters” was rooted in the life of the Bavarian people. The “great painters” dwelt alone in huge monumental buildings; the naturalists, who sought their inspiration in the life of peasants, in the life of camps, and in landscape, without troubling themselves about antique or romantic subjects, furnished the material for the first collections of modern art. Both as artists and as men they were totally different beings. Cornelius and his school stand on the one side, cultured, imperious, fancying themselves in the possession of all true art, and abruptly turning from all who are not sworn to their flag; on the other side stand the naturalists, brisk and cheery, rough it may be, but sound to the core, and with a sharp eye for life and nature.

Painting in the grand style owed its origin to the personal tastes of the king and to the great tasks to which it was occasionally set; independent of princely favour, realistic art found its patrons amongst the South German nobility and, at a later date, in the circle of the Munich Art Union, and seems the logical continuation of that military painting which, at the opening of the century, had its representatives in Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Munich. The motley swarm of foreign soldiers which overran the soil of Germany incited Albrecht Adam, Peter Hess, Johann Adam Klein, and others, to represent what they saw in a fashion which was sincere and simple if it was also prosy. And when the warlike times were over it was quite natural that some of the masters who had learnt 143 their art in camps should turn to the representation of peasant life, where they were likewise able to find gay, pictorial costumes. Wilhelm Kobell, whose etchings of the life of the Bavarian people are more valuable than his battle-pieces, was one of the first to make this transition. In 1820 sturdy Peter Hess painted his “Morning at Partenkirche,” in which he depicted a simple scene of mountain life—girls at a well in the midst of a sunny landscape—in a homely but poetic manner. When this breach had been made, Bürkel was able to take the lead of the Munich painters of rustic subjects.

Heinrich Bürkel’s portrait reveals a square-built giant, whose appearance contrasts strangely with that of his celebrated contemporaries. The academic artists sweep back their long hair and look upwards with an inspired glance. Bürkel looks down with a keen eye at the hard, rough, and stony earth. The academic artists had a mantle—the mantle of Rauch’s statues—picturesquely draped about their shoulders; Bürkel dressed like anybody else. No attribute is added which could indicate that he was a painter; neither palette, nor brush, nor picture; beside him on the table there is—a mug of beer. There he sits without any sort of pose, with his hand resting on his knee—rough, athletic, and pugnacious—for all the world as if he were quite conscious of his peculiarities. Even the photographer’s demand for “a pleasant smile” had no effect upon him. This portrait is itself an explanation of Bürkel’s art. His was a healthy, self-reliant nature, without a trace of romance, sentimentality, affected humour, or sugary optimism. Amongst all his Munich contemporaries he was the least academic in his whole manner of feeling and thinking.

Sprung from the people, he became their painter. He was born, 29th May 1802, in Pirmasens, where his father combined a small farm with a public-house and his mother kept a shop; and he had been first a tradesman’s apprentice, and then assistant clerk in a court of justice, before he came to 144 Munich in 1822. Here the Academy rejected him as without talent; but while it shut the door against the pupil, life revealed itself to the master. He went to the Schleissheimer Gallery, and sat there copying the pictures of Wouwerman, Ostade, Brouwer, and Berghem, and developed his powers, by the study of these Netherlandish masters, with extraordinary rapidity. His first works—battles, skirmishes, and other martial scenes—are amateurish and diffident attempts; it is evident that he was without any kind of guidance or direction. All the more astonishing is the swiftness with which he acquired firm command of abilities, admirable for that age, and the defiant spirit of independence with which he went straight from pictures to nature, though hardly yet in possession of the necessary means of expression. He painted and drew the whole new world which opened itself before him: far prospects over the landscape, mossy stones in the sunlight, numbers of cloud-pictures, peasants’ houses with their surroundings, forest paths, mountain tracks, horses, and figures of every description. The life of men and animals gave him everywhere some opportunity for depicting it in characteristic situations. And later, when he had settled down again in Munich, he did not cease from wandering in the South German mountains with a fresh mind. Up to old age he made little summer and winter tours in the Bavarian highlands. Tegernsee, Rottach, Prien, Berchtesgaden, South Tyrol, and Partenkirche were visited again and again, on excursions for the week or the day; and he returned from them all 145 with energetic studies, from which were developed pictures that were not less energetic.

For, as every artist is the result of two factors, of which one lies in himself and the other in his age and surroundings, the performances of Bürkel are to be judged, not only according to the requirements of the present day, but according to the conditions under which they were produced. What is weak in him he shares with his contemporaries; what is novel is his own most peculiar and incontestable merit. In a period of false idealism worked up in a museum—false idealism which had aped from the true the way in which one clears one’s throat, as Schiller has it, but nothing more indicative of genius—in a period of this accomplishment Bürkel preferred to expose his own insufficiency rather than adorn himself with other people’s feathers; at a time which prided itself on representing with brush and pigment things for which pen and ink are the better medium, he looked vividly into life; at a time when all Germany lost itself aimlessly in distant latitudes, he brought to everything an honest and objective fidelity which knew no trace of romantic sentimentalism; and by these fresh and realistic qualities he has become the father of that art which rose in Munich in a later day. Positive and exact in style, and far too sincere to pretend to raise himself to the level of the old 146 masters by superficial imitation, he was the more industrious in penetrating the spirit of nature and showing his love for everything down to its minutest feature; weak in the sentiment for colour, he was great in his feeling for nature. That was Heinrich Bürkel, and his successors had to supplement what was wanting in him, but not to wage war against his influence.

The peculiarity of all his works, as of those of the early Dutch and Flemish artists, is the equal weight which he lays on figures and on landscape. In his eyes the life of man is part of a greater whole; animals and their scenic surroundings are studied with the same love, and in his most felicitous pictures these elements are so blended that no one feature predominates at the expense of another. Seldom does he paint interiors, almost always preferring to move in free and open nature. But here his field is extraordinarily wide.

Those works in which he handled Italian subjects form a group by themselves. Bürkel was in Rome from 1829 to 1832, the very years in which Leopold Robert celebrated his triumphs there; but curious is the difference between the works of the Munich and those of the Swiss painter. In the 147 latter are beautiful postures, poetic ideas, and all the academical formulas; in the former unvarnished, naturalistic bluntness of expression. Even in Italy he kept romantic and academic art at a distance. They had no power over the rough, healthy, and sincere nature of the artist. He saw nothing in Italy that he had not met with at home, and he painted things as he saw them, honestly and without beatification.

To find material Bürkel did not need to go far. Picture to yourself a man wandering along the banks of the Isar, and gazing about him with a still and thoughtful look. A healthy peasant lass with a basket, or a plough moving slowly in the distance behind a sweating yoke of horses, is quite enough to fill him with feelings and ideas.

His peculiar domain was the high-road, which in the thirties and the forties, before the railways had usurped its traffic, was filled with a much more manifold life than it is to-day. Waggons and mail-carts passed along before the old gateways; in every village there were taverns inviting the wayfarer to rest, and blacksmiths sought for custom on the road. There were vehicles of every description, horses at the forge, posting-stages, change of teams, the departure of marketing folk, and passengers taking their seats or alighting. Here horses were being watered, and an occasion was given for brief dialogues between the coachman and his fares. There travellers surprised by a shower were hurrying under their umbrellas into an inn; or, in wintry weather, they were waiting impatiently, wrapped up in furs, whilst a horse was being shod.

The beaten tracks through field and forest offered much of the same sort. Peasants were driving to market with a cart-load of wood. Horses stood unyoked at a drinking-trough whilst the driver, a muscular fellow with great sinews, quietly enjoyed his pipe. Along some shadowy woodland path a team drew near to a forge or a lonely charcoal-burner’s hut, where the light flickered, and over which there soared a bare and snowy mountain peak.

Such pictures of snow-clad landscape were a specialty of Bürkel’s art, and in their simplicity and harmony are to be ranked with the best that he has done. Heavily freighted wood-carts passing through a drift, waggons brought to a standstill 148 in the snow, raw-boned woodmen perspiring as they load them in a wintry forest, are the accessory objects and figures.

But life in the fields attracted him also. Having a love of representing animals, he kept out of the way of mowers, reapers, and gleaners. His favourite theme is the hay, corn, or potato harvest, which he paints with much detail and a great display of accessory incidents. Maids and labourers, old and young, are feverishly active in the construction of hay-cocks, or, in threatening weather, pile up waggons, loaded as high as a house, with fresh trusses.

In this enumeration all the rustic life of Bavaria has been described. It is only the Sunday and holiday themes, the peculiar motives of the genre painter, that are wanting. And in itself this is an indication of what gives Bürkel his peculiar position.

By their conception his works are out of keeping with everything which the contemporary generation of “great painters” and the younger genre painters were attempting. The great painters had their home in museums; Bürkel lived in the world of nature. The genre painters, under the influence of Wilkie, were fond of giving their motive a touch of narrative interest, like the English. Cheerful or mournful news, country funerals, baptisms, and public dinners offered an excuse for representing the same sentiment in varying keys. Their starting-point was that of an illustrator; it might be very pretty in itself, but it was too jovial or whimpering for a picture. Bürkel’s works have no literary background; they are not composed of stories with a humorous or sentimental tinge, but depict with an intimate grasp of the 149 subject the simplest events of life. He neither offered the public lollipops, nor tried to move them and play upon their sensibilities by subjects which could be spun out into a novel. He approached his men, his animals, and his landscapes as a strenuous character painter, without gush, sentimentality, or romanticism. In contradistinction from all the younger painters of rustic subjects, he sternly avoided what was striking, peculiar, or in any way extraordinary, endeavouring to paint everyday life in the house or the farmyard, in the field or upon the highway, in all plainness and simplicity.

At first, indeed, he thought it necessary to satisfy the demands of the age by, at any rate, painting in a broad and epical manner. The public collections chiefly possess pictures of his which contain many figures: “The Return from the Mountain Pasture,” “Coming Back from the Bear Hunt,” “The Cattle Show,” and “From the Fair”; scenes before an inn at festivals, or waggoners setting out, and the like. But in these works the scheme of composition and the multitude of figures have a somewhat overladen and old-fashioned effect. On the other hand, there are pictures scattered about in private collections which are of a simplicity which was unknown at the time: dusty roads with toiling horses, lonely charcoal burners’ huts in the dimness of the forest, villages in rain or snow, with little figures shivering from frost or damp as they flit along the street. From the very beginning, free from the vices of genre and narrative painting and the search after interesting subjects, he has, in these pictures, renounced the epical manner of representing a complicated event. Like the moderns, he paints things which can be grasped and understood at a glance.

But, after all, Bürkel occupies a position which is curiously intermediate. 150 His colour relegates him altogether to the beginning of the century. He was himself conscious of the weakness of his age in this respect, and stands considerably above the school of Cornelius, even where its colouring is best. Yet, in spite of the most diligent study of the Dutch masters, he remained, as a colourist, hard and inartistic to the end. Having far too much regard for outline, he is not light enough with what should be lightly touched, nor fugitive enough with what is fleeting. What the moderns leave to be indistinctly divined he renders sharp and palpable in his drawing. He trims and rounds off objects which have a fleeting form, like clouds. But although inept in technique, his works are more modern in substance than anything that the next generation produced. They have an intimacy of feeling beyond the reach of the traditional genre painting. In his unusually fresh, simple, and direct studies of landscape he did not snatch at dazzling and sensational effects, but tried to be just to external nature in her work-a-day mood; and, in the very same way, in his figures he aimed at the plain reproduction of what is given in nature.

The hands of his peasants are the real hands of toil—weather-stained, heavy, and awkward. There are no movements that are not simple and actual. Others have told droller stories; Bürkel unrolls a true picture of the surroundings of the peasant’s life. Others have made their rustics persons suitable for the drawing-room, and cleaned their nails; Bürkel preaches the strict, austere, and pious study of nature. An entirely new age casts its shadow upon this close devotion to life. In their intimacy and simplicity his pictures contain the germ of what afterwards became the task of the moderns. All who came after him in Germany were the sons of Wilkie until Wilhelm Leibl, furnished with a better technical equipment, started in spirit from the point at which Bürkel had left off.

Carl Spitzweg, in whose charming little pictures tender and discreet sentiment is united with realistic care for detail, must likewise be reckoned with the few who strove and laboured in quiet, apart from the ruling tendency, until their hour came. Thrown entirely on his own resources, without a teacher, he worked his way upwards under the influence of the older painters. By dint of copying he discovered their secrets of colour, and gave his works, which are full of poetry, a remarkable impress of sympathetic delicacy, suggestive of the old masters. One turns over the leaves of the album of Spitzweg’s sketches as though it were a story-book from the age of romance, and at the same time one is astonished at the master’s ability in painting. He was a genius who united in himself three qualities which seem to be contradictory—realism, fancy, and humour. He might be most readily compared with Schwind, except that the latter was more of a romanticist than a realist, and Spitzweg is more of a realist than a romanticist. The artists’ yearning carries Schwind to distant ages and regions far from the world, and a positive sense of fact holds Spitzweg firmly to the earth.

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Like Jean Paul, he has the boundless fancy which revels in airy dreams, but he is also like Jean Paul in having a cheery, provincial satisfaction in the sights of his own narrow world. He has all Schwind’s delight in hermits and anchorites, and witches and magic and nixies, and he plays with dragons and goblins like Boecklin; but, for all that, he is at home and entirely at his ease in the society of honest little schoolmasters and poor sempstresses, and gives shape to his own small joys and sorrows in a spirit of contemplation. His dragons are only comfortable, Philistine dragons, and his troglodytes, who chastise themselves in rocky solitudes, perform their penance with a kindly irony. In Spitzweg a fine humour is the causeway between fancy and reality. His tender little pictures represent the Germany of the forties, and lie apart from the rushing life of our time, like an idyllic hamlet slumbering in Sunday quietude. Indeed, his pictures come to us like a greeting from a time long past.

There they are: his poor poet, a little, lean old man, with a sharp nose and a night-cap, sits at his garret window scanning verses on his frozen fingers, enveloped in a blanket drawn up to his chin, and protected from the inclemency of the weather by a great red umbrella; his clerk, grown grey in the dust of parchments, sharpens his quill with dim-sighted eyes, and feels himself part of a bureaucracy which rules the world; his book-worm stands on the highest ladder in the library, with books in his hand, books in his pockets, books under his arms, and books jammed between his legs, and neglects the dinner-hour in his peaceful enjoyment, until an angry torrent of scolding is poured over his devoted head by the housekeeper; there is his old gentleman devoutly sniffing the perfume of a cactus blossom which has been looked forward to for years; there is his little man enticing his bird with a lump of sugar; the widower glancing aside from the miniature of his better half at a pair of pretty maidens walking in the park; the constable whiling away the time at the town-gate in catching flies; the old-fashioned bachelor, solemnly presenting a bouquet to a kitchen-maid who is busied at the market-well, to the amusement of all the gossips watching him from the windows; the lovers who in happy oblivion pass down a narrow street by the stall of a second-hand dealer, where amidst antiquated household goods a gilded statuette of Venus reposes in a rickety cradle; the children holding up their pinafores as they beg the stork flying by to bring them a little brother.

Spitzweg, like Jean Paul, makes an effect which is at once joyous and tender, bourgeois and idyllic. The postillion gives the signal on his horn that the moment for starting has arrived; milk-maids look down from the green mountain summit into the far country; hermits sit before their cells forgotten by the world; old friends greet each other after years of separation; Dachau girls in their holiday best pray in woodland chapels; school children pass singing through a still mountain valley; maidens chatter of an evening as they fetch water from the moss-grown well, or the arrival of the postman in his yellow uniform brings to their windows the entire population of an old country town.

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The little man with the miserable figure of a tailor had been an apothecary until he was thirty years of age, but he had an independent and distinctive artistic nature which impresses itself on the memory in a way that is unforgettable. It is only necessary to see his portrait as he sits at his easel in his dressing-gown with his meagre beard, his long nose, and the droll look about the corners of his eyes, to feel attracted by him before one knows his works. Spitzweg reveals in them his own life: the man and the painter are one in him. There is a pretty little picture of him as an elderly bachelor, looking out of the window in the early morning and nodding across the roofs to an old sempstress who had worked the whole night through without noticing that the day had broken; that is the world he lived in, and the world which he has painted. As a kind-hearted, inflexible Benedick, full of droll eccentricities, he lived in the oldest quarter of Munich in a fourth-storey attic. His only visitor was his friend Moritz Schwind, who now and then climbed the staircase to the little room that looked over the roofs and gables and pinnacles to distant, smoky towers. His studio was an untidy confusion of prosaic discomfort and poetic cosiness.

Here he sat, an ossified hermit, bourgeois, and book-worm, as if he were in a spider’s nest, and here at a little window he painted his delightful pictures. Here he took his homely meal at the rickety little table where he sat alone in the evening buried in his books. A pair of heavy silver spectacles with keen glasses sparkled on his thick nose, and the great head with its ironically twinkling eyes rested upon a huge cravat attached to a pointed stand-up collar. When disturbed by strangers he spoke slowly and with embarrassment, though in the society of Schwind he was brilliant and satirical. Then he became as mobile as quicksilver, and paced up and down the studio with great strides, gesticulating and sometimes going through a dramatic performance in vivid mimicry of those of whom he happened to be talking.

His character has the same mixture of Philistine contentment and 155 genial comedy which gleams from his works with the freshness of dew. A touch of the sturdy Philistinism of Eichendorf is in these provincial idylls of Germany; but at the same time they display an ability which even at the present day must compel respect. The whole of Romanticism chirps and twitters in the Spitzweg Album, as from behind the wires of a birdcage. Everything is here united: the fragrance of the woods and the song of birds, the pleasures of travelling and the sleepy life of provincial towns, moonshine and Sunday quiet, vagabonds, roving musicians, and the guardians of law, learned professors and students singing catches, burgomasters and town-councillors, long-haired painters and strolling players, red dressing-gowns, green slippers, night-caps, and pipes with long stems, serenades and watchmen, rushing streams and the trill of nightingales, rippling summer breezes and comely lasses, stroking back their hair of a morning, and looking down from projecting windows to greet the passers-by. In common with Schwind he shows a remarkable capacity for placing his figures in their right surroundings. All these squares, alleys, and corners, in which his provincial pictures are framed, seem—minutely and faithfully executed as they are—to be localities predestined for the action, though they are painted freely from memory. Just as he forgot none of the characteristic figures which he had seen in his youth, so he held in his memory the whimsical and marvellous architecture of the country towns of Swabia and Upper Bavaria which he had visited for his studies, with such a firm grip that it was always at his command; and he used it as a setting for his figures as a musician composes an harmonious accompaniment for a melody.

To look at his pictures is like wandering on a bright Sunday morning through the gardens and crooked, uneven alleys of an old German town. At 156 the same time one feels that Spitzweg belonged to the present and not to the period of the ingenuous Philistines. It was only after he had studied at the university and passed his pharmaceutical examination that he turned to painting. Nevertheless he succeeded in acquiring a sensitiveness to colour to which nothing in the period can be compared. He worked through Burnett’s Treatise on Painting, visited Italy, and in 1851 made a tour, for the sake of study, to Paris, London, and Antwerp, in company with Eduard Schleich. In the gallery of Pommersfelden he made masterly copies from Berghem, Gonzales Coquez, Ostade, and Poelenburg, and lived to see the appearance of Piloty. But much as he profited by the principles of colour which then became dominant, he is like none of his contemporaries, and stands as far from Piloty’s brown sauce as from the frigid hardness of the old genre painters. He was one of the first in Germany to feel the really sensuous joy of painting, and to mix soft, luxuriant, melting colours. There are landscapes of his which, in their charming freshness, border directly on the school of Fontainebleau. Spitzweg has painted bright green meadows in which, as in the pictures of Daubigny, the little red figures of peasant women appear as bright and luminous patches of colour. His woodland glades penetrated by the sun have a pungent piquancy of colour such as is only to be found elsewhere in Diaz. And where he diversified his desolate mountain glens and steeply rising cliffs with the fantastic lairs of dragons and with eccentric anchorites, he sometimes produced such bold colour symphonies of sapphire blue, emerald green, and red, that his pictures seem like anticipations of Boecklin. Spitzweg was a painter for connoisseurs. His refined cabinet pieces are amongst the 157 few German productions of their time which it is a delight to possess, and they have the savour of rare delicacies when one comes across them in the dismal wilderness of public galleries.

Bürkel’s realistic programme was taken up with even greater energy by Hermann Kauffmann, who belonged to the Munich circle from 1827 to 1833, and then painted until his death in 1888 in his native Hamburg. His province was for the most part that of Bürkel: peasants in the field, waggoners on the road, woodmen at their labour, and hunters in the snowy forest. For the first few years after his return home he used for his pictures the well-remembered motives taken from the South German mountain district. A tour in Norway, undertaken in 1843, gave him the impulse for a series of Norwegian landscapes which were simple and direct, and of more than common freshness. In the deanery at Holstein he studied the life of fishers. Otherwise the neighbourhood of Hamburg is almost always the background of his pictures: Harburg, Kellinghusen, Wandsbeck, and the Alster Valley. Concerning him Lichtwark is right in insisting upon the correctness of intuition, the innate soundness of perception which one meets with in all his works.

In Berlin the excellent Eduard Meyerheim went on parallel lines with these masters. An old tradition gives him the credit of having introduced the painting of peasants and children into German art. But in artistic power he is not to be compared with Bürkel or Kauffmann. They were energetic realists, teeming with health, and in everything they drew they were merely inspired by the earnest purpose of grasping life in its characteristic moments. But Meyerheim, good-humoured and childlike, is decidedly inclined to a sentimentally pathetic compromise with reality. At the same time his importance for Berlin is incontestable. Hitherto gipsies, smugglers, and robbers were the only classes of human society, with the exception of knights, monks, noble ladies, and Italian women, which, upon the banks of the Spree, were thought suitable for artistic representation. 158 Friedrich Eduard Meyerheim sought out the rustic before literature had taken this step, and in 1836 he began with his “King of the Shooting Match,” a series of modest pictures in which he was never weary of representing in an honest and sound-hearted way the little festivals of the peasant, the happiness of parents, and the games of children.

He had grown up in Dantzic, and played as a child in the tortuous lanes of the old free imperial city, amid trumpery shops, general dealers, and artisans. Later, when he settled down in Berlin, he painted the things which had delighted him in his youth. The travels which he made for study were not extensive: they hardly led him farther beyond the boundaries of the Mark than Hesse, the Harz district, Thüringen, Altenburg, and Westphalia. Here he drew with indefatigable diligence the pleasant village houses and the churches shadowed by trees; the cots, yards, and alleys; the weather-beaten town ramparts, with their crumbling walls; the unobtrusive landscapes of North Germany, lovely valleys, bushy hills, and bleaching fields, traversed by quiet streams fringed with willows, and enlivened by the figures of peasants, who still clung to so much of their old costume. His pictures certainly do not give an idea of the life of the German people at the time. For the peasantry have sat to Meyerheim only in their most pious mood, in Sunday toilette, and with their souls washed clean. Clearness, neatness, and prettiness are to be found everywhere in his pictures. But little as they correspond to the truth, they are just as little untrue through affectation, for their idealism sprang from the harmless and cheerful temperament of the painter, and from no convention of the schools.

A homely, idyllic poetry is to be found in his figures and his interiors. His women and girls are chaste and gracious. It is evident that Meyerheim had a warm sympathy for the sorrows and joys of humble people; that he had an understanding for this happy family life, and liked himself to take part in these merry popular festivals; that he did not idealise the world according to rules of beauty, but because in his own eyes it really was so beautiful. His 159 “King of the Shooting Match” of 1836 (Berlin National Gallery) has as a background a wide and pleasant landscape, with blue heights in the distance and the cheerful summer sunshine resting upon them. In the foreground are a crowd of figures, neatly composed after studies. The crowned king of the match, adorned for a festival, stands proudly on the road by which the procession of marksmen is advancing, accompanied by village music. An old peasant is congratulating him, and the pretty village girls and peasant women, in their gay rustic costumes, titter as they look on, while the neighbours are merrily drinking his health. Then there is the “Morning Lesson,” representing a carpenter’s house, where an old man is hearing his grandson repeat a school task; “Children at Play,” a picture of a game of hide-and-seek amongst the trees; “The Knitting Lesson,” and the picture of a young wife by the bed of a naked boy who has thrown off the bedclothes and is holding up one of his rosy feet; and “The Road to Church,” where the market-place is shadowed with lime trees and the fresh young girlish figures adorned in their Sunday best. These are all pictures which in lithograph and copperplate engraving once flooded all Germany and enraptured the public at exhibitions.

But the German genre picture of peasant life only became universally popular after the village novel came into vogue at the end of the thirties. 160 Walter Scott was not only a Romanticist, but the founder of the peasant novel: he was the first to study the life and the human character of the peasantry of his native land, their rough and healthy merriment, their humorous peculiarities, and their hot-headed love of quarrelling; and he led the Romanticists from their idyllic or sombre world of dreams nearer to the reality and its poetry. A generation later Immermann created this department of literature in Germany by the Oberhof-Episode of his Münchhausen. “The Village Magistrate” was soon one of those typical figures which in literature became the model of a hundred others. In 1837 Jeremias Gotthelf began in his Bauernspiegel those descriptions of Bernese rustic life which found general favour through their downright common sense. Berthold Auerbach, Otto Ludwig, and Gottfried Keller were then active, and Fritz Reuter lit upon a more clear-cut form for his tales in dialect.

The influence which these writers had upon painting was enormous. It now turned everywhere to the life of the people, and took its joy and pleasure in devoting itself to reality. And the rustic was soon a popular figure much sought after in the picture market. Yet this reliance on poetry and fiction had its disadvantage. For in Germany, also, a vogue was given to that “genre painting” which, instead of starting with a simple, straightforward representation of what the artist had seen, offered an artistically correct composition of what he had invented, and indulged in a rambling display of humorous narrative and pathetic pieces.

In Carlsruhe Johann Kirner was the first to work on these lines, adapting the life of the Swabian peasantry to the purposes of humorous anecdote. In Munich Carl Enhuber was especially fertile in the invention of comic episodes amongst the rustics of the Bavarian highlands, and his ponderous humour made him one of the favourite heroes of the Art Union. Every one was in raptures over his “Partenkirche Fair,” over the charlatan in front of the village inn, who (like a figure after Gerhard Dow) is bringing home to the 161 multitude by his lofty eloquence the fabulous qualities of his soap for removing spots; over that assembly of peasants which gave the painter an opportunity for making clearly recognisable people to be found everywhere in any little town, from the judge of the county court and the local doctor down to the watchmen. His second hit was “The Interrupted Card Party”: the blacksmith, the miller, the tailor, and other dignitaries of the village are so painfully disturbed in their social reunion by the unamiable wife of the tailor that her happy spouse makes his escape under the table. The house servant holds out his blue apron to protect his master, whilst the miller and the blacksmith try to look unconcerned; but a small boy who has accompanied his mother with a mug discovers the concealed sinner by his slipper, which has come off. The “Session Day” contains a still greater wealth of comical types: here is the yard of a country assize court, filled with people, some of them waiting their turn, some issuing in contentment or dejection. Most contented, of course, are a bridal pair from the mountains—a stout peasant lad and a buxom maiden—who have just received official consent to their marriage. Disastrous country excursions—townspeople overtaken by rain on their arrival in the mountains—were also a source of highly comical situations.

In Düsseldorf the reaction against the prevailing sentimentality necessarily gave an impulse to art on these humorous lines. When it seemed as if the mournfulness of the thirties would never be ended, Adolf Schroedter, the satirist of the band of Düsseldorf artists in those times, broke the spell when he began to parody the works of the “great painters.” When Lessing painted “The Sorrowing Royal Pair,” Schroedter painted “The Triumphal Procession of King Bacchus”; when Hermann Stilke produced his knights and crusaders, Schroedter illustrated Don Quixote as a warning; and when Bendemann gave the world “The Lamentation of Jeremiah” and “The Lamentation of the Jews,” Schroedter executed his droll picture “The Sorrowful Tanners,” in which the tanners are mournfully regarding a hide carried away 162 by the stream. Since he was a humorist, and humour is rather an affair for drawing than painting, the charming lithographs, “The Deeds and Opinions of Piepmeyer the Delegate,” published in conjunction with Detmold, the Hanoverian barrister, and author of the Guide to Connoisseurship, are perhaps to be reckoned as his best performances. Hasenclever followed the dilettante Schroedter as a delineator of the “stolid Peter” type, and painted the “Study” and similar pictures for Kortum’s Jobsiade with great technical skill, and, at the same time, with little humour and much complacency. By the roundabout route of illustration artists were gradually brought more directly into touch with life, and painted side by side with melodramatic brigands, rustic folk, or a student at a tavern on the Rhine, absurd people reading the newspapers, comic men sneezing, or the smirking Philistine tasting wine.

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Jacob Becker went to the Westerwald to sketch little village tragedies, and won such popularity with his “Shepherd Struck by Lightning” that for a long time the interest of the public was often concentrated on this picture in the collection of the Staedel Institute. Rudolf Jordan of Berlin settled on Heligoland, and became by his “Proposal of Marriage in Heligoland” one of the most esteemed painters of Düsseldorf. And in 1852 Henry Ritter, his pupil, who died young, enjoyed a like success with his “Middy’s Sermon,” which represents a tiny midshipman with comical zeal endeavouring to convert to temperance three tars who are staggering against him. A Norwegian, Adolf Tidemand, became the Leopold Robert of the North, and, like Robert, attained an international success when, after 1845, he began to present his compatriots, the peasants, fishers, and sailors of the shores of the North Sea, to the public of Europe. There was no doubt that a true ethnographical course of instruction in the life of a distant race, as yet unknown to the rest of Europe, was to be gathered from his pictures, as from those of Robert, or from the Oriental representations of Vernet. In Tidemand’s pictures the Germans learnt the Norwegian usage of Christmas, accompanied the son of the North on his fishing of a night, joined the bridal party on the Hardanger Fjord, or listened to the sexton giving religious instruction; sailed with fishing girls in a skiff to visit the neighbouring village, or beheld grandmother and the children dance on Sunday afternoon to father’s fiddle. Norwegian peasant life was such an unknown world of romance, and the costume so novel, that Tidemand’s art was greeted as a new discovery. That the truth of his pictures went no further than costume was only known at a later time. Tidemand saw his native land with the eyes of a Romanticist, as Robert saw Italy, and, in the same one-sided way, he only visited the people on festive 166 occasions. Though a born Norwegian, he, too, was a foreigner, a man who was never familiar with the life of his country people, who never lived at home through the raw autumn and the long winter, but came only as a summer visitor, when nature had donned her bridal garb, and naturally took away with him the mere impressions of a tourist. As he only went to Norway for recreation, it is always holiday-tide and Sabbath peace in his pictures. He represents the same idyllic optimism and the same kindly view of “the people” as did Björnson in his earliest works; and it is significant that the latter felt himself at the time so entirely in sympathy with Tidemand that he wrote one of his tales, The Bridal March, as text to Tidemand’s picture “Adorning the Bride.”

To seek the intimate poetry in the monotonous life of the peasant, and to go with him into the struggle for existence, was what did not lie in Tidemand’s method of presentation; he did not live amongst the people sufficiently long to penetrate to their depths. The sketches that resulted from his summer journeys often reveal a keen eye for the picturesque, as well as for the spiritual life of this peasantry; but later in Düsseldorf, when he composed his studies for pictures with the help of German models, all the sharp characterisation was watered down. What ought to have been said in Norwegian was expressed in a German translation, where the emphasis was lost. His art is Düsseldorf art with Norwegian landscapes and costumes; a course of lectures on the manners and customs of Norwegian villages composed for Germans. The only thing which distinguishes Tidemand to his advantage from the German Düsseldorfers is that he is less humorously and sentimentally disposed. Pictures of his, such as “The Lonely Old People,” “The Catechism,” “The Wounded Bear Hunter,” “The Grandfather’s Blessing,” “The Sectarians,” etc., create a really pleasant and healthy effect by a certain actual simplicity which they undoubtedly have. Other men would have made a melodrama out of “The Emigrant’s Departure” (National Gallery in Christiania). Tidemand portrays the event without any sort of emphasis, and feels his way with tact on the boundary between sentiment and sentimentality. There is nothing false or hysterical in the behaviour of the man who is going away for life, nor in those who have come to see him off.

In Vienna the genre painters seem to owe their inspiration especially to the theatre. What was produced there in the province of grand art during the first half of the century was neither better nor worse than elsewhere. The Classicism of Mengs and David was represented by Heinrich Füger, who had a more decided leaning towards the operatic. The representative-in-chief of Nazarenism was Josef Führich, whose frescoes in the Altlerchenfeld Church are, perhaps, better in point of colour than the corresponding efforts of the Munich artists, though they are likewise in a formal way derivative from the Italians. Vienna had its Wilhelm Kaulbach in Carl Rahl, its Piloty in Christian Ruben, who, like the Munich artist, had a preference for painting Columbus, and was meritorious as a teacher. It was only through portrait 167 painting that Classicism and Romanticism were brought into some sort of relation with life; and the Vienna portraitists of this older régime are even better than their German contemporaries, as they made fewer concessions to the ruling idealism. Amongst the portrait painters was Lampi, after whom followed Moritz Daffinger with his delicate miniatures; but the most important of them all was Friedrich Amerling, who had studied under Lawrence in London and under Horace Vernet in Paris, and brought back with him great acquisitions in the science of colour. In the first half of the century these assured him a decided advantage over his German colleagues. It was only later, when he was sought after as the fashionable painter of all the crowned heads, that his art degenerated into mawkishness.

Genre painting was developed here as elsewhere from the military picture. As early as 1813 Peter Krafft, an academician of the school of David, had exhibited a great oil-painting, “The Soldier’s Farewell”—the interior of a village room with a group of life-size figures. The son of the family, in grey uniform, with a musket in his hand, is tearing himself from his young wife, who has a baby on her arm and is trying in tears to hold him back. His old father sits in a corner with folded hands beside his mother, who is also crying, and has hid her face. In 1820 Krafft added “The Soldier’s Return” as a 168 pendant to this picture. It represents the changes which have taken place in the family during the warrior’s absence: his old mother is at rest in her grave; his grey-headed father has become visibly older, his little sister has grown up, and the baby in arms is carrying the musket after his father. They are both exceedingly tiresome pictures; the colour is cold and grey, the figures are pseudo-classical in modern costume, and the pathos of the subject seems artificial and forced. Nevertheless a new principle of art is declared in them. Krafft was the first in Austria to recognise what a rich province had been hitherto ignored by painting. He warned his pupils against the themes of the Romanticists. These, as he said, were worked out, since no one would do anything better than the “Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci or the Madonnas of Raphael.” And he warmly advocated the conviction “that nothing could be done for historical painting so long as it refused to choose subjects from modern life.” Krafft was an admirable teacher with a sober and clear understanding, and he invariably directed his pupils to the immediate study of life and nature. The consequence of his career was that Carl Schindler, Friedrich Treml, Fritz L’Allemand, and others set themselves to treat in episodic pictures the military life of Austria, from the recruiting stage to the battle, and from the soldier’s farewell to his return to his father’s house. A further result was that the Viennese genre painting parted company with the academical and historic art.

Just at this time Tschischka and Schottky began to collect the popular songs of the Viennese. Castelli gave a poetic representation of bourgeois life, and Ferdinand Raimund brought it upon the stage in his dramas. Bauernfeld’s types from the life of the people enjoyed a rapid popularity. Josef Danhauser, Peter Fendi, and Ferdinand Waldmüller went on parallel lines with these authors. In their genre pictures they represented the Austrian people in their joys and sorrows, in their merriment and heartiness and good-humour; the people, be it understood, of Raimund’s popular farces, not those of the pavement of Vienna.

Josef Danhauser, the son of a Viennese carpenter, occupied himself with the artisan and bourgeois classes. David Wilkie gave him the form for his work and Ferdinand Raimund his ideas. His studio scenes, with boisterous art students caught by their surly teacher at the moment when they are playing their worst pranks, gave pleasure to the class of people who, at a later date, took so much delight in Emanuel Spitzer. His “Gormandizer” is a counterpart to Raimund’s Verschwender; and when, in a companion picture, the gluttonous liver is supping up the “monastery broth” amongst beggars, and his former valet remains true to him even in misfortune, Grillparzer’s Treuer Diener seines Herrn serves as a model for this type. Girls confessing their frailty to their parents had been previously painted by Greuze. Amongst those of his pictures which had done most to amuse the public was the representation of the havoc caused by a butcher’s dog storming into a studio. In his last period he turned with Collins to the nursery, or wandered through 169 the suburbs with a sketch-book, immortalising the doings of children in the streets, and drawing “character heads” of the school-teacher tavern habitués and the lottery adventurer.

And this was likewise the province to which Waldmüller devoted himself. Chubby peasant children are the heroes of almost all his pictures. A baby is sprawling with joy on its mother’s lap, while it is contemplated with proud satisfaction by its father, or it is sleeping under the guardianship of a little sister; a boy is despatched upon the rough path which leads to school, and brings the reward of his conduct home with rapturous or dejected mien, or he stammers “Many happy returns of the day” to grandpapa. Waldmüller paints “The First Step,” the joys of “Christmas Presents,” and “The Distribution of Prizes to Poor School Children”; he follows eager juveniles to the peep-show; he is to be met at “The Departure of the Bride” and at “The Wedding”; he is our guide to the simple “Peasant’s Room,” and shows the benefit of “Almsgiving.” Though his pictures may seem old-fashioned in subject nowadays, their artistic qualities convey an entirely modern impression. Born in 1793, he anticipated the best artists of later days in his choice of material. Both in his portraits and in his country scenes 170 there is a freshness and transparency of tone which was something rare among the painters of that time.

Friedrich Gauermann wandered in the Austrian Alps, in Steiermark, and Salzkammergut, making studies of nature, the inhabitants, and the animal world. In contradistinction from Waldmüller, painter of idylls, and the humorist Danhauser, he aimed above all at ethnographical exactness. With sincere and unadorned observation Gauermann represents the local peculiarities of the peasantry, differentiated according to their peculiar valleys; life on the pasture and at the market, when some ceremonial occasion—a shooting match, a Sunday observance, or a church consecration—has gathered together the scattered inhabitants.

Genre painting in other countries worked with the same types. The costume was different, but the substance of the pictures was the same.

In Belgium Leys had already worked in the direction of painting everyday life; for although he had painted figures from the sixteenth century, they were not idealised, but as rough and homely as in reality. When the passion for truthfulness increased, as it did in the following years, there came a moment when the old German tradition, under the shelter of which Leys yet took refuge, was shaken off, and artists went directly to nature without seeking the mediation of antiquated style. At that time Belgium was one of the most 171 rising and thriving countries in Europe. It had private collections by the hundred. Wealthy merchants rivalled one another in the pride of owning works by their celebrated painters. This necessarily exerted an influence on production. Pretty genre pictures of peasant life soon became the most popular wares; as for their artistic sanction, it was possible to point to Brouwer and Teniers, the great national exemplars.

At first, then, the painters worked with the same elements as Teniers. The common themes of their pictures were the ale-house with its thatched roof, the old musician with his violin, the mountebank standing in the midst of a circle of people, lovers, or drinkers brawling. Only the costume was changed, and everything coarse, indecorous, or unrestrained was scrupulously excluded ad usum Delphini. That the deep colouring of the old masters became meagre and motley was in Belgium also an inevitable result of the helplessness in regard to colour which had been brought on by Classicism. The pictorial furia of Adriaen Brouwer gave way to a polished porcelain painting which hardly bore a trace of the work of the hand. Harsh and gaudy reds and greens were especially popular.

The first who began a modest career on these lines was Ignatius van Regemorter. As one recognises the pictures of Wouwerman by the dappled-grey horse, Regemorter’s may be recognised by the violin. Every year he turned out one picture at least in which music was being played, and people were dancing with a rather forced gaiety. Then came Ferdinand de Braekeleer, who painted the jubilees of old people, or children and old women amusing themselves at public festivities. Teniers was his principal model, but his large joviality was transformed into a chastened merriment, and his broad laughter into a discreet smile. Braekeleer’s peasantry and proletariat are of an idyllic mildness; honest, pious souls who, with all their poverty, are as moral as they are happy. Henri Coene elaborated such themes as “Oh, what beautiful Grapes!” or “A Pinch of Snuff for the Parson!”

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Madou’s merit lies in having extended Belgian genre painting somewhat beyond these narrow bounds; he introduced a greater variety of types verging more on reality than that everlasting honest man painted by Ferdinand de Braekeleer. Madou was a native of Brussels. There he was born in 1796, and he died there in 1877. When he began his career Wappers had just made his appearance. Madou witnessed his successes, but did not feel tempted to follow him. Whilst the latter in his large pictures in the grand style aimed at being Rubens redivivus, Madou embodied his ideas in fleeting pencil sketches. A great number of lithographs of scenes from the past bore witness to his conception of history. There was nothing in them that was dignified, nothing that was stilted, no idealism and no beauty; in their tabards and helmets the figures moved with the natural gestures of ordinary human beings. By the side of great seigneurs, princes, and knights, and amid helmets and hose, drunken scoundrels, tavern politicians, and village cretins started into view, and grimaced and danced and scuffled. In Belgium his plates occupy a position similar to that of the first lithographs of Menzel in Germany. But Madou lingered for a still briefer period in the Pantheon of history; the tavern had for him a yet greater attraction. The humorous books which he published in Paris and Brussels first showed him in his true light. Having busied himself for several years exclusively with drawings, he made his début in 1842 as a painter. It is difficult to decide how much Madou produced after that date. The long period between 1842 and 1877 yields a crowded chronicle of his works. Even in the seventies he was just as vigorous as at the beginning, and though he was regarded as a jester during his lifetime he was honoured 173 as a great painter after his death. At the auction of his unsold works, pictures fetched 22,000 francs, sketches reached 3200, water-colours 2150, and drawings 750. The present generation has reduced this over-estimation to its right measure, but it has not shaken Madou’s historical importance. He has a firm position as the man who conquered modern life in the interests of Belgian art, and he is the more significant for the genre painting of his age, as he eclipsed all his contemporaries, even in Germany and England, in the inexhaustible fund of his invention.

A merry world is reflected in his pictures. One of his most popular figures is the ranger, a sly old fox with a furrowed, rubicund visage and huge ears, who roves about more to the terror of love-making couples than of poachers, and never aims at any one except for fun at the rural justice, a portly gentleman in a gaudy waistcoat, emerging quietly at the far end of the road. He introduces a varied succession of braggarts, poor fellows, down-at-heel and out-at-elbows, old grenadiers joking with servant girls, old marquesses taking snuff with affected dignity, charlatans at their booth, deaf and dumb flute-players, performing dogs, and boys sick over their first pipe. Here and there are fatuous or over-wise politicians solemnly opening a newly printed paper, with their legs astraddle and their spectacles resting on their noses. Rascals with huge paunches and blue noses fall asleep on their table in the ale-house, and enliven the rest of the company by their snoring. At times the door is opened and a scolding woman appears with a broom in her hand. On these occasions the countenance of the toper is a comical sight. At the sound of 174 the beloved voice he endeavours to raise himself, and anxiously follows the movements of his better half as he clings reeling to the table, or plants himself more firmly in his chair with a resigned and courageous “J’y suis, j’y reste.”

Being less disposed to appear humorous, Adolf Dillens makes a more sympathetic impression. He, too, had begun with forced anecdotes, but after a tour to Zealand opened his eyes to nature; he laid burlesque on one side, and depicted what he had seen in unhackneyed pictures: sound and healthy men of patriarchal habits. Even his method of painting became simpler and more natural; his colouring, hitherto borrowed from the old masters, became fresher and brighter. He emancipated himself from Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro, and began to look at nature without spectacles. There is something poetic in his method of observation: he really loved these good people and painted them in the unadorned simplicity of their life—cheery old age that knows no wrinkles and laughing youth that knows no sorrows. He is indeed one-sided, for a good fairy has banished all trouble from his happy world; but his pictures are the product of a fresh and amiable temperament. His usual themes are a friendly gathering at the ale-house, a conversation beneath the porch, skating, scenes in cobblers’ workshops, a gust of wind blowing an umbrella inside out; and if he embellishes them with little episodic details, this tendency is so innocent that nobody can quarrel with him.

In France it was François Biard, the Paul de Kock of French painting, who attained most success in the thirties by humorous anecdote. He devoted his whole life to the comical representation of the minor trespasses and misfortunes of the commonplace bourgeoisie. He had the secret of displaying his comicalities with great aptitude, and of mocking at the ridiculous eccentricities of the Philistine in an obvious and downright fashion. Strolling players made fools of themselves at their toilette; lads were bathing whilst a gendarme carried off their clothes; a sentry saluted a decorated veteran, whose wife gratefully acknowledged the attention with a curtsey; the village grandee held a review of volunteers with the most pompous gravity; a child was exhibited at the piano to the admiration of its yawning relatives. One of his chief pictures was called “Posada Espagnol.” The hero was a monk winking at a beauty of forty who was passing by while he was being shaved. Women were sitting and standing about, when a herd of swine dashing in threw everything over and put the ladies to flight, and so called forth one of those comic effects of terror in which Paul de Kock took such delight.

Biard was inexhaustible in these expedients for provoking laughter; and as he had travelled far he had always in reserve a slave-market, a primeval forest, or an ice-field to appease the curiosity of his admirers when there was nothing more to laugh at. From the German standpoint he had importance as an artist whose flow of ideas would have furnished ten genre painters; and if he is the only representative of the humorously anecdotic picture in France, the reason is that there earlier than elsewhere art was led into a more earnest course by the tumult of ideas on social politics.

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CHAPTER XXI

THE PICTURE WITH A SOCIAL PURPOSE

That modern life first entered art, in all countries, under the form of humorous anecdote is partly the consequence of the one-sided æsthetic ideas of the period. In an age that was dominated by idealism it was forgotten that Murillo had painted lame beggars sitting in the sun, Velasquez cripples and drunkards, and Holbein lepers; that Rembrandt had so much love for humble folk, and that old Breughel with a strangely sombre pessimism turned the whole world into a terrible hospital. The modern man was hideous, and art demanded “absolute beauty.” If he was to be introduced into painting, despite his want of beauté suprême, the only way was to treat him as a humorous figure which had to be handled ironically. Mercantile considerations were also a power in determining this form of humour. At a time when painting was forced to address itself to a public which was uneducated in art, and could only appreciate anecdotes, such comicalities had the best prospect of favour and a rapid sale. The object was to provoke laughter, at all hazards, by drollness of mien, typical stupidity, and absurdity of situation. The choice of figures was practically made according as they were more or less serviceable for a humorous purpose. Children, rustics, and provincial Philistines seemed to be most adapted to it. The painter treated them as strange and naïve beings, and brought them before the public as a sort of performing dogs, who could go through remarkable tricks just as if they were human beings. And the public laughed over whimsical oddities from another world, as the courtiers of Louis XIV had laughed in Versailles when M. Jourdain and M. Dimanche were acted by the king’s servants upon the stage of Molière.

Meanwhile painters gradually came to remark that this humour à l’huile was bought at too dear a price. For humour, which is like a soap-bubble, can only bear a light method of representation, such as Hokusai’s drawing or Brouwer’s painting, but becomes insupportable where it is offered as a laborious composition executed with painstaking realism. And ethical reasons made themselves felt independently of these artistic considerations.

The drollness of these pictures did not spring from the characters, but from an effort to amuse the public at the expense of the painted figures. As a general rule a peasant is a serious, square-built, angular fellow. For his existence he does battle with the soil; his life is no pleasure to him, but hard 176 toil. But in these pictures he appeared as a figure who had no aim or purport; in his brain the earnestness of life was transformed into a romping game. Painters laughed at the little world which they represented. They were not the friends of man, but parodied him and transformed life into a sort of Punch and Judy show.

And even when they did not approach their figures with deliberate irony, they never dreamed of plunging with any sincere love of truth into the depths of modern life. They painted modern matter without taking part in it, like good children who know nothing of the bitter facts that take place in the world. When the old Dutch painters laughed, their laughter had its historical justification. In the pictures of Ostade and Dirk Hals there is seen all the primitive exuberance and wild joy of life belonging to a people who had just won their independence and abandoned themselves after long years of war with a sensuous transport to the gladness of existence. But the smile of these modern genre painters is forced, conventional, and artificial; the smile of a later generation which only took the trouble to smile because the old Dutch had laughed before them. They put on rose-coloured glasses, and through these gaudy spectacles saw only a gay masque of life, a fair but hollow deception. They allowed their heroes to pass such a merry existence that the question of what they lived upon was never touched. When they painted their tavern pictures they anxiously suppressed the thought that people who drained their great mugs so carelessly possibly had sick children at home, hungry and perishing with cold in a room without a fire. Their peasants are the favoured sons of fortune: they sowed not, neither did they reap, nor gathered into barns, but their Heavenly Father fed them. Poverty and vice presented themselves merely as amiable weaknesses, not as great modern problems.

Just at this time the way was being paved for the Revolution of 1848: the people fought and suffered, and for years before literature had taken part in this struggle. Before the Revolution the battle had been between the nobility and the middle class; but now that the latter had to some extent taken the place of the nobility of earlier days, there rose the mighty problem of strife between the unproductive and the productive, between rich and poor.

In England, the birthplace of the modern capitalistic system, in a country where great industry and great landed property first ousted the independent yeomanry and called forth ever sharper division between those who possessed everything and those who possessed nothing, the unsolved problem of the nineteenth century found its earliest utterance. More than sixty years ago, in the year of Goethe’s death, a new literature arose there, the literature of social politics. With Ebenezer Elliott, who had been himself a plain artisan, the Fourth Estate made its entry into literature; a workman led the train of socialistic poets. Thomas Hood wrote his Song of the Shirt, that lyric of the poor sempstress which soon spread all over the Continent. Carlyle, the 177 friend and admirer of Goethe, came forward in 1843 as the burning advocate of the poor and miserable in Past and Present. He wrote there that this world was no home to the working-man, but a dreary dungeon full of mad and fruitless plagues. It was an utterance that shook the world like a bomb. Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil followed in 1845. As a novel it is a strange mixture of romantic and naturalistic chapters, the latter seeming like a prophetic announcement of Zola’s Germinal. As a reporter Charles Dickens had in his youth the opportunity of learning the wretchedness of the masses in London, even in the places where they lurked distrustfully in dark haunts. In his Christmas stories and his London sketches he worked these scenes of social distress into thrilling pictures. The poor man, whose life is made up of bitter weeks and scanty holidays, received his citizenship in the English novel.

In France the year 1830 was an end and a beginning—the close of the struggles begun in 1789, and the opening of those which led to the decisive battle of 1848. With the roi bourgeois, whom Lafayette called “the best of republicans,” the Third Estate came into possession of the position to which it had long aspired; it rose from the ranks of the oppressed to that of the privileged classes. As a new ruling class it made such abundant capital with the fruits of the Revolution of July that even in 1830 Börne wrote from Paris: “The men who fought against all aristocracy for fifteen years have scarcely conquered—they have not yet wiped the sweat from their faces—and already they want to found for themselves a new aristocracy, an aristocracy of money, a knighthood of fortune.” To the same purpose wrote Heine in 1837: “The men of thought who, during the eighteenth century, were so indefatigable in preparing the Revolution, would blush if they saw how self-interest is building its miserable huts on the site of palaces that have been broken down, and how, out of these huts, a new aristocracy is sprouting up which, more ungraciously than the old, has its primary cause in money-making.”

There the radical ideas of modern socialism were touched. The proletariat and its misery became henceforward the subject of French poetry, though they were not observed with any naturalistic love of truth, but from the romantic standpoint of contrast. Béranger, the popular singer of chansons, composed his Vieux Vagabond, the song of the old beggar who dies in the gutter; Auguste Barbier wrote his Ode to Freedom, where la sainte canaille are celebrated as immortal heroes, and with the scorn of Juvenal “lashes those who drew profit from the Revolution, those bourgeois in kid gloves who watched the sanguinary street fights comfortably from the window.” In 1842-43 Eugène Sue published his Mystères de Paris, a forbidding and nonsensical book, but one which made an extraordinary sensation, just because of the disgusting openness with which it unveiled the life of the lower strata of the people. Even the great spirits of the Romantic school began to follow the social and political strife of the age with deep emotion and close sympathy. Already in the course of the thirties socialistic ideas forced their way into the Romantic 178 school from every side. Their source was Saint Simon, whose doctrines first found a wide circulation under Louis Philippe.

According to Saint Simon, the task of the new Christianity consisted in improving as quickly as possible the fate of the class which was at once the poorest and the most numerous. His pupils regarded him as the Messiah of the new era, and went forth into the world as his disciples. George Sand, the boldest feminine genius in the literature of the world, mastered these seething ideas and founded the artisan novel in her Compagnon du Tour de France. It is the first book with a real love of the people—the people as they actually are, those who drink and commit deeds of violence as well as those who work and make mental progress. In her periodical, L’Éclaireur de l’Indre, she pleads the cause both of the artisan in great towns and of the rustic labourer; in 1844 she declared herself as a Socialist, without qualification, in her great essay Politics and Socialism, and she brought out her celebrated Letters to the People in 1848.

The democratic tide of ideas came to Victor Hugo chiefly through the religious apostle Lamennais, whose book, written in prison, De l’Esclavage Moderne, gave the same fuel to the Revolution of 1848 as the works of Rousseau had done to that of 1789. “The peasant bears the whole burden of the day, exposes himself to rain and sun and wind, to make ready by his work the harvest which fills our barns in the late autumn. If there are those who think the lighter of him on that account, and will not accord him freedom and justice, build a high wall round them, so that their noisome breath may not poison the air of Europe.” From the forties there mutters through Hugo’s poems the muffled sound of the Revolution which was soon to burst over Paris, and thence to move, like a rolling thunderstorm, across Europe. In place of the tricolor under which the bourgeoisie and the artisan class had fought side by side eighteen years before, the banner of the artisan was hoisted blood-red against the ruling bourgeoisie.

This Zeitgeist, this spirit of the age which had grown earnest, necessarily guided art into another course; the painted humour and childlike optimism of the first genre painters began to turn out a lie. In spite of Schiller, art cannot be blithe with sincerity when life is earnest. It can laugh with the muscles of the face, but the laughter is mirthless; it may haughtily declare itself in favour of some consecrated precinct, in which nothing of the battles and struggles of the outside world is allowed to echo; but, for all that, harsh reality demands its rights. Josef Danhauser’s modest little picture of 1836, “The Gormandizer,” is an illustration of this. In a sumptuously furnished room a company of high station and easy circumstances are seated at dinner. The master of the house, a sleek little man, is draining his glass, and a young dandy is playing the guitar. But an unwelcome disturbance breaks in. The figure of a beggar, covered with rags and with a greasy hat in his hand, appears at the door. The ladies scream, and a dog springs barking from under a chair, whilst the flunkey in attendance angrily prepares to send the impudent 179 intruder about his business. That was the position which art had hitherto taken up towards the social question. It shrank peevishly back as soon as rude and brutal reality disturbed its peaceful course. People wished to see none but cheerful pictures of life around them.

For this reason peasants were invariably painted in neat and cleanly dress, with their faces beaming with joy, an embodiment of the blessing of work and the delights of country life. Even beggars were harmless, peacefully cheerful figures, sparkling with health and beauty, and enveloped in æsthetic rags. But as political, religious, and social movements have always had a vivid and forcible effect on artists, painters in the nineteenth century could not in the long run hold themselves aloof from this influence. The voice of the disinherited made itself heard sullenly muttering and with ever-increasing strength. The parable of Lazarus lying at the threshold of the rich man had become a terrible reality. Conflict was to be seen everywhere around, and it would have been mere hardness of heart to have used this suffering people any longer as an agreeable subject for merriment. A higher conception of humanity, the entire philanthropic character of the age, made the jests at which the world had laughed seem forced and tasteless. Modern life must cease altogether before it can be a humorous episode for art, and it had become earnest reality through and through. Painting could no longer affect trivial humour; it had to join issue, and speak of what was going on around it. It had to take its part in the struggle for aims that belonged to the immediate time.

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Powerfully impressed by the Revolution of July, it made its first advance. The Government had been thrown down after a blood-stained struggle, and a liberated people were exulting; and the next Salon showed more than forty representations of the great events, amongst which that of Delacroix took the highest place in artistic impressiveness. The principal figure in his picture is “a youthful woman, with a red Phrygian cap, holding a musket in one hand and a tricolor in the other. Naked to the hip, she strides forward over the corpses, giving challenge to battle, a beautiful vehement body with a face in bold profile and an insolent grief upon her features, a strange mixture of Phryne, poissarde, and the goddess of Liberty.” Thus has Heine described the work while still under a vivid impression of the event it portrayed. In the thick of the powder smoke stands “Liberty” upon the barricade, at her right a Parisian gamin with a pistol in his hand, a child but already a hero, at her left an artisan with a gun on his arm: it is the people that hastens by, exulting to die the death for the great ideas of liberty and equality.

The painter himself had an entirely unpolitical mind. He had drawn his inspiration for the picture, not from experience, but out of La Curée, those verses of Auguste Barbier that are ablaze with wrath—

And by this allegorical figure he has certainly weakened its grip and directness; but it was a bold, naturalistic achievement all the same. By this work the great Romanticist became the father of the naturalistic movement, which henceforward, supported by the revolutionary democratic press, spread more and more widely.

The critics on these journals began to reproach painters with troubling themselves too little about social and political affairs. “The actuality and social significance of art,” it was written, “is the principal thing. What is meant by Beauty? We demand that painting should influence society, and join in the work of progress. Everything else belongs to the domain of Utopias and abstractions.” The place of whimsicalities is accordingly taken by sentimental and melodramatic scenes from the life of the poor. Rendered enthusiastic by the victory of the people, and inspired by democratic sentiments, some painters came to believe that the sufferings of the artisan class 181 were the thing to be represented, and that there was nothing nobler than work.

One of the first to give an example was Jeanron. His picture of “The Little Patriots,” produced in connection with the Revolution of July, was a glorification of the struggle for freedom; his “Scene in Paris” a protest against the sufferings of the people. He sought his models amongst the poor of the suburb, painted their ragged clothes and their rugged heads without idealisation. For him the aim of art was not beauty, but the expression of truth—a truth, no doubt, which made political propaganda. It was Jeanron’s purpose to have a socialistic influence. One sees it in his blacksmiths and peasants, and in that picture “The Worker’s Rest” which in 1847 induced Thoré’s utterance: “It is a melancholy and barren landscape from the neighbourhood of Paris, a plebeian landscape which hardly seems to belong to itself, and which gives up all pretensions to beauty merely to be of service to man. Jeanron is always plebeian, even in his landscapes: he loves the plains which are never allowed to repose, on which there is always labour; there are no beautiful flowers in his fields, as there is no gold ornament on the rags of his beggars and labourers.”

And afterwards, during the early years of the reign of Louis Philippe, when the tendency became once more latent, the Revolution of February worked out what the Revolution of July had begun. Mediocre painters like Antigna became famous because they bewailed the sorrows of the “common man” in small and medium-sized pictures. Others began to display a greater interest in rustics, and to take them more seriously than they had done in earlier works. Adolphe Leleux made studies in Brittany, and discovered earnest episodes in the daily life of the peasant, which he rendered with great 182 actuality. And after sliding back into Romanticism, as he did with his Arragon smugglers, he enjoyed his chief success in 1849 with that picture at the Luxembourg to which he was incited by the sad aspect of the streets of Paris during the rising of 1848. The men who, driven by hunger and misery, fought upon the barricades may be found in Leleux’s “Mot d’Ordre.”

After the coup d’état of 1851 even Meissonier, till then exclusively a painter of rococo subjects, encroached on this province. In his picture of the barricades (2 December 1851) heaps of corpses are lying stretched out in postures which could not have been merely invented. The execution, too, has a nervous force which betrays that even so calculating a spirit as Meissonier was at one time moved and agitated. In his little smokers and scholars and waiting-men he is an adroit but cold-blooded painter: here he has really delivered himself of a modern epic. His “Barricade” (formerly in the Van Praet Collection) is the one thrilling note in the master’s work, which was elsewhere so quiet. Alexandre Antigna, originally an historical painter, turned from historical disasters to those which take place in the life of the lower strata of the people. A dwelling of a poor family is struck by lightning; poor people pack up their meagre goods with the haste of despair on the outbreak of fire; peasants seek refuge from a flood upon the roof of their little house; petty shopkeepers are driving with their wares across the country, when their nag drops down dead in the shafts; or an old crone, cowering at the street corner, receives the pence which her little daughter has earned by playing on the fiddle.

But the artist in whose works the philanthropic if sentimental humour of the epoch is specially reflected is that remarkable painter, made up of contradictions, Octave Tassaert. Borrowing at one and the same time from Greuze, Fragonard, and Prudhon, he painted subjects mythological, ribald, and religious, boudoir pictures, and scenes of human misery. Tassaert was a Fleming, a grandson of that Tassaert who educated Gottfried Schadow and died as director of the Berlin Academy in 1788. His name has been for the most part forgotten; it awakes only a dim recollection in those who see “The Unhappy Family” in the Luxembourg Musée. But forty years ago he was amongst the most advanced of his day, and enjoyed the respect of men like Delacroix, Rousseau, Troyon, and Diaz. He took Chardin and Greuze as his models, and is a real master in talent. He was the poet of the suburbs, who spoke in tender complaining tones of the hopes and sufferings of humble people. 183 He painted the elegy of wretchedness: suicide in narrow garrets, sick children, orphans freezing in the snow, seduced and more or less repentant maidens—a sad train. He was called the Correggio of the attic, the Prudhon of the suburbs. His labours are confined to eleven years, from 1846 to 1857. After that he sent no more to the Salon and sulkily withdrew from artistic life. He had no wish ever to see his pictures again, and sold them—forty-four altogether—to a dealer for two thousand francs and a cask of wine. With a glass in his hand he forgot his misanthropy. He lived almost unknown in a little house in the suburbs with a nightingale, a dog, and a little shop-girl for his sole companions.

But his nightingale died, and then the dog, who should have followed at his funeral. He could not survive the blow. He broke his palette, threw his colours into the fire, lit a pan of charcoal that he might die like “The Unhappy Family,” and was found suffocated on the following day. On a scrap of paper he had written, without regard to metre or orthography, a few verses to his nightingale and his dog.

There is much that is magniloquent and sentimental in Tassaert’s pictures. His poor women perish with the big eyes of the heroines of Ary Scheffer. Nevertheless he belongs to the advance line of modern art, and suffered shipwreck merely because he gave the signal too early. The sad reality prevails in his work. Merciless as a surgeon operating on a diseased limb, he made a dissecting-room of his art, which is often brutal where his brush probes the deepest wounds of civilisation. There is nothing in his pictures but wretched broken furniture, stitched rags, and pale faces in which toil and hunger have ploughed their terrible furrows. He painted the degeneration of man perishing from lack of light and air. Himself a Fleming, he has found his greatest follower in another Netherlander, Charles de Groux, whose sombre pessimism dominates modern Belgian art.

In Germany, where the socialistic writings of the French and English had a wide circulation, Gisbert Flüggen, in Munich known as the German 184 Wilkie, was perhaps the first who as early as the forties went somewhat further than the humorous representation of rustics, and entered into a certain relation with the social ideas of his age in such pictures as “The Interrupted Marriage Contract,” “The Unlucky Gamester,” “The Mésalliance,” “Decision of the Suit,” “The Disappointed Legacy Hunter,” “The Execution for Rent,” and the like. Under his influence Danhauser in Vienna deserted whimsicalities for the representation of social conflicts in middle-class life. To say nothing of his “Gormandizer,” he did this in “The Opening of the Will,” where in a somewhat obtrusive manner the rich relations of the deceased are grouped to the right and the poor relations to the left, the former rubicund, sleek, and insolent, the latter pale, spare, and needily clad. An estimable priest is reading the last testament, and informs the poor relatives with a benevolent smile that the inheritance is theirs, whereon the rich give way to transports of rage.

Yet more clearly, although similarly transposed into a sentimental key, is the mood of the time just previous to 1848, reflected in the works of Carl Hübner of Düsseldorf. Ernest Wilkomm in the beginning of the forties had represented in his sensational genre pictures, particularly in the “White Slaves,” the contrast between afflicted serfs and cruel landlords, between rich manufacturers and famishing artisans; Robert Prutz had written his Engelchen, in which he had announced the ruin of independent handicraft by the modern industrial system. Soon afterwards the famine among the Silesian weavers, the intelligence of which in 1844 flew through all Germany, set numbers of people reflecting on the social question. Freiligrath made it the subject of his verses, Aus dem Schlesischen Gebirge, the song of the poor weaver’s child who calls on Rübezahl—one of his most popular poems. And yet more decisively does the social and revolutionary temper of the age find an echo in Heine’s Webern, composed in 1844. Even Geibel was impelled to his poem Mene Tekel by the spread of the news, though it stands in curious opposition to his manner of writing elsewhere. Carl Hübner therefore was 185 acting very seasonably when he likewise treated the distress of the Silesian weavers in his first picture of 1845.

Hübner knew the life of the poor and the heavy-laden; his feelings were with them, and he expressed what he felt. This gives him a position above and apart from the rest in the insipidly smiling school of Düsseldorf, and sets his name at the beginning of a new chapter in the history of German genre painting. His next picture, “The Game Laws,” sprang from an occasion which was quite as historical: a gamekeeper had shot a poacher. In 1846 followed “The Emigrants,” “The Execution for Rent” in 1847, and in 1848 “Benevolence in the Cottage of the Poor.” These were works in which he continued to complain of the misery of the working classes, and the contrast between ostentatious wealth and helpless wretchedness, and to preach the crusade for liberty and human rights. In opposition to the usual idyllic representations, he spoke openly for the first time of the material weight oppressing large classes of men. Undoubtedly, however, the artistic powers of the painter corresponded but little to the good intentions of the philanthropist.

In 1853 even the historical painter Piloty entered this path in one of his earliest pictures, “The Nurse”: the picture represents a peasant girl in service as a nurse in the town, with her charge on her arm, entering the dirty house of an old woman with whom she is boarding her own child. The rich child, already dressed out like a little lady, is exuberant in health, whilst her own is languishing in a dark and cold room without food or warm clothing.

In Belgium Eugène de Block first took up these lines. The artistic development of his character is particularly interesting, inasmuch as he went through various transformations. First he had come forward in 1836 with the representation of a brawl amongst peasants, a picture which contrasted with the tameness of contemporary painting by a native power suggestive of Brouwer. Then, 186 following the example of Madou and Braekeleer, he occupied himself for a long time with quips and jests. At a time when every one had a type to which he remained true as long as he lived, Block chose poachers and game-keepers, and represented their mutual cunning, now enveloping them, after the example of Braekeleer, in the golden light and brown shadows of Ostade, now throwing over them a tinge of Gallait’s cardinal red. But this forced humour did not satisfy him long; he let comicalities alone, and became the serious observer of the people. A tender compassion for the poor may be noticed in his works, though without doubt it often turns to a tearful sentimentalism. He was an apostle of humanity who thundered against pauperism and set himself up as spokesman on the social question; a tribune of the people, who by his actions confirmed his reputation as a democratic painter. This it is which places him near that other socialistic agitator who in those days was filling Brussels with his fame.

It was in 1835 that a young man wrote to one of his relatives from Italy the proud words: “I will measure my strength with Rubens and Michael Angelo.”

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Having gained the Prix de Rome, he was enabled to make a sojourn in the Eternal City. He was thinking of his return. He was possessed of a lofty ambition, and dreamt of rivalling the fame of the old masters. As a victor he made an entry into his native land, into the good town of Dinant, which received him like a mother. He was accompanied by a huge roll of canvas like a declaration of war. But he needed a larger battle-field for his plans. “I imagine,” said he, “that the universe has its eyes upon me.” So he went on to Paris with his “Patroclus” and a few other pictures. No less than six thousand artists had seen the work in Rome: a prince of art, Thorwaldsen, 188 had said when he beheld it: “This young man is a giant.” And the young man was himself of that opinion. With the gait of a conqueror he entered Paris, in the belief that artists would line the streets to receive him. But when the portals of the Salon of 1839 were opened he did not see his picture there. It was skied over a door, and no one noticed it. Théophile Gautier, Gustave Planché, and Bürger-Thoré wrote their articles without even mentioning it with one word of praise or blame.

For one moment he thought of exhibiting it out of doors in front of the Louvre, of calling together a popular assembly and summoning all France to decide. But an application to the minister was met with a refusal, and he returned to Brussels hanging his head. There he puffed his masterpiece, “The Fight round the Body of Patroclus,” in magniloquent phrases upon huge placards. A poet exclaimed, “Hats off: here is a new Homer.” The Moniteur gave him a couple of articles. But when the Exhibition came, artists were again unable to know what to make of it. The majority were of an opinion that Michael Angelo was brutally parodied by these swollen muscles and distorted limbs. And no earthquake disturbed the studios, as the painter had expected. However, he was awarded a bronze medal and thanked in an honest citizen-like fashion “for the distinguished talent which he had displayed.” Then his whole pride revolted. He circulated caricatures and cried out: “This medal will be an eternal blot on the century.” Then he published in the Charivari an open letter to the king. “Michael Angelo,” he wrote, “never allowed himself to pass final judgment on the works of contemporary artists, and so His Majesty, who hardly understands as much about art as Michael Angelo, would do well not to decide on the worth of modern pictures after a passing glance.”

Antoine Wiertz, the son of a gendarme who had once been a soldier of the great Republic, was born in Dinant in 1806. By his mother he was a Walloon, and he had German blood in him through his father, whose family had originally come from Saxony. German moral philosophy and treatises on education had formed the reading of his youthful years. He had not to complain of want of assistance. At the declaration of Belgian independence he was five-and-twenty; so his maturity fell in the proud epoch when the young nation laid out everything to add artistic to political splendour. Even as a boy, their only child, he was idolised by his parents, the old gendarme and the honest charwoman. His first attempts were regarded by his relations as marvels. The neighbours went into raptures over a frog he had modelled, “which looked just as if it were alive.” The landlord of a tavern ordered a signboard from him, and when it was finished the whole population stood before it in admiration. A certain Herr Maibe, who was artistically inclined, had his attention directed to the young genius, undertook all the expenses of his education, and sent him to the Antwerp Academy. There he obtained a government scholarship, and gained in 1832 the Prix de Rome. From the first he was quite clear as to his own importance.

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Even as a pupil at the Antwerp Academy he wrote in a letter to his father contemptuously of his fellow-students’ reverence for the old masters. “They imagine,” said he, “that the old masters are invincible gods, and not men whom genius may surpass.” And instead of admonishing him to be modest, his father answered with pride: “Be a model to the youth of the future, so that in later centuries young painters may say, ‘I will raise myself to fame as the great Wiertz did in Belgium.’” Such dangerous flattery would have affected stronger characters. It needed only the Italian journey to send him altogether astray. Michael Angelo made him giddy, as had been the case with Cornelius, Chenavard, and many another. With all the ambition of a self-taught man he held every touch of his brush to be important, and was indignant if others refused to think the same. After his failures in Paris and Brussels he began to find high treason in every criticism, and started a discussion on “the pernicious influence of journalism upon art and literature.” We find him saying: “If any one writes ill of me when I am dead, I will rise from the grave to defend myself.”

In his hatred of criticism he resolved to exhibit no more, lived a miserable existence till his death in 1865, and painted hasty and careless portraits, pour 190 la soupe, when he was in pressing need of money. These brought him at first from three to four hundred, and later a thousand francs. He indulged in colossal sketches, for the completion of which the State built him in 1850 a tremendous studio, the present Musée Wiertz. It stands a few hundred paces from the Luxembourg station, to the extreme north of the town, in a beautiful though rather neglected little park, a white building with a pillared portico and a broad perron leading up to it. Here he sat in a fantastically gorgeous costume, for ever wearing his great Rubens hat. Philanthropic lectures on this world and the next, on the well-being of the people and the diseases of modern civilisation, were the fruits of his activity. Whoever loves painting for painting’s sake need never visit the museum.

There there are battles, conflagrations, floods, and earthquakes; heaven and earth are in commotion. Giants hurl rocks at one another, and try, like Jupiter, to shake the earth with their frown. All of them delight in force, and bring their muscles into play like athletes. But the painter himself is no athlete, no giant as Thorwaldsen called him, and no genius as he fancied himself to be. Le singe des génies, he conceived the notion of “great art” purely in its relation to space, and believed himself greater than the greatest because his canvases were of greater dimensions. When the ministry thought of making him Director of the Antwerp Academy, after the departure of Wappers, he wrote the following characteristic sentences: “I gather from the newspapers that I may be offered the place of Wappers.” If in the moment when the profound philosopher is pondering over sublime ideas people were to say to him, “Will you teach us the A, B, C? I believe that he whose dwelling-place is in the clouds would fall straight from heaven to earth.” Living in an atmosphere of flattery at home, and overpowered by the incense which was there offered to his genius, he could not set himself free from the fixed idea of competing with Michael Angelo and Rubens. Below his picture of “The Childhood of Mary” he placed the words: “Counterpart to the picture by Rubens in Antwerp treating the same subject.” He offered his “Triumph of Christ” to the cathedral there under the condition of its being hung beside Rubens’ “Descent from the Cross.” “The Rising up of Hell” he wished to exhibit of an evening in the theatre when it was opened for a performance. During the waits the audience were to contemplate the picture while a choir sang with orchestral accompaniment. But all these offers were declined with thanks.

Such failures make men pessimists; but it was through them that Wiertz, after being an historical painter, became the child of his age. He began to hurl thunderbolts against the evils of modern civilisation. He preaches and lashes and curses and suffers. The forms of which he makes use are borrowed from the old masters. The man of Michael Angelo, with his athletic build, his gigantic muscles, his nude body, the man of the Renaissance and not the man of the nineteenth century, strides through his works; it is only in the subject-matter of his pictures that the modern spirit has broken through 191 the old formula. All the questions which have been thrown out by the philosophy and civilisation of the nineteenth century are reflected as vast problems in his vast pictures. He fashions his brush into a weapon with which he fights for the disinherited, for the pariahs, for the people. He is bent on being the painter of democracy—a great danger for art.

He agitates in an impassioned way against the horrors of war. His picture “Food for Powder” begins this crusade. A cannon is lying idle on the wall of a fortress, and around this slumbering iron monster children are playing at soldiers, with no suspicion that their sport will soon be turned into bitter earnest, and that in war they will themselves become food for this demon. In another picture, “The civilisation of the Nineteenth Century,” soldiers intoxicated with blood and victory have broken into a chamber by night and are stabbing a mother with her child. A third, “The Last Cannon Shot,” hints dimly at the future pacification of the world. “A Scene in Hell,” however, is the chief of the effusions directed against war. The Emperor Napoleon in his grey coat and his historical three-cornered hat is languishing in hell; wavering flames envelop him as with a flowing purple mantle, and an innumerable multitude of mothers and sisters, wives and betrothed maidens, children and fathers, from whom he has taken their dearest are pressing 192 round him. Fists are clenched against him, and screams issue from toothless, raging mouths. He, on the other hand, with his arms crossed on his breast, and his haughty visage stern and gloomy, stands motionless, looking fixedly with satanic eyes upon the thousands whose happiness he has destroyed.

In his “Thoughts and Visions of a Decapitated Head”, Wiertz, moved by Victor Hugo’s Le dernier jour d’un condamné, makes capital punishment a subject of more lengthy disquisition. The picture, which is made up of three parts, is supposed to represent the feelings of a man, who has been guillotined, during the first three minutes after execution. The border of the picture contains a complete dissertation: “The man who has suffered execution sees his body dried up and in corruption in a dark corner; and sees also, what it is only given to spirits of another world to perceive, the secrets of the transmutation of matter. He sees all the gases which have formed his body, and its sulphurous, earthy, and ammoniacal elements, detach themselves from its decaying flesh and serve for the structure of other living beings.... When that abominable instrument the guillotine is one day actually abolished, may God be praised,” and so on.

Beside this painted plea against capital punishment hangs “The Burnt Child,” as an argument in favour of crêches. A poor working woman has for one moment left her garret. Meanwhile a fire has broken out, and she returns to find the charred body of her boy. In the picture “Hunger, Madness, and Crime” he treats of human misery in general, and touches on the question of the rearing of illegitimate children. There is a young girl forced to live on the carrots which a rich man throws into the gutter. In consequence of a notification to pay taxes she goes out of her mind, and with hellish laughter cuts 193 to pieces the baby who has brought her to ruin. Cremation is recommended in the picture “Buried too soon”: there is a vault, and in it a coffin, the lid of which has been burst open from the inside; through the cleft may be seen a clenched hand, and in the darkness of the coffin the horror-stricken countenance of one who is piteously crying for help.

In the “Novel Reader” he endeavours to show the baneful influence of vicious reading upon the imagination of a girl. She is lying naked in bed, with loosened hair and a book in her hand; her eyes are reddened with hysterical tears, and an evil spirit is laying a new book on the couch, Antonine, by Alexandre Dumas Fils. “The Retort of a Belgian Lady”—an anticipation of Neid—glorifies homicide committed in the defence of honour. A Dutch officer having taken liberties with a Belgian woman, she blows out his brains with a pistol. In “The Suicide” the fragments of a skull may be seen flying in all directions. How the young man who has just destroyed himself came to this pass may be gathered from the book entitled Materialism, which lies on his table. And thus he goes on, though the spectator feels less and less inclined to take any serious interest in these lectures. For although the intentions of Wiertz had now and then a touch of the sublime, he was neither clear as to the limits of what could be represented nor did he possess the capacity of expressing what he wished in artistic forms. Like many a German painter of those years, he was a philosopher of the brush, a scholar in disguise, who wrote out his thoughts in paint instead of ink.

Wiertz made painting a vehicle for more than it can render as painting: with him it begins to dogmatise; it is a book, and it awakens a regret that this rich mind was lost to authorship. There he might, perhaps, have done much that was useful towards solving the social and philosophical questions of the day; as he is, he has nothing to offer the understanding, and only succeeds in offending the eye. A human brain with both great and trivial ideas lays itself bare. But, like Cornelius, from the mere fulness of his ideas he was unable to give them artistic expression. He groped from Michael Angelo to Rubens, and from Raphael to Ary Scheffer, without realising that the artistic utterance of all these masters had been an individual gift. The career of Wiertz is an interesting psychological case. He was an abnormal phenomenon, and he cannot be passed over in the history of art, because he was one of the first who treated subjects from modern life in large pictures. Never before had a genuinely artistic age brought forth such a monster, yet it is impossible to ignore him, or deny that he claims a certain degree of importance in the art history of the past century.

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CHAPTER XXII

THE VILLAGE TALE

During the decade following the year 1848 genre painting in Germany threw off the shackles of the anecdotic style, and continued a development similar to that of history, which, in the same country, flourished long after it was moribund elsewhere. After the elder artists, who showed so much zeal in producing perfectly ineffective little pictures, executed with incredible pains and a desperate veracity of detail, there followed, from 1850, a generation who were technically better equipped. They no longer confined themselves to making tentative efforts in the manner of the old masters, but either borrowed their lights directly from the historical painters in Paris, or were indirectly made familiar with the results of French technique through Piloty. Subjects of greater refinement were united with a treatment of colour which was less offensive.

The childlike innocence which had given pleasure in Meyerheim and Waldmüller was now thought to be too childlike by far. The merriment which radiated from the pictures of Schroedter or Enhuber found no echo amidst a generation which was tired of such cheap humour: the works of Carl Hübner were put aside as lachrymose and sentimental efforts. When the world had issued from the period of Romanticism there was no temptation to be funny over modern life nor to make socialistic propaganda; for after the Revolution of 1848 people had become reconciled to the changed order of affairs and to life as it actually was—its cares and its worries, its mistakes and its sins. It was the time when Berthold Auerbach’s village tales ran through so many editions; and, hand in hand with these literary productions, painting also set itself to tell little stories from the life of sundry classes of the people, amongst which rustics were always the most preferable from their picturesqueness of costume.

At the head of this group of artists stands Louis Knaus, and if it is difficult to hymn his praises at the present day, that is chiefly because Knaus mostly drew upon that sarcastic and ironical characteristic which is such an unpleasant moral note in the pictures of Hogarth, Schroedter, and Madou. The figures of the old Dutch masters behave as if the glance of no stranger were resting upon them: it is possible to share their joys and sorrows, which are not merely acted. We feel at our ease with them because they regard us as one of themselves. In Knaus there is always an artificial bond between the figures and 195 the frequenters of the exhibition. They plunge into the greatest extravagances to excite attention, tickle the spectator to make him laugh, or cry out to move him to tears. With the exception of Wilkie, no genre painter has explained his purpose more obtrusively or in greater detail. Even when he paints a portrait, by way of variation, he stands behind with a pointer to explain it. On this account the portraits of Mommsen and Helmholtz in the Berlin National Gallery are made too official. Each of them is visibly conscious that he is being painted for the National Gallery, and by emphasis and the accumulation of external characteristics Knaus took the greatest pains to lift these personalities into types of the nineteenth-century scholar.

Since popular opinion is wont to represent the philologist as one careless of outward appearance, and the investigator of natural philosophy as an elegant man of the world,—Mommsen must wear boots which have seen much service, and those of Helmholtz must be of polished leather; the shirt of the one must be genially rumpled, and that of the other must fit him to perfection. By such obvious characterisation the Sunday public was satisfied, but those who were represented were really deprived of character. It is not to be supposed that in Mommsen’s room the manuscripts of all his principal works would lie so openly upon the writing-table and beneath it, so that every one might see them: it is not probable that his famous white locks would flutter so as he sat at the writing-table. Even the momentary gesture of the hand has in both pictures something obtrusively demonstrative. “Behold, with this pen I have written the history of Rome,” says Mommsen. “Behold, there is the famous ophthalmometer which I invented,” says Helmholtz.

But as a genre painter Knaus has fallen still more often into such intolerable stage gesticulation. The picture “His Highness upon his Travels” is usually mentioned as that in which he reached his zenith in characterisation. Yet is not this characterisation in the highest degree exaggerated? Is not the expression apportioned to every figure, like parts to a theatrical company, and does not the result seem to be strained beyond all measure? Just look at the children, see how each plays a part to catch your eye. A little girl is leaning shyly on her elder sister, who has bashfully thrust her finger into her mouth: some are looking on with rustic simplicity, others 196 with attention: a child smaller than the others is puckering up its face and crying miserably. The prince, in whose honour the children are drawn up, passes the group with complete indifference, while his companion regards “the people” haughtily through his eyeglass. The schoolmaster bows low, in the hope that his salary may be raised, whilst the stupid churchwarden looks towards the prince with a jovial smile, as though he were awaiting his colleague from the neighbouring village. Of course, they are all very intelligible types; but they are no more than types. For the painter the mere accident of the moment is the source of all life. Would that six-year-old peasant child who stands with the greatest dignity in Knaus’s picture as “The Village Prince” have ever stood in that fashion, with a flower between his teeth and his legs thrust apart, unless he had been carefully taught this self-conscious pose by the painter himself? So that there may not be the slightest doubt as to which of the shoemaker’s apprentices is winning and which is losing, one of them has to have a knowing smirk, whilst the other is looking helplessly at his cards. And how that little Maccabee is acting to the public in “The First Profit!” The old man in threadbare clothes, who stands in an ante-chamber rubbing his hands in the picture “I can Wait”; the frightened little girl who sees her bit of bread-and-butter imperilled by geese in “In Great Distress,”—they have all the same deliberate comicality, they are all treated with the same palpable carefulness, the same 197 pointed and impertinently satirical sharpness. Even in “The Funeral” he is not deserted by the humorous proclivity of the anecdotist, and the schoolmaster has to brandish the bâton with which he is conducting the choir of boys and girls as comically as possible. Knaus uses too many italics, and underlines as if he expected his public to be very dull of understanding. In this way he appeals to simple-minded people, and irritates those of more delicate taste. The peasant sits in his pictures like a model; he knows that he must keep quiet, and neither alter his pose nor his grimace, because otherwise Knaus will be angry. All his pictures show signs of the superior and celebrated city gentleman, who has only gone into the country to interest himself in the study of civilisation: there he hunts after effectively comical features, and, having arranged his little world in tableaux vivants, he coolly surrenders it to the derision of the cultivated spectator.

But such a judgment, which seems like a condemnation, could not be maintained from the historical standpoint. Germany could not forget 198 Knaus, if it were only for the fact that in the fifties he sided with those who first spread the unusual opinion that painting was incomprehensible without sound ability in the matter of colour. He was not content, like the elder generation, to arrange the individual characters in his pictures in well-disposed groups. He took care to make his works faultless in colouring, so that in the fifties he not only roused the enthusiasm of the great public by his “poetic invention,” but made even the Parisian painters enthusiastic by his easy mastery of technique.

To the following effect wrote Edmond About in 1855: “I do not know whether Herr Knaus has long nails; but even if they were as long as those of Mephistopheles, I should still say that he was an artist to his fingers’ ends. His pictures please the Sunday public and the Friday public, the critics, the bourgeois, and (God forgive me!) the painters. What is seductive to the great multitude is the clearly expressed dramatic idea, while artists and connoisseurs are won by his knowledge and thorough ability. Herr Knaus has the capacity of satisfying every one. His pictures attract the most incompetent eyes, because they tell pleasant anecdotes; but they likewise fascinate the most jaded by perfect execution of detail. The whole talent of Germany is contained in the person of Herr Knaus. So Germany lives in the Rue de l’Arcade in Paris.”

In the fifties all the technical ability which was to be gained from the study of the old Dutch masters and from constant commerce with the modern French reached its highest point in Knaus. Even in his youth the great Netherlandish painters, Ostade, Brouwer, and Teniers, must have had more effect upon him than his teachers, Sohn and Schadow, since his very first pictures, “The Peasants’ Dance” of 1850 and “The Card Sharpers” of 1850, had little in common with the Düsseldorf school, and therefore so much the more with the Netherlandish chiaroscuro. “The Card Sharpers” is precisely like an Ostade modernised. By his migration to Paris in 1852 he sought to acquire the utmost perfection of finish; and when he returned home, after a sojourn of eight years, he had at his command such a sense for effect and fine harmony of tone, such a knowledge of colour, and such a disciplined and refined taste, that his works indicate an immeasurable advance on the motley harshness of his predecessors. His “Golden Wedding” of 1858—perhaps his finest picture—had nothing of the antiquated technique of the older type of Düsseldorf pictures of peasant life; technically it stood on a level with the works of the French.

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And Knaus has remained the same ever since: a separate personality which belongs to history. He painted peasant pictures of tragic import and rustic gaiety; he recognised a number of graceful traits in child-life, and, having seen a great deal of the world, he made a transition, after he had settled in Berlin, from the character picture of the Black Forest to such as may be painted from the life of cities. He even ventured to touch on religious subjects, and taught the world the limitations of his talent by his “Holy Families,” composed out of reminiscences of all times and all schools, and by his “Daniel in the Lions’ Den.” Knaus is whole-heartedly a genre painter; though that, indeed, is what he has in common with many other people. But thirty years ago he had a genius for colour amid a crowd of narrative and character painters, and this makes him unique. He is a man whose significance does not merely lie in his talent for narrative, but one who did much for German art. It may be said that in giving the genre picture unsuspected subtleties of colour he helped German art to pass from mere genre painting to painting pure and simple. In this sense he filled an artistic mission, and won for himself in the history of modern painting a firm and sure place, which even the opponent of the illustrative vignette cannot take from him.

Vautier, who must always be named in the same breath with Knaus, is in truth the exact opposite of the Berlin master. He also is essentially a genre painter, and his pictures should not be merely seen but studied in detail; but where Knaus has merits Vautier is defective, and where Knaus is jarring Vautier has merits. In technique he cannot boast of similar qualities. He is always merely a draughtsman who tints, but has never been a colourist. As a painter he has less value, but as a genre painter he is more sympathetic. In the pictures of Knaus one is annoyed by the deliberate smirk, by his exaggerated 202 and heartlessly frigid observation. Vautier gives pleasure by characterisation, more delicately reserved in its adjustment of means, and profound as it is simple, by his wealth of individual motives and their charm, and by the sensitiveness with which he renders the feelings and relationship of his figures. A naïve, good-humoured, and amiable temperament is betrayed in his works. He is genially idyllic where Knaus creates a pungently satirical effect, and a glance at the portraits of the two men explains this difference.

Knaus with his puckered forehead, and his searching look shooting from under heavy brows, is like a judge or a public prosecutor. Vautier, with his thoughtful blue eyes, resembles a prosperous banker with a turn for idealism, or a writer of village tales à la Berthold Auerbach. Knaus worried himself over many things, brooded much and made many experiments; Vautier was content with the acquisition of a plain and simple method of painting, which appeared to him a perfectly sufficient medium for the expression of that which he had realised with profound emotion. The one is a reflective and the other a dreamy nature. Vautier was a man of a happy temperament, one with whom the world went well from his youth upwards, who enjoyed an existence free from care, and who had accustomed himself as a painter to see the world in a rosy light. There is something sound and pure in his characters, in his pictures something peaceful and cordial; it does not, indeed, make his paltry pedantic style of painting any the better, but from the human standpoint it touches one sympathetically. His countrymen may be ashamed of Vautier as a painter when they come across him amongst aliens in foreign exhibitions, but they rejoice in him none the less as a genre painter. It is as if they had been met by the quiet, faithful gaze of a German eye amid the fiery glances of the Latin nations. It is as if they suddenly heard a simple German song, rendered without training, and yet with a great deal of feeling. A generation ago Knaus could exhibit everywhere as a painter; as such Vautier was only possible in Germany during the sixties. But in Knaus it is impossible to get rid of the impress of 203 the Berlin professor, while from Vautier’s pictures there smiles the kindly sentiment of German home-life. Vautier’s world, no doubt, is as one-sided as that of old Meyerheim. His talkative Paul Prys, his brides with their modest shyness, his smart young fellows throwing amorous glances, his proud fathers, and his sorrow-stricken mothers are, it may be, types rather than beings breathing positive and individual life. Such a golden radiance of grace surrounds the pretty figures of his bare-footed rustic maidens as never pertained to those of the real world, but belongs rather to the shepherdess of a fairy tale who marries the prince. His figures must not be measured by the standard of realistic truth to nature. But they are the inhabitants of a dear, familiar world in which everything breathes of prettiness and lovable good-humour. It is almost touching to see with what purity and beauty life is reflected in Vautier’s mind.

How dainty are these brown-eyed Swabian peasant girls, how tender and sympathetic the women, and how clean and well-behaved the children! You could believe that Vautier mixed with his peasants like a friend or a benevolent god-father, that he delighted in their harmless pleasures, that he took part in their griefs and cares. In his pictures he does not give an account of his impressions with severity or any deliberate attempt to amuse, but with indulgence and cordiality. It is not his design to excite or to thrill, to waken comedy through whimsicalities or mournfulness by anything tragical. Life 204 reveals to him “merely pleasant things,” as it did to Goethe during his tour in Italy, and even in its tragedies only people “who bear the inevitable with dignity.” He never expressed boisterous grief: everything is subdued, and has that tenderness which is associated with the mere sound of his Christian name, Benjamin. Knaus has something of Menzel, Vautier of Memlinc: he has it even in the loving familiarity with which he penetrates minute detail. In their religious pictures the old German and Netherlandish masters painted everything, down to the lilies worked on the Virgin’s loom, or the dust lying on the old service-book; and this thoroughly German delight in still life, this complacent rendering of minutiæ, is found again in Vautier.

Men and their dwellings, animated nature and atmosphere, combine to make a pleasant world in his pictures. Vautier was one of the first to discover the magic of environment, the secret influence which unites a man to the soil from which he sprang, the thousand unknown, magnetic associations existing between outward things and the spirit, between the intuitions and the actions of man. The environment is not there like a stage scene in front of which the personages come and go; it lives and moves in the man himself. One feels at home in these snug and cosy rooms, where the Black Forest clock is ticking, where little, tasteless photographs look down from the wall with an honest, patriarchal air, where the floor is scoured so clean, and greasy green hats hang on splendid antlers. There is the great family bed with the flowered curtains, the massive immovable bench by the stove, the solid old table, around which young and old assemble at meal-times. There are the great cupboards for the treasures of the house, the prayer-book given to grandmother at her confirmation, the filigree ornaments, the glasses and coffee-cups, which are kept for show, not for daily use. Over the bedstead are hung the little pictures of saints painted on glass, and the consecrated tokens. From the window one overlooks other appurtenances of the house; gaudy scarlet runners clamber in from the little garden, blossoming fruit-trees stand in its midst, and the gable of the well-filled barn rises above it. Everything has an air of peace and prosperity, the mood of a Sunday forenoon; one almost fancies that one can catch the chime of the distant church bells through the blissful stillness. But completeness of effect and pictorial harmony are not to be demanded: the illustrated paper is better suited to his style than the exhibition.

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The third member of the alliance is Franz Defregger, a man of splendid talent; of all the masters of the great Munich school of Piloty, he is at once the simplest and the healthiest. True it is, no doubt, that when posterity sifts and weighs his works, much of him, also, will be found too light. Defregger’s art has suffered from his fame and from the temptations of the picture market. Moreover, he had not Vautier’s fine sense of the limitations of his ability, but often represented things which he did not understand. He was less of a painter than any of the artists of Piloty’s school, and more completely tethered by the size of his picture. He could not go beyond a certain space of canvas without suffering for it; and he bound his talent on the bed of Procrustes when he attempted to paint Madonnas, or placed himself with his Hofer pictures in the rank of historical painters. But as a genre painter he stands beside Vautier, in the first line; and by these little genre pictures—the simpler and quieter the better—and some of his genially conceived and charming portrait studies, he will survive. Those are things which he understood and felt. He had himself lived amid the life he depicted, and so it was that what he depicted made such a powerful appeal to the heart.

The year 1869 made him known. The Munich Exhibition had in that year a picture on a subject from the history of the Hofer rising of 1809. It represented how the little son of Speckbacher, one of the Tyrolese leaders, had come after his father, armed with a musket; and at the side of an old forester he is entering the room in which Speckbacher is just holding a council of war. The father springs up angry at his disobedience, but also proud of the little fellow’s pluck. From this time Defregger’s art was almost entirely devoted to the Tyrolese people. To paint the smart lads and neat lasses of Tyrol in joy and sorrow, love and hate, at work and merry-making, at home or outside on the mountain pasture, in all their beauty, strength, and robust health, was the life-long task for which he more than any other man had been created. He had, over Knaus and most other painters of village tales, the enormous advantage of not standing personally outside or above the people, and not regarding them with the superficial curiosity of a tourist—for he belonged to them himself. Others, if ironically disposed, saw in the rustic the stupid, comic peasant; or, if inclined to sentimentalism, introduced into the rural world the moods and feelings of “society,” traits of drawing-room sensitiveness, the heavy air of the town. Models in national costume were grouped for pictures of Upper Bavarian rustic life. But Defregger, who up to the age of fifteen had kept his father’s cattle on the pastures of the Ederhof, had shared the joys 208 and sorrows of the peasantry long enough to know that they are neither comic nor sentimental people.

The roomy old farmhouse where he was born in 1835 lay isolated amid the wild mountains. He went about bare-footed and bare-headed, waded through deep snow when he made his way to school in winter, and wandered about amid the highland pastures with the flocks in summer. Milkmaids and wood-cutters, hunters and cowherds, were his only companions. At fifteen he was the head labourer of the estate, helped to thresh the corn, and worked on the arable land and in the stable and the barn like others. When he was twenty-three he lost his father and took over the farm himself: he was thus a man in the full sense of the word before his artistic calling was revealed to him. And this explains his qualities and defects. When he came to Piloty after the sale of his farm and his aimless sojourn in Innsbruck and Paris he was mature in mind; he was haunted by the impressions of his youth, and he wanted to represent the land and the people of Tyrol. But he was too old to become a good “painter.” On the other hand, he possessed the great advantage of knowing what he wanted. The heroes of history did not interest him; it was only the Tyrolese woodmen who persisted in his brain. He left Piloty’s studio almost as he had entered it—awkward, and painting heavily and laboriously, and but very little impressed by Piloty’s theatrical sentiment. His youth and his recollections were rooted in the life of the people; and with a faithful eye he caught earnest or cheerful phases of that life, and represented them simply and cordially: and if he had had the strength to offer a yet more effectual resistance to the prevalent ideal of beauty, there is no doubt that his stories would seem even more fresh and vigorous.

“The Dance” was the first picture which followed that of “Speckbacher,” and it was circulated through the world in thousands of reproductions. There are two delightful figures in it: the pretty milkmaid who looks around her, radiant with pleasure, and the wiry old Tyrolese who is lifting his foot, cased in a rough hobnail shoe, to dance to the Schuhplattler. At the same 209 time he painted “The Prize Horse” returning to his native village from the show decked and garlanded and greeted exultantly by old and young as the pride of the place. “The Last Summons” was again a scene from the Tyrolese popular rising of 1809. All who can still carry a rifle, a scythe, or a pitchfork have enrolled themselves beneath the banners, and are marching out to battle over the rough village street. The wives and children are looking earnestly at the departing figures, whilst a little old woman is pressing her husband’s hand. Everything was simply and genially rendered without sentimentality or emphasis, and the picture even makes an appeal by its colouring. As a sequel “The Return of the Victors” was produced in 1876: a troop of the Tyrolese levy is marching through its native mountain village, with a young peasant in advance, slightly wounded, and looking boldly round. Tyrolese banners are waving, and the fifes and drums and clarionet players bring up the rear. The faces of the men beam with the joy of victory, and women and children stand around to welcome those returning home. Joy, however, is harder to paint faithfully than sorrow. It is so easy to see that it has been artificially worked up from the model; nor is Defregger’s picture entirely innocent on this charge.

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“Andreas Hofer going to his Death” was his first concession to Piloty. Defregger had become professor at the Munich Academy, and was entered in the directory as “historical painter.” The figures were therefore painted life size; and in the grouping and the choice of the “psychic moment” the style aimed at “grand painting.” The result was the same emptiness which blusters through the historical pictures of the school of Delaroche, Gallait, and Piloty. The familiar stage effect and stilted passion has taken the place of simple and easy naturalism. Nor was he able to give life to the great figures of a large canvas as he had done in the smaller picture of the “Return of the Victors.” This is true of “The Peasant Muster” of 1883—which represented the Tyrolese, assembled in an arms manufactory, learning that the moment for striking had arrived—and of the last picture of the series, “Andreas Hofer receiving the Presents of the Emperor Francis in the Fortress of Innsbruck.” All the great Hofer pictures, which in earlier days were honoured as his best performances, have done less for his memory than for that of the sturdy hero. The genre picture was Defregger’s vocation. There lay his strength, and as soon as he left that province he renounced his fine qualities.

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And a holiday humour, a tendency to beautify what he saw, is spread over even his genre pictures. They make one suppose that there is always sunshine in the happy land of Tyrol, that all the people are chaste and beautiful, all the young fellows fine and handsome, all the girls smart, every household cleanly and well-ordered, all married folk and children honest and kind; whereas in reality these milk-maids and woodmen are far less romantic in their conduct; and so many a townsman who avoids contact with the living people goes into raptures over them as they are pictures. With Vautier he shares this one-sidedness as well as his defective colour. Almost all his pictures are hard, dry, and diffident in colouring, but, as with Vautier, the man atones for the painter. From Defregger one asks for no qualities of colour and no realistic Tyrolese, since he has rendered himself in his pictures, and gives one a glimpse into his own heart; and a healthy, genial, and kindly heart it is. His idealism is not born of laboriously acquired principles of beauty; it expresses the temperament of a painter—a temperament which unconsciously sees the people through a medium whereby they are glorified. A rosy glow obscures sadness, ugliness, wretchedness, and misery, and shows only strength and health, tenderness and beauty, fidelity and courage. He treasured sunny memories of the cheerful radiance which rested on his home in the hour of his return; he painted the joy which swelled in his own breast as he beheld again the rocks of his native country, heard once more the peaceful chime of its Sabbath bells. And this is what gives his works their human, 214 inward truth, little as they may be authentic documents as to the population of Tyrol.

Later this will be more impartially recognised than it possibly can be at present. The larger the school of any artist, the more it will make his art trivial; and thus for a time the originality of the master himself seems to be mere trifling. The Tyrolese were depreciated in the market by Defregger’s imitators; only too many have aped his painting of stiff leather breeches and woollen bodices, without putting inside them the vivid humanity which is so charming in a genuine Defregger. But his position in the history of art is not injured by this. He has done enough for his age; he has touched the hearts of many by his cheerful, fresh, and healthy art, and he would be certain of immortality had he thrown aside his brush altogether from the time when the progress of painting left him in the rear.

With Defregger, the head of the Tyrolese school, Gabl and Mathias Schmidt, standing at a measurable distance from him, may find a well-merited place. Mathias Schmidt, born in the Tyrolese Alps in the same year as Defregger, began with satirical representations of the local priesthood. A poor image-carver has arrived with his waggon at an inn, on the terrace of which are sitting a couple of well-fed ecclesiastics, and by them he is ironically called to account as he offers a crucifix for sale. A young priest, as an austere judge of morals, reproves a pair of lovers who are standing before him, or asks a young girl such insidious questions at the bridal examination that she lowers her eyes, blushing. His greatest picture was “The Emigration of the Zillerthal Protestants.” Amongst later works, without controversial tendencies, “The Hunter’s Greeting” and “The Lathered Parson” may be named. The latter is surprised by two pretty girls while shaving. To these may be added “The Parson’s Patch,” a picture of a robust housekeeper hastily mending a weak spot in the pastor’s inexpressibles just before service.

Shortly after Defregger had painted his picture of “Speckbacher,” Alois Gabl came forward with his “Haspinger preaching Revolt,” and followed it up by smaller pictures with a humorous touch, representing a levy of recruits in Tyrol, the dance at the inn interrupted by the entrance of the parson, magnates umpiring at the shooting butts, a bar with laughing girls, and the like.

In 1870, Eduard Kurzbauer, who died young, in his “Fugitives Overtaken” executed a work representing an entire class of painted illustrations. A young man who has eloped with a girl is discovered with her by her mother in a village inn. The old lady is looking reproachfully at her daughter, who is overwhelmed by shame and penitence; the young man is much moved, the old servant grave and respectful, the young landlady curious, and the postilion who has driven the eloping pair has a sly smirk. Elsewhere Kurzbauer, who is a fresh and lively anecdotist, painted principally episodes, arraying his figures in the peasant garb of the Black Forest: a rejected suitor takes a sad farewell of a perverse blonde who disdains his love; or the engagement of two lovers is hindered by the interference of the father.

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Hugo Kauffmann, the son of Hermann Kauffmann, planted himself in the interior of village taverns or in front of them, and made his dressed-up models figure as hunters, telling incredible tales, dancing to the fiddle, or quarrelling over cards.

Another North German, Wilhelm Riefstahl, showed how the peasants in Appenzell or Bregenz conduct themselves at mournful gatherings, at their devotions in the open air, and at All Souls’ Day Celebrations, and afterwards extended his artistic dominion over Rügen, Westphalia, and the Rhine country with true Mecklenburg thoroughness. He was a careful, conscientious worker, with a discontent at his own efforts in his composition, a certain ponderousness in his attempts at genre; but his diligently executed pictures—full of colour and painted in a peculiarly German manner—are highly prized in public galleries on account of their instructive soundness.

After the various classes of the German peasantry had been naturalised in the picture market by these narrative painters, Eduard Grützner, when religious controversy raged in the seventies, turned aside to discover drolleries in monastic life. This he did with the assistance of brown and yellowish white cowls, and the obese and copper-nosed models thereto pertaining. He depicts how the cellarer tastes a new wine, and the rest of the company await his verdict with anxiety; how the entire monastery is employed at the vintage, at the broaching of a wine cask or the brewing of the beer; how they tipple; how bored they are over their chess or their dice, their cards or their dominoes; how they whitewash old frescoes or search after forbidden books in the monastery library. This, according to Grützner, is the routine in which the life of monks revolves. At times amidst these figures appear foresters who tell of their adventures in the chase, or deliver hares at the cloister kitchen. And the more Grützner was forced year after year to make up for his decline as a colourist, by cramming his pictures with so-called humour, the greater was his success.

It was only long afterwards that genre painting in broad-cloth came into vogue by the side of this genre in peasant blouse and monastic cowl, and stories of the exchange and the manufactory by the side of village and monastic tales. Here Düsseldorf plays a part once more in the development of art. The neighbourhood of the great manufacturing towns on the Rhine could not but lead painters to these subjects. Ludwig Bokelmann, who began by painting tragical domestic scenes—card players, and smoking shop-boys, in the style of Knaus—made the pawnshop a theme for art in 1875, and dexterously crowded into his picture all the types which popular fancy brings into association with the conception: business-like indifference, poverty ashamed, fallen prosperity, bitter need, avarice, and the love of pleasure. In 1877, when the failure of the house of Spitzeder made a sensation in the papers, he painted his picture “The Savings Bank before the Announcement of Failure,” which 218 gave him another opportunity for ranging in front of the splendid building an assembly of deluded creditors of all classes, and of showing how they expressed their emotion according to temperament and education, by excited speeches, embittered countenances, gloomy resignation, or vivid gesticulation. Much attention was likewise excited by “The Arrest.” In this picture a woman was being watched for by a policeman, whilst the neighbours—male and female—loitered round with the requisite expression of horror, indignation, sympathy, or indifferent curiosity. The opening of a will, the last moments of an electioneering struggle, scenes in the entrance hall of a court of justice, the emigrants’ farewell, the gaming-table at Monte Carlo, and a village fire, were other newspaper episodes from the life of great towns which he rendered in paint.

His earlier associate in Düsseldorf, Ferdinand Brütt, after first painting rococo pictures, owed his finest successes to the Stock Exchange. It, too, had its types: the great patrician merchants and bankers of solid reputation, the jobbers, break-neck speculators, and decayed old stagers; and, as Brütt rendered these current figures in a very intelligible manner, his pictures excited a great deal of attention. Acquittals and condemnations, acts of mortgage, emigration agents, comic electors, and prison visits, as further episodes from the social, political, and commercial life of great towns, fill up the odd corners of his little local chronicle.

Thus the German genre painting ran approximately the same course as the English had done at the beginning of the century. At that time the kingdom of German art was not of this world. Classicism taught men to turn their eyes on the art of a past age. Art in Germany had progressed slowly, and at first with an uncertain and hesitating step, before it learnt that what blossoms here, and thrives and fades, should be the subject of its labours. Gradually it brought one sphere of reality after the other into its domain. Observation took the place of abstraction, and the discoverer that of the inventor. The painter went amongst his fellow-creatures, opened his eyes and his heart to share their fortunes and misfortunes, and to reproduce them in his own creation. He discovered the peculiarities of grades of life and professional classes. Every one of the beautiful German landscapes with its peasantry, every one of the monastic orders and every manufacturing town found its representative in genre painting. The country was mapped out. Each one took over his plot, which he superintended, conscientiously, like an ethnographical museum. And just as fifty years before, Germany had been fertilised by England, so it now gave in its turn the principles of genre painting to the powers of the second rank in art.

Even France was in some degree influenced. As if to indicate that Alsace would soon become German once more, after 1850 there appeared in that province certain painters who busied themselves with the narration of anecdote from rustic life quite in the manner of Knaus and Vautier.

Gustave Brion, the grand-nephew of Frederica of Sesenheim, settled in 219 the Vosges, and there gave intelligence of a little world whose life flowed by, without toil, in gentle, patriarchal quietude, interrupted only by marriage feasts, birthdays, and funeral solemnities. He appears to have been rather fond of melancholy and solemn subjects. His interiors, with their sturdy and honest people, bulky old furniture, and large green faïence stoves, which are so dear to him, are delightful in their familiar homeliness and their cordial Alsatian and German character, and recall Vautier; in fact, he might well be termed the French Vautier. He lives in them himself—the quiet old man, who in his last years occupied himself solely with the management of his garden and the culture of flowers, or sat by the hour in an easy-chair at the window telling stories to his old dog Putz. But pictorial unity of effect must be asked from him as little as from Vautier.

Charles Marchal, too, was no painter, but an anecdotist, with a bias towards the humorous or sentimental; and so very refined and superior was he that he saw none but pretty peasant girls, who might easily be mistaken for “young ladies,” if they exchanged their kerchiefs and bodices for a Parisian toilette. His chief picture was “The Hiring Fair” of 1864: pretty peasant girls are standing in a row along the street, bargaining with prospective masters before hiring themselves out.

The most famous of this group of artists is Jules Breton, who after various humorous and sentimental pieces placed himself in 1853 in the front rank of the French painters of rustics by his “Return of the Reapers” (Musée Luxembourg). His “Gleaners” in 1855, “Blessing the Fields” in 1857, and “The Erection of the Picture of Christ in the Churchyard” were pretty enough to please the public, and sufficiently sound in technique not to be a stumbling-block to artists. After 1861 he conceived an enthusiasm for sunsets, and was never weary of depicting the hour when the fair forms of peasant maidens stand gracefully out against the quiet golden horizon. Jules Breton wrote many poems, and a vein of poetry runs through his pictures. They tell of the sadness of the 220 land when the fields sleep dreamily beneath the shadows of the evening, touched by the last ray of the departing sun; but they tell of it in verses where the same rhymes are repeated with wearisome monotony. Breton is a charming and sympathetic figure, but he never quite conquered Classicism. His gleaners moving across the field in the evening twilight bear witness to an attentive, deliberate study of the works of Leopold Robert; and unfortunately much of the emphasis and classical style of Robert has been transmitted to Breton’s rustic maidens. They have most decidedly a lingering weakness for pose, and a sharp touch of the formula of the schools. There is an affectation of style in their garb, and their hands are those of bonnes who have never even handled a rake. Breton, as Millet said of him, paints girls who are too beautiful to remain in the country. His art is a well-bred, idyllic painting, with gilt edges; it is pleasing and full of delicate figures which are always elegant and always correct, but it is a little like flat lemonade; it is monotonous and only too carefully composed, destitute of all masculinity and seldom avoiding the reef of affectation.

Norway and Sweden were fructified from Düsseldorf immediately. When Tidemand had shown the way, the academy on the Rhine was the high school for all the sons of the North during the fifties. They set to translating Knaus and Vautier into Swedish and Norwegian, and caught the tone of their originals so exactly that they almost seem more Düsseldorfian than the Düsseldorfers themselves.

Karl D’Uncker, who arrived in 1851 and died in 1866, was led by the influence of Vautier to turn to little humorous incidents. After “The Two Deaf Friends” (two old people very hard of hearing, who are making comical efforts to understand each other) and “The Vagabond Musician and his Daughter before the Village Magistrates” there followed in 1858 the scene in “The Pawnshop,” which divided the honours of the year with Knaus’s “Golden Wedding.” He is an artistic compromise between Knaus and Schroedter, a keen observer and a humorous narrator, who takes special pleasure in the sharp opposition of characteristic figures. In his “Pawnshop” and his “Third Class Waiting Room” vagabonds mingle in the crowd beside honest people, beggars beside retired tradesmen, old procuresses beside pure and innocent girls, and heartless misers beside warm-hearted philanthropists. In these satirically humorous little comedies Swedish costume has been rightly left out of sight. This ethnographical element was the forte of Bengt Nordenberg, who as a copyist of Tidemand gradually became the Riefstahl of the North. His “Golden Wedding in Blekingen,” his “Bridal Procession,” his “Collection of Tithes,” “The Pietists,” and “The Promenade at the Well,” are of the same ethnographical fidelity and the same anecdotic dryness. He gets his best effects when he strikes an idyllic, childlike note or one of patriarchal geniality. The “Bridal Procession” received in the village with salvoes and music, “The Newly Married Pair” making a first visit to the parents of one of them, the picture of schoolboys playing tricks upon an old organist, 221 that of children mourning over a lamb slain by a wolf, are, in the style of the sixties, the works of a modest and amiable anecdotist, who had a fine sense for the peaceful, familiar side of everyday life in town and country.

In Wilhelm Wallander, as in Madou, noise and frolic and jest have the upper hand. His pictures are like saucy street ditties sung to a barrel-organ. The crowd at the market-place, the gossip in the spinning-room on a holiday evening, hop-pickings, dances, auctions on old estates, weddings, and the guard turning out, are his favourite scenes. Even when he came to Düsseldorf he was preceded by his fame as a jolly fellow and a clever draughtsman, and when he exhibited his “Market in Vingaker” he was greeted as another Teniers. His “Hop-Harvest” is like a waxwork show of teasing lads and laughing lasses. He was an incisive humorist and a spirited narrator, who under all circumstances was more inclined to jest than to touch idyllic and elegiac chords. In his pictures peasant girls never wander solitary across the country, for some lad who is passing by always has a joke to crack with them; it never happens that girls sit lonely by the hearth, there is always a lover to peep out laughing from behind the cupboard door.

Anders Koskull cultivated the genre picture of children in a more elegiac fashion; he has poor people sitting in the sun, or peasant families in the Sunday stillness laying wreaths upon the graves of their dear ones in the churchyard. Kilian Zoll, like Meyer of Bremen, painted very childish pictures of women spinning, children with cats, the joys of grandmother, and the like. Peter Eskilson turned to the representation of an idyllic age of honest yeomen, and 222 has given in his best known work, “A Game of Skittles in Faggens,” a pleasant picture from peasant life in the age of pig-tails. The object of August Jernberg’s study was the Westphalian peasant with his slouching hat, long white coat, flowered waistcoat, and large silver buttons. He was specially fond of painting dancing bears surrounded by a crowd of amused spectators, or annual fairs, for which a picturesque part of old Düsseldorf served as a background. Ferdinand Fagerlin has something attractive in his simplicity and good-humour. If he laughs, as he delights in doing, his laughter is cordial and kind-hearted, and if he touches an elegiac chord he can guard against sentimentalism. In contrast with D’Uncker and Wallander, who always hunted after character pieces, he devotes himself to expression with much feeling, and interprets it delicately even in its finer nuances. Henry Ritter, who influenced him powerfully in the beginning of his career, drew his attention to Holland, and Fagerlin’s quiet art harmonises with the Dutch phlegm. Within the four walls of his fishermen’s huts there are none but honest grey-beards and quiet women, active wives and busy maidens, vigorous sailors and lively peasant lads. But his pictures are sympathetic in spite of this one-sided optimism, since the sentiment is not too affected nor the anecdotic points too heavily underlined.

Amongst the Norwegians belonging to this group is V. Stoltenberg-Lerche, who with the aid of appropriate accessories adapted the interiors of cloisters and churches to genre pictures, such as “Tithe Day in the Cloister,” “The Cloister Library,” and “The Visit of a Cardinal to the Cloister,” and so forth. Hans Dahl, a juste-milieu between Tidemand and Emanuel Spitzer, carried the Düsseldorf village idyll down to the present time. “Knitting the Stocking” (girls knitting on the edge of a lake), “Feminine Attraction” (a lad with three peasant maidens who are dragging a boat to shore in spite of his resistance), “A Child of Nature” (a little girl engaged to sit as model to a painter amongst the mountains, and running away in alarm), “The Ladies’ Boarding School on the Ice,” “First Pay Duty,” etc., are some of the witty titles of his wares, which are scattered over Europe and America. Everything is sunny, everything laughs, the landscapes as well as the figures; and if Dahl had painted fifty years ago, his fair maidens with heavy blond plaits, well-bred carriage, and delicate hands that have never been disfigured by work, would undoubtedly have assured him no unimportant place beside old Meyerheim in the history of the development of the genre picture.

An offshoot from the Munich painting of rustics shot up into a vigorous sapling in Hungary. The process of refining the raw talents of the Magyar race had been perfected on the shores of the Isar, and the Hungarians showed gratitude to their masters by applying the principles of the Munich genre to Magyar subjects when they returned home. The Hungarian rooms of modern exhibitions have consequently a very local impress. Everything seems aboriginal, Magyar to the core, and purely national. Gipsies are playing the fiddle and Hungarian national songs ring forth, acrobats exhibit, slender 223 sons of Pusta sit in Hungarian village taverns over their tokay, muscular peasant lads jest with buxom, black-eyed girls, smart hussars parade their irresistible charms before lively damsels, and recruits endeavour to imbibe a potent enthusiasm for the business of war from the juice of the grape. Stiff peasants, limber gipsies, old people dancing, smart youths, the laughing faces of girls and bold fellows with flashing eyes, quarrelsome heroes quick with the knife, tipsy soldiers and swearing sergeants, drunkards, suffering women and poor orphans, pawnshops and vagabonds, legal suits, electioneering scenes, village tragedies and comic proposals, artful shop-boys, and criminals condemned to death, the gay confusion of fairs and the merry return from the harvest and the vintage, waxed moustaches, green and red caps and short pipes, tokay, Banat wheat, Alfoeld tobacco, and Sarkad cattle,—such are the elements worked up, as the occasion demanded, either into little tales or great and thrilling romances. And the names of the painters are as thoroughly Magyar as are the figures. Beside Ludwig Ebner, Paul Boehm, and Otto von Baditz, which have a German sound, one comes across such names as Koloman Déry, Julius Aggházi, Alexander Bihari, Ignaz Ruskovics, Johann Jankó, Tihamér Margitay, Paul Vagó, Arpad Fessty, Otto Koroknyai, D. Skuteczky, etc.

But setting aside the altered names and the altered locality and garb, the substance of these pictures is precisely the same as that of the Munich pictures of twenty years before: dance and play, maternal happiness, wooing, and the invitation to the wedding. Instead of the Schuhplattler they paint the Czarda, instead of the drover’s cottage the taverns of Pesth, instead of the blue Bavarian uniform the green of the Magyar Hussars. Their painting 224 is tokay adulterated with Isar water, or Isar water with a flavour of tokay. What seems national is at bottom only their antiquated standpoint. It is a typical development repeating itself in the nineteenth century through all branches of art; the sun rises in the West and sets in the East. Any other progress than that of the gradual expansion of subject-matter cannot be established in favour of the productions of all this genre painting. In colour and in substance they represent a phase of art which the leading countries of Europe had already left behind about the middle of the century, and which had to be overcome elsewhere, if painting was again to be what it had been in the old, good periods.

For as yet all these genre painters were the children of Hogarth; their productions were the outcome of the same spirit, plebeian and alien to art, which had come into painting when the middle classes began to hold a more important position in society. Yet their artistic significance ought not to be and cannot be contested. In an age which was prouder of its antiquarian knowledge than of its own achievements, which recognised the faithful imitation of the method of all past periods, the mere performance of a delicate task, as the highest aim of art, these genre painters were the first to portray the actual man of the nineteenth century; the first to desert museums and appeal to nature, and thus to lay the foundation of modern painting. They wandered in the country, looked at reality, sought to imitate it, and often displayed in their studies a marvellous directness of insight. But these vigorous initial studies were too modest to find favour and esteem with a public 225 as yet insufficiently educated for the appreciation of art. Whilst in England the exhibitions of the Royal Academy and in France those of the Paris Salon created, comparatively early, a certain ground for the comprehension of art, the genre painters of other countries worked up to and into the sixties without the appropriate social combinations. After 1828 the Art Unions began to usurp the position of that refined society which had formerly played the Mæcenas as the leading dictators of taste.

Albrecht Adam, who was chiefly responsible for the foundation of the Munich Union, has himself spoken clearly in his autobiography of the advantages and disadvantages of this step. “Often,” he writes, “often have I asked myself whether I have done good or not by this scheme, and to this hour I have not been able to make up my mind. The cultivation of art clearly received an entirely different bias from that which it had in earlier days. What was formerly done by artistic and judicious connoisseurs was now placed for the most part in the hands of the people. Like so much else in the world, that had its advantages, but in practice the shady side of the matter became very obvious.” The disadvantages were specially these: “the people” for a long time could only understand such paintings as represented a story in a broad and easy fashion; paintings which in the narrative cohesion of the subject represented might be read off at a glance, since the mere art of reading had been learnt at school, rather than those which deserved and required careful study. The demand for anecdotic subject was only waived in the case of ethnographical painting, in Italian and Oriental genre; for here the singular types, pictorial costumes, and peculiar customs of foreign countries were in themselves enough to provoke curiosity. What was prized in the picture was merely something external, the subject of representation, not the representation 226 itself, the matter and not the manner, that which concerned the theme, that which fell entirely beyond the province of art. The illustrated periodicals which had been making their appearance since the forties gave a further impetus to this phase of taste. The more inducement there was to guess charades, the more injury was done to the sensuous enjoyment of art; for the accompanying text of the author merely translated the pictures back into their natural element. Painters, however, were not unwilling to reconcile themselves to the circumstances, because, as a result of their technical insufficiency, they were forced, on their side, to try to lend their pictures the adjunct of superficial interest by anecdotic additions. Literary humour had to serve the purpose of pictorial humour, and the talent of the narrator was necessary to make up for their inadequate artistic qualities. As the historical painters conveyed the knowledge of history in a popular style, the genre painters set up as agreeable tattlers, excellent anecdotists: they were in turn droll, meditative, sentimental, and pathetic, but they were not painters.

And painters, under these conditions, they could not possibly become. For though it is often urged in older books on the history of art that modern genre painting far outstripped the old Dutch genre in incisiveness of characterisation, depth of psychological conception, and opulence of invention, these merits are bought at the expense of all pictorial harmony. In the days of Rembrandt the Dutch were painters to their fingers’ ends, and they were able to be so because they appealed to a public whose taste was adequately trained to take a refined pleasure in the contemplation of works of art which had sterling merits of colour. Mieris painted the voluptuous ruffling of silken stuffs; Van der Meer, the mild light stealing through little windows into quiet chambers, and playing upon burnished vessels of copper and pewter, on majolica dishes and silver chattels, on chests and coverings; De Hoogh, the sunbeam streaming like a golden shaft of dust from some bright lateral space into a darker ante-chamber. 227 Each one set before himself different problems, and each ran through an artistic course of development.

The more recent masters are mature from their first appearance; the Hungarians paint exactly like the Swedes and the Germans, and their pictures have ideas for the theme, but never such as are purely artistic. Like simple woodland birds, they sing melodies which are, in some ways, exceedingly pretty; but their plumage is not equal to their song. No man can be painter and genre painter at the same time. The principal difference between them is this: a painter sees his picture, rather than what may be extracted from it by thought; the genre painter, on the other hand, has an idea in his mind, an “invention,” and plans out a picture for its expression. The painter does not trouble his head about the subject and the narrative contents; his poetry lies in the kingdom of colour. There reigns in his works—take Brouwer, for example—an authentic, uniformly plastic, and penetrative life welling from the artist’s soul. But the leading motive for the genre painter is the subject as such. For example, he will paint a children’s festival precisely because it is a children’s festival. But one must be a Jan Steen to accomplish such a task in a soundly artistic manner. The observation of these more recent painters meanwhile ventured no further than detail, and did not know what to do with the picture as a whole. They got over their difficulties because they “invented” the scene, made the children pose in the places required by the situation, and then composed these studies. The end was accomplished when the leading heroes of the piece had been characterised and the others well traced. The colouring was merely an unessential adjunct, and in a purely artistic sense not at all possible. For a picture which has come into being through a piecing together from separate copies of set models, and of costumes, vessels, interiors, etc., may be ever so true to nature in details, but this mosaic work is bound systematically to destroy the pictorial appearance, unity, and 228 quietude of the whole. Knaus is perhaps the only one who, as a fine connoisseur of colour, concealed this scrap-book drudgery, and achieved a certain congruity of colour in a really artistic manner by a subtilised method of harmony. But as regards the pictures of all the others, it is clear at once that, as Heine wrote, “they have been rather edited than painted.” The effectiveness of the picture was lost in the detail, and even the truth of detail was lost in the end in the opulence of subject, seductive as that was upon the first glance. For, as it was held that the incident subjected to treatment—the more circumstantial the better—ought to be mirrored through all grades and variations of emotion in the faces, in the gestures of a family, of the gossips, of the neighbours, of the public in the street, the inevitable consequence was that the artist, to make himself understood, was invariably driven to exaggerate the characterisation, and to set in the place of the unconstrained expression of nature that which has been histrionically drilled into the model. Not less did the attempt to unite these set figures as a composition in one frame lead to an intolerable stencilling. The rules derived from historical painting in a time dominated by that form of art were applied to our chequered and many-sided modern life. Since the structure of this composition prescribed laws from which the undesigned manifestation of individual objects is free, the studies after nature had to be readjusted in the picture according to necessity. There were attitudes in a conventional sense beautiful, but unnatural and strained, and therefore creating an unpleasing effect. An arbitrary construction, a forced method of composition, usurped the place of what was flexible, various, and apparently casual. The painters did not fit the separate part as it really was into the totality which the coherence of life demands: they arranged scenes of comedy out of realistic elements just as a stage manager would put them together.

And this indicates the further course which development was obliged to take. When Hogarth was left behind, painting had once more gained the independence which it had had in the great periods of art. The painter was forced to cease from treating secondary qualities—such as humour and narrative power—as though they were of the first account; and the public had to begin to understand pictures as paintings and not as painted stories. An “empty subject” well painted is to be preferred to an “interesting theme” badly painted. Pictures of life must drive out tableaux vivants, and human beings dislodge character types which curiosity renders attractive. Rather let there be a moment of breathing reality rendered by purely artistic means of expression than the most complete village tale defectively narrated; rather the simplest figure rendered with actuality and no thought of self than the most suggestive and ingenious characterisation. A conception, coloured by the temperament of the artist, of what was simple and inartificial, expressing nature at every step, had to take the place of laborious composition crowded with figures, the plainness and truth of sterling art to overcome what was overloaded and arbitrary, and the fragment of nature seized with spontaneous 229 freshness to supplant episodes put together out of fragmentary observations. Only such painting as confined itself, like that of the Dutch, “to the bare empirical observation of surrounding reality,” renouncing literary byplay, spirited anecdotic fancies, and all those rules of beauty which enslave nature, could really become the basis of modern art: and this the landscape painters created. When once these masters resolved to paint from nature, and no longer from their inner consciousness, there inevitably came a day when some one amongst them wished to place in the field or the forest, which he had painted after nature, a figure, and then felt the necessity of bringing that figure into his picture just as he had seen it, without giving it an anecdote mission or forcing it arbitrarily into his compositions. The landscapist found the woodcutter in the forest, and the woodcutter seemed to him the ideal he was seeking; the peasant seemed to him to have the right to stand amid the furrows he had traced with his plough. He no longer drove the fisher and the sailor from their barks, and had no scruple in representing the good peasant woman, laden with wood, striding forwards in his picture just as she strode through the forest. And so entry was made into the way of simplicity; the top-heavy burden of interesting subject-matter was thrown aside, and the truth of figures and environments was gained. The age contained all the conditions for bringing landscape painting such as this to maturity.

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CHAPTER XXIII

LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN GERMANY

That landscape would become for the nineteenth century even more important than it was for the Holland of the seventeenth century had been clearly announced since the days of Watteau and Gainsborough, and since this tendency, in spite of all coercive rules, could be only momentarily delayed by Classicism, it came to pass that the era which began with Winckelmann’s conception of “vulgar nature” ended a generation later with her apotheosis. The thirty years from 1780 to 1810 denoted no more than a brief imprisonment for modern landscape, the luxuriantly blooming child being arbitrarily confined meanwhile in the strait-waistcoat of history. At first the phrase of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, which declared that landscape was no subject for painting because it had no soul, held painters altogether back from injuring their reputation by such pictures. And when, after the close of the century, some amongst them overcame this dread, Poussin the Classicist was of course set up as the only model. For an age which did not paint men but only statues, nature was too natural. As the figure painter subordinated everything to style and moulded the human body accordingly, landscape became mannered to suit an historical idea, and was used merely as a theatrical background for Greek tragedies. As the draughtsmen of the age freed the human figure from all “individual blemishes,” and thereby abandoned the most essential points of life and credibility which are bound up with personality, the landscapists wished to purify nature from everything “accidental,” with the result that dreary commonplaces were produced from her, the infinitely manifold. As the former sought the chief merit of their works in “well-balanced composition,” the latter regarded trees and mountains, temples and palaces, clouds and rivers, merely as counters which only needed to be changed in their mutual position according to acquired rules of composition to make new pictures. They did not reflect that nature possesses a more original force than the most able self-conscious work of man, or, as Ludwig Richter has so well expressed it, that “what God Almighty has made is always more beautiful than what men can invent.” There were summary rules for landscapes in the Poussin style, the beauty of which was sought above all in an opulent play of noble lines, corresponding to the fine and flowing lines of Carstens’ figures. But the conception was all the more pedantic whilst the drawing was hard and dry and the colour feeble and vitreous. The 231 most familiar of the group is the old Tyrolese Josef Anton Koch, who came to Rome in 1796, and, during two years, had an opportunity of allying himself with Carstens. His pictures are usually composed with motives taken from the Sabine Mountains. A landscape with “The Rape of Hylas” is possessed by the Staedel Institute in Frankfort, a “Sacrifice of Noah” by the Museum in Leipzig, and a landscape from the Sabine Mountains by the New Pinakothek in Munich. All three show little promise in technique; it was only in water-colour that he painted with more freedom.

Without a doubt nature in Italy is favourable to this “heroic” style of landscape. In South Italy the country is at once magnificent and peaceful. The naked walls of rock display their majestic lines with a sharp contour; the sea is blue, and there is no cloud in the sky. As far as the eye reaches everything is dead and nugatory in its colour, and rigid and inanimate in form: a plastic landscape, full of style but apparently devoid of soul. Nowhere is there anything either stupendous or familiar, though, at the same time, there is no country on the earth where there is such a sweep of proud majestic lines. It was not the composition of Poussin, but the classic art of Claude—which aimed at being nothing but the transparent mirror of sunny and transparent nature—that gave perfect expression to this classic landscape; and in the nineteenth century Karl Rottmann, according to what one reads, has most completely represented this same classical form of art. His twenty-eight Italian landscapes in the arcades of the Munich Hofgarten are said to display a sense of the beauty of line and a greatness of conception paralleled by few other landscape works of the century. And those who draw their critical appreciations from books will probably continue to make this statement, with all the greater right since the world has been assured that the Arcade pictures are but a shadow of earlier splendour. To a spectator who has not been primed and merely judges with his own eyes without knowing anything about Rottmann’s celebrity, these pictures with their hard, inept colouring and their pompous “synthetic” composition seem in the majority of cases to be excessively childish, though it is not contested that before their restoration by Leopold Rottmann and their present state of decay they may very possibly have been good. Rottmann’s Grecian landscapes in the New Pinakothek are not ranked high even by his admirers. Standing in the beginning entirely upon Koch’s ground, he was led in these pictures to give more importance to colour and light, and even to introduce unusual phenomena, 232 such as lowering skies, with rainbows, sunsets, moonlight scenes, thunderstorms, and the like. This mixture of classical principles of drawing with effect-painting in the style of Eduard Hildebrandt brought a certain confusion into his compositions, to say nothing of the fact that he never got rid of his harsh and heavy colour, Bengal lights, and a crudeness of execution suggestive of tapestry. His water-colours, probably, contain the only evidence from which it may be gathered that Rottmann really had an eminent feeling for great characteristic lines, and did not unsuccessfully go through the school of Claude with his finely moulded, rhythmically perfected, and yet simple conception of nature.

Otherwise Friedrich Preller is the only one of all the stylists deriving from Koch who rose to works consistent in execution. To him only was it granted to assure his name a lasting importance by exhaustively working out a felicitous subject. The Odyssey landscapes extend through his whole life. During a sojourn in Naples in 1830 he was struck by the first idea. After his return home he composed for Doctor Härtel in Leipzig the first series as wall decoration in tempera in 1832-34. Then there followed his journeys to Rügen and Norway, where he painted wild strand and fell landscapes of a sombre austerity. After this interruption, so profitably extending his feeling for nature, he returned to the Odyssey. The series grew from seven to sixteen cartoons, which were to be found in 1858 at the Munich International Exhibition. The Grand Duke of Weimar then commissioned him to paint the complete sequence for a hall in the Weimar Museum. In 1859-60 Preller prepared himself afresh in Italy, and as an old man completed the work which he had planned in youth. This Weimar series, executed in encaustic painting, is artistically the maturest that he ever did. Of the entire school he only had the secret of giving his figures a semblance of life, and concealed the artificiality of his compositions. Nature in his pictures has an austere, impressive sublimity, and is the worthy home of gods and heroes. During his long life he had made so many and such incessant studies of nature in North and South—even at seventy-eight he was seen daily with his sketch-book in the Campagna—that he could venture to work with great, simple lines without the danger of becoming empty.

At the time when these pictures were painted the rendering of still-life in 233 landscape had in general been long buried, although even to-day it has scattered representatives in the younger Preller, Albert Hertel, and Edmund Kanoldt. As antique monuments came into fashion with Classicism, German ruins became the mode at the beginning of the romantic period and the return to the national past. For Koch and his followers landscape was only of value when, as the background of classical works of architecture, it directed one’s thoughts to the antique: shepherds had to sit with their flock around them on the ruins of the temple of Vesta, or cows to find pasture between the truncated pillars of the Roman Forum. But now it could only find its justification by allying itself with mediæval German history, by the portrayal of castles and strongholds.

“What is beautiful?—A landscape with upright trees, fair vistas, atmosphere of azure blue, ornamental fountains, stately palaces in a learned architectural style, with well-built men and women, and well-fed cows and sheep. What is ugly?—Ill-formed trees with aged, crooked, and cloven stems, uneven and earthless ground, sharp-cut hills and mountains which are too high, rude or dilapidated buildings, with their ruins lying strewn in heaps, a sky with heavy clouds, stagnant water, lean cattle in the field, and ungraceful wayfarers.”

In these words Gérard de Lairesse, the ancestor of Classicism, defined his ideal of landscape, and in the last clause, where he speaks of ugliness, he 234 prophetically indicated the landscape ideal of the Romanticists, as this is given for the first time in literature in Tieck’s Sternbald. For the young knight in Sternbald who desires to become a painter exclaims with enthusiasm: “Then would I depict lonely and terrible regions, rotting and broken bridges, between two rough cliffs facing a precipice, through which the forest stream forces its foaming course, lost travellers whose garments flutter in the moist wind, the dreaded figures of robbers ascending from the gully, waggons fallen upon and plundered, and battle against the travellers.” Which is all exactly the opposite to what Lairesse demanded from the landscapist. Alexander Humboldt has shown that the men of antiquity only found beauty in nature so far as she was kindly, smiling, and useful to them. But to the Romanticists nature was uncomely where she was the servant of civilisation, and beautiful only in tameless and awe-inspiring savageness. The light, therefore, was never to be that of simple day, but the gloom of night and of the mountain glens. Such phenomena are neither to be seen in Berlin nor in Breslau, and to be a Romanticist was to love the opposite of all that one sees around one. Tieck, who lived in the cold daylight of Berlin with its modern North German rationalism, has therefore—and not by chance—first felt the yearning for moonlight landscapes of primæval forest; Lessing, from Breslau, was the first to give it pictorial expression.

Even in the twenties Koch’s classical heroic landscapes, executed with an ideal sweep of line, were contrasted with castle chapels, ruins, and cloister courts composed in a similarly arbitrary manner. Landscape was no longer to make its appeal to the understanding by lines, as in the work of the Classicists, but to touch the spirit by colour. The various hues of moonlight seemed specially made to awaken sombre emotions. But as yet the technique of painting was too inadequately trained to express this preconceived “mood” through nature itself. To make his intentions clearer, therefore, the painter showed the effect of natural scenery on the figures in his pictures, illustrating the “mood” of the landscape in the “accessories.” Lessing’s early works represent in art that self-consciously elegiac and melancholy sentimental rendering of a mood introduced into literature by Sternbald, in his knights, squires, noble maidens, and other romantic requisites. The melancholy lingers upon rocks savagely piled upon each other, tumble-down chapels and ruined castles, in swamps and sombre woods, in old, decaying trees, half-obliterated paths, and ghostly gravestones; it veils the sky with a dark grey cerement. Amid hills and glens with wayside crosses, mills, and charcoal-burners’ huts may be seen lonely wanderers, praying pilgrims, priests hurrying from the cloister to bring the last consolation to the dying, riders who have lost their way, and mercenary soldiers lying dead. His first picture of 1828 revealed a desolate churchyard beneath a dark and lowering heaven, from which a solitary sunbeam bursts forth to illumine a grave-stead. Then followed the castle by the sea standing upon strangely moulded cliffs heaped in confusion; the churchyard in the snow where the nuns in the cloisters are following 235 a dead sister to the grave; the churchyard cloister, likewise in snow, where an old man has dug a fresh grave; the cloister in the light of evening with a priest visiting the sick; the landscape with the weary, grey-headed crusader, riding on a weary horse through a lonely mountain district, probably meant as an illustration to Uhland’s ballad Das Rosennest—

and then came the desolate tableland with the robbers’ den burnt to ashes, and the landscape with the oak and the shrine of the Virgin, before which a knight and noble lady are making their devotions. As yet all these pictures were an arbitrary potpourri from Walter Scott, Tieck, and Uhland, and their ideal was the Wolf’s Glen in the Freischütz.

The next step which Romanticism had to take was to discover such primæval woodland scenes in actual nature, and as Italian landscape seems, as it were, to have been made for Claude, nature, as she is in Germany, makes a peculiar appeal to this romantic temperament. In certain parts of Saxon Switzerland the rocks look as if giants of the prime had played ball with them or piled them one on top of the other in sport. Lessing found in 1832 a landscape corresponding to the romantic ideal of nature in the Eifel district, whither he had been induced to go by a book by Nöggerath, Das Gebirge im Rheinland und Westfalen nach Mineralogischem und Chemischem Bezuge. Up to that time he had only known the romantic ideal of nature through Scott, Tieck, and Uhland, just as the Classicists had taken their ideal from Homer, Theocritus, and Virgil: in the Eifel district it came before him in tangible form. Flat, swampy tracts of shrub and spruce alternated with dark woods, where gigantic firs, weird pines, and primæval oaks raised their branches to the sky. At the same time he beheld the rude and lonely sublimity of nature in union with a humanity which was as yet uncultivated, and for that reason all the simpler and the healthier, judged by the Romanticist’s distaste for civilisation. Defiant cones of rock and huge masses of mountain wildly piled upon each other overlooked valleys in which a stalwart race of peasants passed their days in patriarchal simplicity. Here, for the first time, a sense for actual landscape was developed in him; hitherto it had been alloyed by a 236 taste for knights, robbers, and monks. “Oh, had I been born in the seventeenth century,” he wrote, “I would have wandered after the Thirty Years’ War throughout Germany, plundered, ruined, and run wild as she then was.” Hitherto only “composed” Italian landscapes had been painted, the soil of home ostensibly offering no sujets, or, in other words, not suiting those tendencies which subordinated everything to style: so Lessing was now the first painter of German landscape. His “Eifel Landscape” in the Berlin National Gallery, which was followed by a series of such pictures, introduces the first period of German landscape painting. The forms of the ground and of the rough sides of rock are rendered sharply and decisively, from geological knowledge. On principle he became an opponent of all artistic influence derived from Italy, and located himself in the Eifel district. The landscapes which he painted there are founded on immediate studies of nature, and are sustained by large and earnest insight. He draws the picture of this quarter in strong and simple lines: the sadness of the heath and the dark mist, the dull breath of which rises from swampy moorland. Still he painted only scenes in which nature had taken the trouble to be fantastic. The eye of the painter did not see her bright side, approaching her only when she looked gloomy or was in angry humour. Either he veils the sky with vast clouds or plunges into the darkness of an untrodden forest. Gnarled trees spread around, their branches stretching out fantastically twisted; the unfettered tumult of the powers of nature, the dull sultry atmosphere before the burst of the storm or its moaning subsidence, are the only moments which he represents. But the whole baggage of unseasonable Romanticism, the nuns and monks, pious knights and sentimental robbers, at first used to embody the mood of nature, were thrown overboard. A quieter and more melancholy though thoroughly manly seriousness, something strong and pithy, lies in the representations of Lessing. The Romanticists had lost all sense of the dumb silent life of nature. They only painted the changing adornment of the earth: heroes and the works of men, palaces, ruins, and classic temples. Nature served merely as a stage scene: the chief interest lay in the persons, the monuments, and the historical ideas associated with them. Even in the older pictures of Lessing the mood was exclusively given by the lyrical accessories. But now it was placed more and more in nature herself, and rings in power like an organ peal, from the cloudy sky, the dim lights, and the swaying tree-tops. For the first time it is really nature that speaks from the canvas, sombre and forceful. In this respect his landscapes show progress. They show the one-sidedness, but also the poetry of the Romantic view of nature. And they are no less of an advance in technique; for in making the discovery that his haunting ideal existed in reality, Lessing first began to study nature apart from preconceived and arbitrary rules of composition, and—learnt to paint.

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Up to 1840 there stood at his side a master no less powerful, the refractory, self-taught Karl Blechen, who only took up painting when he was five-and-twenty, and became one of the most original of German landscapists, in spite of a ruined life prematurely closing in mental darkness and suicide. He possessed a delicate feeling for nature, inspiration, boldness, and a spirited largeness of manner, although his technique was hard, awkward, and clumsy to the very end. He might be called the Alfred Rethel of landscape painting. He was not moved by what was kindly or formally beautiful in nature, but by loneliness, melancholy, and solitude. Many of his landscapes break away from peaceful melancholy, and are like the pictures in some horrible nightmare, ghastly and terrifying; on the other hand, he often surprises us by the pleasure he takes in homely everyday things, a characteristic hitherto of rare occurrence. Whereas Lessing never crossed the Alps for fear of losing his originality, Blechen was the first who saw even modern Italy without the spectacles of ideal style. From his Italian pictures it would not be supposed that he had previously studied the landscapes of the Classicists, or that beside him in Berlin Schinkel worked on the entirely abstract and ideal landscape. As a painter Blechen has even discovered the modern world. For Lessing landscape “with a purpose” was something hideous and insupportable. He cared exclusively for nature untouched by civilisation, painted the murmuring wood and the raging storm, here and there at most a shepherd who indicated the simplest and the oldest employment on the earth’s surface. But the Blechen Exhibition of 1881 contained an entirely singular phenomenon as regards the thirties, an evening landscape before the iron works in Eberswald: a long, monotonous plain with a sluggish river, behind which the dark outlines of vomiting manufactory chimneys rise sullenly into the bright evening sky. Even in that day Blechen painted what others scarcely ventured to draw: nature working in the service of man, and thereby—to use Tieck’s expression—“robbed of her austere dignity.”

Lessing’s most celebrated follower, Schirmer, appears in general as a weakened and sentimental Lessing. He began in 1828 with “A Primæval German Forest,” but a journey to Italy caused him in 1840 to turn aside from this more vigorous path. Henceforth his efforts were directed to nobility of form and line, to turning out Southern ideal landscapes with classically romantic accessories. The twenty-six Biblical landscapes drawn in charcoal, belonging to the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle, the four landscapes in oil with the history of the Good Samaritan in the Kunsthalle of Carlsruhe, and the twelve pictures on the history of Abraham in the Berlin National Gallery, are the principal results of this second period—his period of ideal style. 240 They are tame efforts at a compromise between Lessing and Preller, and therefore of no consequence to the history of the development of landscape painting. Amongst the many who regarded him as a model, Valentin Ruths of Hamburg is one of the most natural and delicate. His pictures, however, did not display any new impulse to widen the boundary by proceeding more in the direction of healthy and honestly straightforward observation of nature, or by emancipating himself from the school of regular composition and the rendering of an arbitrary mood.

Meanwhile this impulse came from another quarter. At the very time when the genre artists were painting their earliest pictures of rustic life under the influence of Teniers and Ostade, the landscapists also began to return to the old Dutch masters, following Everdingen in particular. Thus another strip of nature was conquered, another step made towards simplicity. The landscape ideal of the Classicists had been architecture, that of the Romanticists poetry; from this time forward it became pure painting. Little Denmark, which fifty years before had exercised through Carstens that fateful influence on Germany which led painters from the treatment of contemporary life and sent them in pursuit of the antique, now made recompense for the evil it had done. During the twenties and thirties it produced certain landscapists who guided the Germans to look with a fresh and unfettered gaze, undisturbed by the ideal, at nature in their own country, after the aberrations of Classicism and the 241 one-sidedness of the Romanticists. Under Eckersberg the Academy of Copenhagen was the centre of a healthy realism founded on the Dutch, and some of the painters who received their training there and laboured in later years in Dresden, Düsseldorf, and Munich spread abroad the principles of this school.

J. C. Dahl taught as professor in the Academy of Dresden. At the present time his Norwegian landscapes seem exceedingly old-fashioned, but in the thirties they evidently must have been something absolutely new, for they raised a hue and cry amongst the German painters as “the most wild naturalism.” In 1788 Johann Christian Clausen Dahl was born in Bergen. He was the son of one of those Norwegian giants who are one day tillers of the soil and on the morrow fishers or herdsmen and hunters, who cross the sea in their youth as sailors and clear the waste land when they return home. As he wandered with his father through the dense, solitary pine forests, along abrupt precipices, sullen lakes, rushing waterfalls, silvery shining glaciers, the majesty of Northern nature was revealed to him, and he rendered them in little coloured drawings, which, in spite of their awkward technique, bear witness to an extraordinary freshness of observation. The course of study at the Copenhagen Academy, whither he proceeded in his twentieth year, enabled him to become acquainted with Everdingen and Ruysdael, and these two old masters, who had also painted Norwegian landscapes, stimulated him to further efforts.

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Dahl became the first representative of Norwegian landscape painting, and remained true to his country even when in 1819 he undertook a professorship in Dresden. Italy and Germany occupied his brush as much as Norway, but he was only himself when he worked amongst the Norwegian cliffs. Breadth of painting and softness of atmosphere are wanting in all his pictures. They are hard and dry in their effect, and not seldom entirely conventional; especially the large works painted after 1830. In them he gave the impression of a bewildering, babbling personality. They have been swiftly conceived and swiftly painted, but without artistic love and fine feeling. In his later years Dahl did not allow himself the time to bury himself in nature quietly and with devotion, and finally—especially in his moonlight pictures—took to using a violet-blue, which has a very conventional effect. Everdingen sought by preference for what was forceful and violently agitated in nature; Ruysdael felt an enthusiasm for rushing mountain streams. But for Dahl even these romantic elements of Northern nature were not enough. He approached nature, not to interpret her simply, but to arrange his effects. In his picture the wild Norwegian landscape had to be wilder and more restless than in reality it is. Not patient enough to win all its secrets from the savage mountain torrent, he forced together his effects, made additions, brought confusion into his picture as a whole, and a crudeness into the particular incidents. His large pictures have a loud effect contrasted with the simple intuition of nature amongst the Netherlanders. Many of them are merely fantastically irrational compositions of motives which have been learned by heart.

But there were also years in which Dahl stood in the front rank of his age, and even showed it the way to new aims. He certainly held that position from 1820 to 1830 in those pictures in which, instead of making romantic adaptations of Ruysdael and Everdingen, he resembled them by rendering the weirdness and eeriness and the rough and wild features of Norwegian scenery: red-brown heaths and brownish green turf-moors, stunted oaks and dark pine forests, erratic blocks sown without design amid the roots of trees, branches snapped by the storm and hanging as they were broken, and trunks felled by the tempest and lying where they fell. In certain pictures in the Bergen and Copenhagen Galleries he pointed out the way to new aims. The tendency to gloom and seriousness which reigns in those Dutch Romanticists has here yielded to what is simple and familiar, to the homely joy of the people of the North in the crisp, bright day and the wayward sunbeams. He loves the glimmer of light upon the birch leaves and the peacefully rippling sea. Like Adrian van der Neer, he studied with delight the wintry sky, the snow-clad plains, and the night and the moonshine. He began to feel even the charm of spring. Poor peasant cots are brightly and pleasantly perched upon moist, green hills, as though he had quite forgotten what his age demanded in “artistic composition.” Or the summer day spreads opulent and real between the cliffs, and the warm air vibrates over the fields. Peasants and 243 cattle, glimmering birches and village spires, stand vigorously forth in the landscape; even the execution is so simple that with all his richness of detail he succeeds in attaining a great effect. It is felt that this painting has developed amid a virgin nature, surrounded by the poetry of the fjord, the lofty cliff, and the torrent. In the same measure the Dutch had not the feeling for quietude and habitable, humble, and familiar places. And perhaps it was not by chance that this reformer came from the most virgin country of Europe, from a country that had had no share in any great artistic epoch of the past.

Caspar David Friedrich, that singular painter who carried on his artistic work in Greifswald, and later in Dresden also, is, if anything, almost more original and startling. Like Dahl, he studied under Eckersberg, at the Academy in Copenhagen, and it was this elder artist who opened his eyes to nature, in which he saw moods and humours as romantic as they were modern. His work was not seen in a right light until shown in the German Centenary Exhibition of 1906, when his just place was first, in the history of art, assigned to him.

For Munich a similar importance was won by the Hamburg painter Christian Morgenstern, who, like all artists of this group, imitated the Dutch in the tone of his colour, though as a draughtsman he remained a fresh and healthy son of nature. Even what he accomplished in all naïveté between 1826 and 1829, through direct study of Hamburg landscape, is something unique in the German production of that age. His sketches and etchings of these years assure him a high place amongst the earliest German “mood” painters, and 244 show that as a landscapist he had at that time made the furthest advance towards simplicity and intimacy of feeling. A journey to Norway, undertaken in 1829, and a sojourn at the Copenhagen Academy, where he worked up his Norwegian studies, only extended his ability without altering his principles; and when he came to Munich in the beginning of the thirties his new and personal intuition of nature made a revolution in artistic circles. The landscape painters learnt from him that Everdingen, Ruysdael, and Rembrandt were contemporaries of Poussin, that foliage need not be an exercise of style, and is able properly to indicate the nature of the tree. He discovered the beauty of the Bavarian plateau for the Munich school.

Even the first picture that he brought with him from Hamburg displayed a wide plain shadowed by clouds—a part of the Lüneberg heath—and to this type of subject he remained faithful even in later days. Himself a child of the plains, he sought for kindred motives in Bavaria, and found them in rich store on the shore of the Isar, in the quarries near Polling, at Peissenberg, and in the mossy region near Dachau. His pictures have not the power of commanding the attention of an indifferent spectator, but when they have been once looked into they are seen to be poetic, quiet, harmless, sunny, and thoughtful. He delighted in whatever was ordinary and unobtrusive, the gentle nature of the wood, the surroundings of the village, everything homely and familiar. If Rottmann revelled in the forms of Southern nature, Morgenstern abided by his native Germany; where Lessing only listened to the rage of the hurricane, Morgenstern hearkened to the quiet whisper of the breeze. The shadows of the clouds and the radiance of the sun lie over the dark heath, the moonlight streams dreamily over the quiet streets of the village, the waves break, at one moment rushing noisily and at another gently caressing the shore. Later, when he turned to the representation of the mountains, he lost the intimacy of feeling which was in the beginning peculiar to him. In mountain pictures, often as he attempted ravines, waterfalls, and snowy Alpine summits, he never succeeded in doing anything eminently good. These pictures have something petty and dismembered, and not the great, simple stroke of his plains and skies.

What Morgenstern was for Munich, Ludwig Gurlitt was for Düsseldorf—the most eminent of the great Northern colony which migrated thither in the thirties. His name is not to be found in manuals, and the pictures of his later period which represent him in public galleries seldom give a full idea of his importance. After a journey to Greece in 1859 he took to a brown tone, in which much is conventional. Moreover, his retired life—he resided from 1848 to 1852 in a Saxon village, and from 1859 to 1873 in Siebleben, near Gotha—contributed much to his being forgotten by the world. But the history of art which seeks operative forces must do him honour as the first healthy, realistic landscape painter of Germany, and—still more—as one who opened the eyes of a number of younger painters who have since come to fame.

Gurlitt was a native of Holstein, and, like Morgenstern, received his first 245 instruction in Hamburg, where at that time Bendixen, Vollmer, the Lehmanns, and the Genslers formed an original group of artists. After this, as in the case of Morgenstern also, there followed a longer sojourn in Norway and Copenhagen. In Düsseldorf, where he then went, a Jutland heath study made some sensation on his arrival. It was the first landscape seen in Düsseldorf which had not been composed, and Schadow is said to have come to Gurlitt’s studio, accompanied by his pupils, to behold the marvel. In 1836 he migrated to Munich, where Morgenstern had worked before him, and here he produced a whole series of works, which reveals an artist exceedingly independent in sentiment, and one who even preserves his individuality in the presence of the Dutch. His pictures were grey in tone, and not yellowish, like those of the Dutch; moreover, they were less composed and less “intelligently” dressed out with accessories than the pictures of Dahl; they were glances into nature resulting from earnest, realistic striving. Even when he began to paint Italian pictures, as he did after 1843, he preserved a straightforward simplicity which was not understood by criticism in that age, though it makes the more sympathetic appeal at the present day. The strength of his realism lay, as was the case with all artists of those years, rather in drawing; but at times he reaches, even in painting, a remarkable clearness and delicacy, which at one time verges on the silver tone of Canaletto, at another on the fine grey of Constable.

Realism begins in German art with the entry of these Northern painters 246 into Düsseldorf and Munich. They were less affected by æsthetic prejudices, and fresher and healthier than the Germans. Gurlitt was specially their intellectual leader, the soul, the driving force of the great movement which now followed. Roused by him, Andreas Achenbach emancipated himself from the landscape of style, and, in the years from 1835 to 1839, painted Norwegian pictures even before he knew Norway. Roused by Gurlitt, Achenbach set forth upon the pilgrimage thither, the journey which was a voyage of discovery for German landscape painting.

Until Achenbach’s death in 1905 he yearly exhibited works which were no longer in touch with the surrounding efforts of younger men, and there was an inclination to make little of his importance as a pioneer. What is wanting in his pictures is artistic zeal; what he seems to have too much of is routine. Andreas Achenbach is, as his portrait shows, a man of great acuteness. From his clear, light blue eyes he looks sharply and sagaciously into the world around; his short, thick-set figure, proud and firm of carriage, in spite of years, bears witness to his tough energy. His forehead, like Menzel’s, is rather that of an architect than of a poet; and his pictures correspond to his outward appearance. Each one of his earlier good pictures was a battle fought and won. Realism incarnate, a man from whom all visionary enthusiasm lay at a world-wide distance, he conquered nature by masculine firmness and unexampled perseverance. He appears as a maître-peintre, a man of cool, exact talent with a clear and sober vision. The chief characteristic of his organism was his eminent capacity for appreciating the artistic methods of other artists, and adapting what was essential in them to his own manner of production. One breathes more freely before the works of the masters of Barbizon, and merely sees good pictures in those of Achenbach. The former are captivating by their intimate penetration, where he is striking by his bravura of execution. His landscapes have no chance inspiration, no geniality. Everything is harmonised for the sake of pictorial effect. The structure and scaffolding are of monumental stability. Yet fine as his observation undoubtedly is, he has never surprised the innermost working of nature, but merely turned her to account for the production of pictures. For the French artists colour is the pure expression of nature and of her inward humour, but for Achenbach it is just the means for attaining an effectiveness similar to that of the Dutch. Penetrating everything thoroughly with those sparkling blue eyes of his, he learnt to render conscientiously and firmly the forms of the earth and its outward aspect, but the moods of its life appealing to the spirit like music were never disclosed to him. The paintings of the Dutch attracted him to art, not the impulse to give token to his own peculiar temperament. He thinks more of producing pictures which may equal those of his forerunners in their merits than of rendering the impression of nature which he has himself received. His intelligence quickens at the study of the rules and theories set up by the Dutch, and he seeks for spots in nature where he may exercise these principles, but remains chill at the sight of sky and water, trees 247 and mountains. It is not mere love of nature that has guided his brush, but a refined calculation of pictorial effect; and as he never went beyond this endeavour after rounded expression, as it was understood by the Dutch, though he certainly set German landscape free from a romantic subjection to style like Schirmer’s, he never led it to immediate personal observation of nature. It is not the fragrance of nature that is exhaled from his pictures, but the odour of oil and varnish; and as the means he made use of to attain his effects never alter, the result is frequently conventional and methodic.

But this does not alter the fact that, when the development of German landscape painting is in question, the name of Andreas Achenbach will be always heard in connection with it. He united technical qualities of the higher order with the capacity of impressing the public, and therefore he completed the work that the Danes had begun. He was the reformer who gave evidence that it was not alone by cliffs and baronial castles and murmuring oaks that sentiment was to be awakened; he hated everything unhealthy, mawkish, and vague, and by showing the claws of the lion of realism in the very heart of the romantic period he came to have the significance of a hero in German landscape painting. He forced demure Lower German landscape to surrender to him its charms; he revealed the fascination of Dutch canal scenes, with their quaint architecture and their characteristic human figures; he went to the stormy, raging North Sea, and opposed the giant forces of 248 boisterous, unfettered nature to the tame pictures of the school of Schirmer. Achenbach’s earliest North Sea pictures were exhibited at the very time when Heine’s North Sea series made its appearance, and they soon ousted the wrecks of the French painter Gudin, which, up to that time, had dominated the picture market. For the first time in the nineteenth century sea-pieces were so painted that the water really seemed a fluent, agitated element, the waves of which did not look as if they had been made of lead, and the froth and foam of cotton wool. The things which he was specially felicitous in painting were Rhine-land villages with red-tiled roofs, Dutch canals with yellow sandbanks and running waves breaking at the wooden buttresses of the harbour, Norwegian scenes with stubborn cliffs and dark pines, wild torrents and roaring waterfalls. He did not paint them better than Everdingen and Ruysdael had done, but he painted them better than any of his contemporaries had it in their power to do.

As Gurlitt is connected with the present by Achenbach, Morgenstern is connected with it by Eduard Schleich. The Munich picture rendering a mood took the place of Rottmann’s architectural pictures. Instead of the fair forms of the earth’s surface, artists began to study the play of sunlight on the plain and amid the flight of the clouds, and instead of the build of the landscape they turned to notice its atmospheric mood. Through Morgenstern Schleich was specially directed to Ruysdael and Goyen. In Ruysdael he was captivated by that profound seriousness and that sombre observation of nature which corresponded to something in his own humour; in Goyen by the pictorial harmony of sunlight, air, water, and earth. Schleich has visited France, Belgium, Hungary, and Italy, yet it is only by exception that he has painted anything but what the most immediate vicinity of Munich might offer. He chose the plainest spot in nature—a newly tilled field, a reedy pond, a stretch of brown moorland, a pair of cottages and trees; and under the guidance of Goyen he observed the changes of the sky with great care—the retreat of thunderclouds, the sun shrouded by thin veils of haze, the tremulous moonlight, or the hovering of the morning and evening mists. The Isar district and the mossy Dachauer soil were his favourite places of sojourn. He had a special preference for rain and moonlight and the mood of autumn, in rendering which he toned brown and grey hues to fine Dutch harmonies. His keynote was predominantly serious and elegiac, but he also loved scenes in which there was a restless and violent change of light. Over a wide plateau the sunlight spreads its radiance, whilst from the side an army of dense thunderclouds approaches, threatening storm and casting dark shadows. Over a monotonous plain, broken by solitary clumps of trees, the warm summer rain falls dripping down. Trees and shrubs throw light shadows, and the plain glistens in the beams of the sun. Or else there is a wide expanse of moor. Darkling the clouds advance, the rushes bend before the wind, and narrow strips of moonlight glitter amid the slender reeds. By such works Schleich became the head of the Munich school of landscape without having ever 249 directed the study of pupils. Through him and through Achenbach capacity for the fresh observation of the life of nature was given to German painters.

Undoubtedly amongst the younger group of artists there was a great difference in regard to choice of subject. The modern rendering of mood has only had its origin in Germany; it could not finally develop itself there. Just as figure painting, after making so vigorous a beginning with Bürkel, turned to genre painting in the hands of Enhuber and Knaus, until it returned to its old course in Leibl, landscape also went through the apprentice period of interesting subject, until it once more recognised the poetry of simpleness. The course of civilisation itself led it into these lines. When Morgenstern painted his first pictures the post-chaise still rattled from village to village, but now the whistle of the railway engine screams shrill as the first signal of a new age throughout Europe. Up to that time the possibility of travelling had been greatly circumscribed by the difficulties of traffic. But facilitated arrangements of traffic brought with them such a desire for travel as had never been before. In literature the revolution displayed itself by the rise of books of travels as a new branch of fiction. Hackländer sent many volumes of touring sketches into the market. Theodor Mügge made Norway, Sweden, 250 and Denmark the scene of his tales. But America was the land where the Sesame was to be found, for Germany had been set upon the war-trail with Cooper’s Indians, it had Charles Sealsfield to describe the grotesque mountain land of Mexico, the magic of the prairie, and the landscapes of Susquehannah and the Mississippi, and read Gerstäcker’s, Balduin Möllhausen’s, and Otto Ruppius’ transatlantic sketches with unwearying excitement. The painters who found their greatest delight in seeing the world with the eyes of a tourist also became cosmopolitan.

In Geneva Alexander Calame brought Germany to the knowledge of what is to be seen in Switzerland. Calame was, indeed, a dry, unpoetic landscapist. He began as a young tradesman by making little coloured views of Switzerland which foreigners were glad to bring away with them as mementoes of their visits, just as they now do photographs. Even his later pictures can only lay claim to the merit of such “mementoes of Switzerland.” His colour is insipid and monotonous, his atmosphere heavy, his technique laborious. By painting he understood the illumination of drawings, and his drawing was that of an engraver. An excellent drawing-master, he possessed an unusual mastery of perspective. On the other hand, all warmth and inward life are wanting in his works. Sentiment has been replaced by correct manipulation, and in the deep blue mirror of his Alpine lakes, as in the luminous red of his Alpine summits, there is always to be seen the illuminator who has first drawn the contours with a neat pencil and pedantic correctness. His pictures are grandiose scenes of nature felt in a petty way—in science too it is often the smallest spirit that seeks the greatest heroes. “The Ruins of Pæstum,” like “The Thunderstorm on the Handeck” and “The Range of Monte-Rosa at Sunrise,” merely attain an external, scenical effect which is not improved by crude and unnatural contrasts of light. And as, in later years, when orders accumulated, he fell a victim to an astounding fertility, many of his 251 works give one the impression of a dexterous calligrapher incessantly repeating the same ornamental letters. “Un Calame, deux Calame, trois Calame—que de calamités,” ran the phrase every year in the Paris Salon.

But if France remained cool he found the more numerous admirers in Germany. When, in 1835, he exhibited his first pictures in Berlin, a view of the Lake of Geneva, his appearance was at once hailed with the warmest sympathy. The dexterity, the rounded form, the finish of his pictures, were exactly what gave pleasure, and the distinctness of his drawing made its impression. His lithograph studies of trees and his landscape copies attained the importance of canonical value, and for whole decades remained in use as a medium of instruction in drawing. Amongst German painters Carl Ludwig, Otto von Kameke, and Count Stanislaus Kalkreuth were specially incited by Calame to turn to the sublimity of Alpine nature. Desolate wastes of cliffs, still, clear blue lakes, wild, plunging torrents, and mountain summits covered with glaciers and glowing to rose colour in the reflection of the setting sun are the elements of their pictures as of those of the Genevan master.

After Achenbach there came a whole series of artists from the North who began to depict the mountains of their native Norway under the strong colour effects of the Northern sun. The majestic formations of the fjords, the emerald green walls of rock, the cloven valleys, the terrible forest wildernesses, and the mountains of Norway dazzlingly illuminated and reflecting themselves like glittering jewels in the quiet waters of sapphire blue lakes, were interesting enough to afford nourishment for more than one landscapist.

Knud Baade, who worked from 1842 in Munich, after a lengthy sojourn at the Copenhagen Academy and with Dahl in Dresden, delighted in moonlight scenes, gloomy fir forests, and midnight suns. The sea rises in waves mountain 252 high, and tosses mighty vessels like withered leaves or dashes foaming against the cliffs of the shore. Fantastic clouds chase each other across the sky, and the wan moonlight rocks unsteadily upon the waves. More seldom he paints the sea lit up afar by the moon, or the fjord with its meadows and silver birches; and in such plain pictures he makes a far more attractive effect than in those which are wild and ambitious, for his diffident, petty execution is, as a rule, but little suited to restless and, as it were, dramatic scenes of nature.

Having come to Düsseldorf in 1841, Hans Gude became the Calame of the North. Achenbach taught him to approach the phenomena of nature boldly and realistically, and not to be afraid of a rich and soft scale of colour. Schirmer, the representative of Italian still landscape, guided him to the acquisition of a certain large harmony and sense for style in the structure of his pictures, to beauty of line and effective disposition of great masses of light and shade. This quiet, sure-footed, and robust realism, which had, at the same time, a gift of style, became the chief characteristic of his Northern landscapes, in which, however, the mutable and fleeting moods of nature were all the more neglected. Here are Norwegian mountain landscapes with lakes, rivers, and waterfalls, then pictures of the shore under the most varied phases of light, or grand cliff scenery with a sombre sky and a sea in commotion. Hans Gude, living from 1864 in Carlsruhe, and from 1880 in Berlin, is one of those painters whom one esteems, but for whom it is not possible to feel great enthusiasm—one of those conscientious workers who from their very solidity run the risk of becoming tedious. His landscapes are good gallery pictures, soberly and prosaically correct, and never irritating, though at the same time they seldom kindle any warm feeling.

Like Gude, Niels Björnson Möller devoted himself to pictures of the shore and the sea. Undisturbed by men in his sequestered retreat, August Capellen gave way to the melancholy charms of the Norwegian forest. He represented the tremulous clarity of the air above the cliffs, old, shattered tree-trunks and green water plants, sleepy ponds, and far prospects bounded by blue mountains; but he would have made an effect of greater originality had he thought less of Schirmer’s noble line and compositions arranged in the grand style. Morten-Müller became the specialist of the fir forest. His native woods where the valleys stretch towards the high mountain region offered him motives, which he worked up in large and excessively scenical pictures. His strong point was the contrast between sunlight playing on the mountain tops and mysterious darkness reigning in the forest depths, and his pictures have many admirers on account of “their elegiac melancholy, their minor key of touching sadness.” The Norwegian spring changing the earth into one carpet of moorland, broken by marshes, found its delineator in Erik Bodom. Ludwig Munthe became the painter of wintry landscape in thaw, when the snow is riddled with holes and a dirty brown crust of earth peeps from the dazzling mantle. A desolate field, a pair of crippled trees stretching their 253 naked branches to the dark-grey sky, a swarm of crows and a drenched road marked with the tracks of wheels, a tawny yellow patch of light gleaming through the cloud-bank and reflected in the wayside puddles, such are the elements out of which one of Munthe’s landscapes is composed. Through Eilert Adelsten Normann representations of the fjords gained currency in the picture market. His specialty was the delineation of the steep and beetling rocky fastnesses of Lofodden with their various reflections of light and colour, the midnight sun glaring over the deep clear sea, the contrast between the blue-black masses of the mountains and the gleaming fields of snow.

Others, such as Ludwig Willroider, Louis Douzette, and Hermann Eschke, set themselves to observe the German heath and the German forest from similar points of view; the one painted great masses of mountain and giant trees, the other the setting sun, and the third the sea. Oswald Achenbach, Albert Flamm, and Ascan Lutteroth set out once more on the pilgrimage to the South, where, in contrast to their predecessors, they studied no longer the classic lines of nature in Italy, but the splendour of varied effects of colour in the neighbourhood of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples. The most enterprising turned their backs on Europe altogether, and began to paint the primæval 254 forests of South America, to which Alexander Humboldt had drawn attention, the azure and scarlet wonders of the tropics, and the gleam and sparkle of the icy world at the ultimate limits of the Polar regions. Ferdinand Bellermann was honoured as a new Columbus when in 1842 he returned home with his sketches, botanically accurate as they were, of the marvels of the virgin forest. Eduard Hildebrandt, who in 1843 had already gone through the Canary Islands, Italy, Sicily, North Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Sahara, and the Northern sea of ice, at the mandate of Frederich Wilhelm IV in 1862 undertook a voyage round the world “to learn from personal view the phenomena that the sea, the air, and the solid earth bring forth beneath the most various skies.” Eugen Bracht traversed Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, and returned with a multitude of studies from the sombre and majestic landscape of the desert, and from that world of ruins and mountains in the East, and developed them at home into as many pictures.

A modicum of praise is due to all these masters for having continually widened the circuit of subject-matter, and gradually disclosed the whole world; and if their works cannot be reckoned as the products of a delicate landscape painting, that is a result of the same taste which prescribed anecdotic and narrative subjects to the genre picture of those years. The landscape painters conquered the earth, but, above all, those parts of it which were geographically remarkable. This they did in the interest of the public. They went with a Baedeker in their pocket into every quarter of the globe, brought with them all the carmine necessary for sunsets, and set up their easels at every place marked with an asterisk in the guidebook. And in these fair regions they noted everything that was to be seen with the said Baedeker’s assistance. Through satisfying the interest of the tourist by a rendering, faithful to a hair’s breadth, of topographically instructive points, they could best reckon on the sale of their productions.

At the same time, their pictures betray that, during this generation, historical painting was throned on a summit whence it could dictate the æsthetic catechism. The historical picture represented a humanity that carried about with it the consciousness of its outward presence, draped itself in front of the glass, and made an artificial study of every gesture and every expression of emotion. Genre painting followed, and rendered the true spirit of life, illustrating it histrionically, but without surprising it in its unconstrained working. And so trees, mountains, and clouds also were forced to lay aside the innocence of unconscious being and wrap themselves in the cloak of affectation. Simple reality in its quiet, delicate beauty, the homely “mood” of nature, touching the forms of landscape with the play of light and air, had nothing to tell an age overstrained by the heroics of history and the grimaces of genre painting. A more powerful stimulus was necessary. So the landscapists also were forced to seek nature where she was histrionic and came forth in blustering magnificence; they were forced to send off brilliant pyrotechnics to fire out sun, moon, and stars in order to be heard, or, more literally, seen.

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Instruction or theatrical effect—the aim of historical painting—had also to be that of the landscape painter. And as railroads are cosmopolitan arrangements, he was in a position to satisfy both demands with promptitude. As historical painters in the chase of striking subjects directed their gaze to the farthest historical horizon, and the genre painters sought to take their public captive principally through what was alien and strange, Oriental and Italian, the landscape painters, too, found their highest aim in the widest possible expansion of the geographical horizon. “Have these good people not been born anywhere in particular?” asked Courbet, when he contemplated the German landscapes in the Munich Exhibition of 1869. What would first strike the inhabitant of a Northern country in foreign lands was made the theme of the majority of the pictures. But as the historical painting, in illustrating all the great dramatic scenes from the Trojan War to the French Revolution, yielded at one time to a pædagogical doctrinaire tendency and at another to theatrical impassionedness, so landscape painting on its cosmopolitan excursions became partly a dry synopsis of famous regions, only justifiable as a memento of travel, partly a tricked-out piece of effect which, like everything obtrusive, soon lost its charm. Pictures of the first description which chiefly borrowed their motives from Alpine nature, so imposing in its impressiveness of form—grand masses of rock, glaciers, snow-fields, and abrupt precipices—only needed to have the fidelity of a portrait. Where that was given, the public, guided by the instinct for what is majestic and beautiful in nature, stood before them quite content, while Alpine travellers instructed the laity that the deep blue snow of the picture was no exaggeration, but a phenomenon of the mountain world which had been correctly reproduced. In all these cases there can be no possible doubt about geographical position, but there is seldom any need to make inquiries after the artist. The interest which they excite is purely of a topographical order; otherwise they bear the stamp of ordinary prose, of the aridity and unattractiveness which always creeps in as a consequence of pure objectivity. Works of the second description, which depict exotic regions, striking by the strangeness of various phenomena of light and the splendour and glow of colour, are generally irritating by their professional effort to display “mood.” The old masters revealed “mood” without intending to do so, because they approached nature piously and with a wealth of feeling. The new masters obtain a purely external effect, because they strain after a “mood” in their painting without feeling it; and though art does not exclude the choice of exotic subjects, it is not healthy when a tendency of this sort becomes universal. Really superior art will, from principle, never seek the charm of what is strange and distant, since it possesses the magical gift of bestowing the deepest interest on what lies nearest to it. In addition to this, such effects are as hard to seize as the moment of most intense excitement in the historical picture. As an historical painter Delacroix could render it, and Turner as a landscape painter, but geniuses like Delacroix and Turner are not born every day. As these phenomena 256 were painted at the time in Germany, the right “mood” was not excited by them, but merely a frigid curiosity. Almost all landscapes of these years create an effect merely through their subject; they are entertaining, astonishing, instructive, but the poetry of nature has not yet been aroused. It could only reveal itself when the preponderance of interest in mere subject was no longer allowed. As the figure painters at last disdained through narrative and “points” to win the applause of those who had no sensitiveness for art, so the landscape painters were obliged to cease from giving geographical instruction by the representation of nature as beloved by tourists, and to give up forcing a “mood” in their pictures by a subterfuge. The necessary degree of artistic absorption could only go hand in hand with a revolt against purely objective interest of motive, and with a strenuous effort at the representation of familiar nature in the intimate charm of its moods of light and atmosphere. It was necessary for refinement of taste to follow on the expression of subject-matter; and this impulse had to bring artists back to the path struck by Dahl, Morgenstern, and Gurlitt. To unite the simple, moving, and tender observation of those older artists with richer and more complex methods of expression was the task given to the next generation in France, where paysage intime, the most refined and delicate issue of the century, grew to maturity in the very years when German landscape painting roamed through the world with the joy of an explorer.

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CHAPTER XXIV

THE BEGINNINGS OF “PAYSAGE INTIME”

How it was that the secrets of paysage intime were reserved for our own century—and this assuredly by no mere accident—can only be delineated in true colours when some one writes a special history of landscape painting, a book which at the present time would be the most seasonable in the literature of art. Wereschagin once declared that in the province of landscape the works of the old masters seem like the exercises of pupils in comparison with the performances of modern art; and certain it is that the nineteenth century, if it is inferior to previous ages in everything else, may, at any rate, offer them an equivalent in landscape. It was only city life that could produce this passionately heightened love of nature. It was only in the century of close rooms and over-population, neurosis and holiday colonies, that landscape painting could attain to this fulness, purity, and sanctity. It was only our age of hurry and work that made possible a relation between nature and the human soul, which really has something of what the Earth Spirit vouchsafed to Faust: “to gaze into her heart as into the bosom of a friend.”

In France also, the tendency which since the eighteenth century had made itself felt in waves rising ever higher, had been for a short time abruptly interrupted by Classicism. Of the pre-revolutionary landscapists Hubert Robert was the only one who survived into the new era. His details of nature and his rococo savour were pardoned to him for the sake of his classic ruins. At first there was not one of the newer artists who was impelled to enter this province. A generation which had become ascetic, and which dreamed only of rude, manly virtue, expressed through the plastic and purified forms of the human body, had lost all sense for the charms of landscape. And when the first landscapes appeared once more, after several years, they were, as in Germany, solemn stage-tragedy scenes, abstract “lofty” regions such as Poussin ostensibly painted. Only in Poussin a great feeling for nature held together the conventional composition, in spite of all his straining after style; whereas nothing but frigid rhetoric and sterile formalism reigns in the works of these newer painters, works which were created at second-hand. The type of the beautiful which had been borrowed from the antique was worked into garden and forest with a laboured effort at style, as it had been worked into 258 the human form and the flow of drapery. A prix de Rome was founded for historical landscapes.

Henri Valenciennes was the Lenôtre of this Classicism, the admired teacher of several generations. The beginner in landscape painting modelled himself upon Valenciennes as the figure painter upon Guérin. His Traité élémentaire de perspective pratique, in which he formulated the principles of landscape, contains his personal views as well as the æsthetics of the age. Although, as he premises, he “is convinced that there is in reality only one kind of painting, historical painting, it is true that an able historical painter ought not entirely to neglect landscape.” Rembrandt, of course, and the old Dutch painters were without any sort of ideal, and only worked for people without soul or intelligence. How far does a landscape with cows and sheep stand below one with the funeral of Phocion, or a rainy day by Ruysdael below a picture of the Deluge by Poussin! Hardly does Claude Lorrain find grace in the eyes of Valenciennes. “He has painted with a pretty fidelity to nature the morning and evening light. But just for that very reason his pictures make no appeal to the intelligence. He has no tree where a Dryad could dwell, no spring in which nymphs could splash. Gods, demigods, nymphs, satyrs, even heroes are too sublime for these regions; shepherds could dwell there at best.” Claude, indeed, loved Italy, but knew the old writers all too little, and they are the groundwork for landscape painters. As David said to his pupil Gros, “Look through your Plutarch,” Valenciennes advised his own pupils to study Theocritus, Virgil, and Ovid: only from these authors might be learnt what were the regions suitable for gods and heroes.