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 andgenial 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. Atthe 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’sTreatise 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 oldgenrepainters. 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 thefew 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 byHermann 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 excellentEduard Meyerheimwent 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.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“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 Germangenrepicture of peasant life only became universally popular after the village novel came into vogue at the end of the thirties.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 hisMünchhausen. “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 hisBauernspiegelthose 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 “genrepainting” 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 CarlsruheJohann Kirnerwas the first to work on these lines, adapting the life of the Swabian peasantry to the purposes of humorous anecdote. In MunichCarl Enhuberwas 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 themultitude 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 illustratedDon Quixoteas 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 awayby 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 theGuide to Connoisseurship, are perhaps to be reckoned as his best performances.Hasencleverfollowed the dilettante Schroedter as a delineator of the “stolid Peter” type, and painted the “Study” and similar pictures for Kortum’sJobsiadewith 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.
Jacob Beckerwent 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 Jordanof Berlin settled on Heligoland, and became by his “Proposal of Marriage in Heligoland” one of the most esteemed painters of Düsseldorf. And in 1852Henry 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 festiveoccasions. 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 thegenrepainters 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 byHeinrich Füger, who had a more decided leaning towards the operatic. The representative-in-chief of Nazarenism wasJosef 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 inCarl Rahl, its Piloty inChristian Ruben, who, like the Munich artist, had a preference for painting Columbus, and was meritorious as a teacher. It was only through portraitpainting 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 wasLampi, after whom followedMoritz Daffingerwith his delicate miniatures; but the most important of them all wasFriedrich 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.
Genrepainting was developed here as elsewhere from the military picture. As early as 1813Peter 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 apendant 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 thatCarl 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 Viennesegenrepainting 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 ofbourgeoislife, 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 theirgenrepictures 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 andbourgeoisclasses. 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’sVerschwender; 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’sTreuer Diener seines Herrnserves 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 throughthe suburbs with a sketch-book, immortalising the doings of children in the streets, and drawing “character heads” of the school-teacher tavernhabituésand the lottery adventurer.
And this was likewise the province to whichWaldmüllerdevoted 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 scenesthere is a freshness and transparency of tone which was something rare among the painters of that time.
Friedrich Gauermannwandered 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.
Genrepainting 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 mostrising 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. Prettygenrepictures 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 excludedad 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 pictorialfuriaof 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 wasIgnatius 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 cameFerdinand 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 Coeneelaborated such themes as “Oh, what beautiful Grapes!” or “A Pinch of Snuff for the Parson!”
Madou’s merit lies in having extended Belgiangenrepainting 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.Madouwas 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 Rubensredivivus, 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 hisdébutin 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 honouredas 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 thegenrepainting 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 ofthe 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 Dillensmakes 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’schiaroscuro, 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 wasFrançois 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 commonplacebourgeoisie. 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 tengenrepainters; 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.
CHAPTER XXI
THE PICTURE WITH A SOCIAL PURPOSE
Thatmodern 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 ofbeauté 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 LouisXIVhad 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 humourà l’huilewas 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 hardtoil. 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 moderngenrepainters 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 hisSong of the Shirt, that lyric of the poor sempstress which soon spread all over the Continent. Carlyle, thefriend and admirer of Goethe, came forward in 1843 as the burning advocate of the poor and miserable inPast 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’sSybilfollowed in 1845. As a novel it is a strange mixture of romantic and naturalistic chapters, the latter seeming like a prophetic announcement of Zola’sGerminal. 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 theroi 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 ofchansons, composed hisVieux Vagabond, the song of the old beggar who dies in the gutter; Auguste Barbier wrote his Ode to Freedom, wherela sainte canailleare celebrated as immortal heroes, and with the scorn of Juvenal “lashes those who drew profit from the Revolution, thosebourgeoisin kid gloves who watched the sanguinary street fights comfortably from the window.” In 1842-43 Eugène Sue published hisMystères 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 Romanticschool 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 herCompagnon 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 essayPolitics and Socialism, and she brought out her celebratedLetters to the Peoplein 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 thebourgeoisieand the artisan class had fought side by side eighteen years before, the banner of the artisan was hoisted blood-red against the rulingbourgeoisie.
ThisZeitgeist, this spirit of the age which had grown earnest, necessarily guided art into another course; the painted humour and childlike optimism of the firstgenrepainters 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 impudentintruder 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.
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 ofDelacroixtook 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 ofLa Curée, those verses of Auguste Barbier that are ablaze with wrath—
“C’est que la Liberté n’est pas une comtesseDu noble faubourg Saint-Germain,Une femme qu’un cri fait tomber en faiblesse,Qui met du blanc et du carmin;C’est un forte femme aux puissantes mamelles,À la voix rauque, aux durs appas,Qui, du brun sur la peau, du feu dans les prunelles,Agile et marchant à grands pas,Se plait aux cris du peuple, aux sanglantes mêlées,Aux longs roulements des tambours,À l’odeur de la poudre, aux lointaines voléesDes cloches et des canons sourds.”
“C’est que la Liberté n’est pas une comtesse
Du noble faubourg Saint-Germain,
Une femme qu’un cri fait tomber en faiblesse,
Qui met du blanc et du carmin;
C’est un forte femme aux puissantes mamelles,
À la voix rauque, aux durs appas,
Qui, du brun sur la peau, du feu dans les prunelles,
Agile et marchant à grands pas,
Se plait aux cris du peuple, aux sanglantes mêlées,
Aux longs roulements des tambours,
À l’odeur de la poudre, aux lointaines volées
Des cloches et des canons sourds.”
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 classwere the thing to be represented, and that there was nothing nobler than work.
One of the first to give an example wasJeanron. 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 likeAntignabecame 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 Leleuxmade studies in Brittany, and discovered earnest episodes in the daily life of the peasant, which he rendered with greatactuality. 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 thecoup d’étatof 1851 evenMeissonier, till then exclusively a painter ofrococosubjects, 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 LuxembourgMusée. 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.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 GermanWilkie, 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,” “TheMésalliance,” “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 ofCarl Hübnerof Düsseldorf. Ernest Wilkomm in the beginning of the forties had represented in his sensationalgenrepictures, particularly in the “White Slaves,” the contrast between afflicted serfs and cruel landlords, between rich manufacturers and famishing artisans; Robert Prutz had written hisEngelchen, 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’sWebern, composed in 1844. Even Geibel was impelled to his poemMene Tekelby the spread of the news, though it stands in curious opposition to his manner of writing elsewhere. Carl Hübner therefore wasacting 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 Germangenrepainting. 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 BelgiumEugène de Blockfirst 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,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.