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.”
Having gained thePrix 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,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 theSalonof 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.” TheMoniteurgave 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 theCharivarian 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 thePrix de Rome. From the first he was quite clear as to his own importance.
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,pourla 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 presentMusée 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 throughthe 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 pressinground 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’sLe 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 ofcrêches. 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 cutsto 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 DumasFils. “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 entitledMaterialism, 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.
CHAPTER XXII
THE VILLAGE TALE
Duringthe decade following the year 1848genrepainting 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 standsLouis 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 andthe 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, nogenrepainter 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 agenrepainter 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, otherswith 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 samepointed 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 intableaux 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 forgetKnaus, 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, thebourgeois, 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 Netherlandishchiaroscuro. “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.
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 agenrepainter; 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 thegenrepicture unsuspected subtleties of colour he helped German art to pass from meregenrepainting 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 agenrepainter, 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 agenrepainter he is more sympathetic. In the pictures of Knaus one is annoyed by the deliberate smirk, by his exaggeratedand 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 talesà laBerthold 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 agenrepainter. 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 ofthe 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. Lifereveals 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.
The third member of the alliance isFranz 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 agenrepainter he stands beside Vautier, in the first line; and by these littlegenrepictures—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 joysand 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 theSchuhplattler. At the sametime 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.
“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. Thegenrepicture was Defregger’s vocation. There lay his strength, and as soon as he left that province he renounced his fine qualities.
And a holiday humour, a tendency to beautify what he saw, is spread over even hisgenrepictures. 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,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 Gablcame 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.
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 atgenre; 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 thatgenrepainting in broad-cloth came into vogue by the side of thisgenrein 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,” whichgave 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 paintingrococopictures, 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 Germangenrepainting 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 ingenrepainting. 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 ofgenrepainting 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 inthe 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 isJules 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 theland 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 ofbonneswho 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 theforte 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,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.
InWilhelm 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 Koskullcultivated thegenrepicture 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 Eskilsonturned to the representation of an idyllic age of honest yeomen, andhas 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 ofAugust Jernberg’sstudy 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 Fagerlinhas 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 finernuances. 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 isV. Stoltenberg-Lerche, who with the aid of appropriate accessories adapted the interiors of cloisters and churches togenrepictures, such as “Tithe Day in the Cloister,” “The Cloister Library,” and “The Visit of a Cardinal to the Cloister,” and so forth.Hans Dahl, ajuste-milieubetween 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 thegenrepicture.
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 Munichgenreto 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, slendersons 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. BesideLudwig Ebner,Paul Boehm, andOtto von Baditz, which have a German sound, one comes across such names asKoloman 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 theSchuhplattlerthey 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 paintingis 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 thisgenrepainting. 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 thesegenrepainters 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, thesegenrepainters 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 publicas 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, thegenrepainters 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.