Albrecht Adam, who was chiefly responsible for the foundation of the Munich Union, has himself spoken clearly in his autobiography of the advantages and disadvantages of this step. “Often,” he writes, “often have I asked myself whether I have done good or not by this scheme, and to this hour I have not been able to make up my mind. The cultivation of art clearly received an entirely different bias from that which it had in earlier days. What was formerly done by artistic and judicious connoisseurs was now placed for the most part in the hands of the people. Like so much else in the world, that had its advantages, but in practice the shady side of the matter became very obvious.” The disadvantages were specially these: “the people” for a long time could only understand such paintings as represented a story in a broad and easy fashion; paintings which in the narrative cohesion of the subject represented might be read off at a glance, since the mere art of reading had been learnt at school, rather than those which deserved and required careful study. The demand for anecdotic subject was only waived in the case of ethnographical painting, in Italian and Orientalgenre; for here the singular types, pictorial costumes, and peculiar customs of foreign countries were in themselves enough to provoke curiosity. What was prized in the picture was merely something external, the subject of representation, not the representationitself, the matter and not the manner, that which concerned the theme, that which fell entirely beyond the province of art. The illustrated periodicals which had been making their appearance since the forties gave a further impetus to this phase of taste. The more inducement there was to guess charades, the more injury was done to the sensuous enjoyment of art; for the accompanying text of the author merely translated the pictures back into their natural element. Painters, however, were not unwilling to reconcile themselves to the circumstances, because, as a result of their technical insufficiency, they were forced, on their side, to try to lend their pictures the adjunct of superficial interest by anecdotic additions. Literary humour had to serve the purpose of pictorial humour, and the talent of the narrator was necessary to make up for their inadequate artistic qualities. As the historical painters conveyed the knowledge of history in a popular style, thegenrepainters set up as agreeable tattlers, excellent anecdotists: they were in turn droll, meditative, sentimental, and pathetic, but they were not painters.
And painters, under these conditions, they could not possibly become. For though it is often urged in older books on the history of art that moderngenrepainting far outstripped the old Dutchgenrein incisiveness of characterisation, depth of psychological conception, and opulence of invention, these merits are bought at the expense of all pictorial harmony. In the days of Rembrandt the Dutch were painters to their fingers’ ends, and they were able to be so because they appealed to a public whose taste was adequately trained to take a refined pleasure in the contemplation of works of art which had sterling merits of colour. Mieris painted the voluptuous ruffling of silken stuffs; Van der Meer, the mild light stealing through little windows into quiet chambers, and playing upon burnished vessels of copper and pewter, on majolica dishes and silver chattels, on chests and coverings; De Hoogh, the sunbeam streaming like a golden shaft of dust from some bright lateral space into a darker ante-chamber.Each one set before himself different problems, and each ran through an artistic course of development.
The more recent masters are mature from their first appearance; the Hungarians paint exactly like the Swedes and the Germans, and their pictures have ideas for the theme, but never such as are purely artistic. Like simple woodland birds, they sing melodies which are, in some ways, exceedingly pretty; but their plumage is not equal to their song. No man can be painter andgenrepainter at the same time. The principal difference between them is this: a painter sees his picture, rather than what may be extracted from it by thought; thegenrepainter, on the other hand, has an idea in his mind, an “invention,” and plans out a picture for its expression. The painter does not trouble his head about the subject and the narrative contents; his poetry lies in the kingdom of colour. There reigns in his works—take Brouwer, for example—an authentic, uniformly plastic, and penetrative life welling from the artist’s soul. But the leading motive for thegenrepainter is the subject as such. For example, he will paint a children’s festival precisely because it is a children’s festival. But one must be a Jan Steen to accomplish such a task in a soundly artistic manner. The observation of these more recent painters meanwhile ventured no further than detail, and did not know what to do with the picture as a whole. They got over their difficulties because they “invented” the scene, made the children pose in the places required by the situation, and then composed these studies. The end was accomplished when the leading heroes of the piece had been characterised and the others well traced. The colouring was merely an unessential adjunct, and in a purely artistic sense not at all possible. For a picture which has come into being through a piecing together from separate copies of set models, and of costumes, vessels, interiors, etc., may be ever so true to nature in details, but this mosaic work is bound systematically to destroy the pictorial appearance, unity, andquietude of the whole. Knaus is perhaps the only one who, as a fine connoisseur of colour, concealed this scrap-book drudgery, and achieved a certain congruity of colour in a really artistic manner by a subtilised method of harmony. But as regards the pictures of all the others, it is clear at once that, as Heine wrote, “they have been rather edited than painted.” The effectiveness of the picture was lost in the detail, and even the truth of detail was lost in the end in the opulence of subject, seductive as that was upon the first glance. For, as it was held that the incident subjected to treatment—the more circumstantial the better—ought to be mirrored through all grades and variations of emotion in the faces, in the gestures of a family, of the gossips, of the neighbours, of the public in the street, the inevitable consequence was that the artist, to make himself understood, was invariably driven to exaggerate the characterisation, and to set in the place of the unconstrained expression of nature that which has been histrionically drilled into the model. Not less did the attempt to unite these set figures as a composition in one frame lead to an intolerable stencilling. The rules derived from historical painting in a time dominated by that form of art were applied to our chequered and many-sided modern life. Since the structure of this composition prescribed laws from which the undesigned manifestation of individual objects is free, the studies after nature had to be readjusted in the picture according to necessity. There were attitudes in a conventional sense beautiful, but unnatural and strained, and therefore creating an unpleasing effect. An arbitrary construction, a forced method of composition, usurped the place of what was flexible, various, and apparently casual. The painters did not fit the separate part as it really was into the totality which the coherence of life demands: they arranged scenes of comedy out of realistic elements just as a stage manager would put them together.
And this indicates the further course which development was obliged to take. When Hogarth was left behind, painting had once more gained the independence which it had had in the great periods of art. The painter was forced to cease from treating secondary qualities—such as humour and narrative power—as though they were of the first account; and the public had to begin to understand pictures as paintings and not as painted stories. An “empty subject” well painted is to be preferred to an “interesting theme” badly painted. Pictures of life must drive outtableaux vivants, and human beings dislodge character types which curiosity renders attractive. Rather let there be a moment of breathing reality rendered by purely artistic means of expression than the most complete village tale defectively narrated; rather the simplest figure rendered with actuality and no thought of self than the most suggestive and ingenious characterisation. A conception, coloured by the temperament of the artist, of what was simple and inartificial, expressing nature at every step, had to take the place of laborious composition crowded with figures, the plainness and truth of sterling art to overcome what was overloaded and arbitrary, and the fragment of nature seized with spontaneousfreshness to supplant episodes put together out of fragmentary observations. Only such painting as confined itself, like that of the Dutch, “to the bare empirical observation of surrounding reality,” renouncing literary byplay, spirited anecdotic fancies, and all those rules of beauty which enslave nature, could really become the basis of modern art: and this the landscape painters created. When once these masters resolved to paint from nature, and no longer from their inner consciousness, there inevitably came a day when some one amongst them wished to place in the field or the forest, which he had painted after nature, a figure, and then felt the necessity of bringing that figure into his picture just as he had seen it, without giving it an anecdote mission or forcing it arbitrarily into his compositions. The landscapist found the woodcutter in the forest, and the woodcutter seemed to him the ideal he was seeking; the peasant seemed to him to have the right to stand amid the furrows he had traced with his plough. He no longer drove the fisher and the sailor from their barks, and had no scruple in representing the good peasant woman, laden with wood, striding forwards in his picture just as she strode through the forest. And so entry was made into the way of simplicity; the top-heavy burden of interesting subject-matter was thrown aside, and the truth of figures and environments was gained. The age contained all the conditions for bringing landscape painting such as this to maturity.
CHAPTER XXIII
LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN GERMANY
Thatlandscape would become for the nineteenth century even more important than it was for the Holland of the seventeenth century had been clearly announced since the days of Watteau and Gainsborough, and since this tendency, in spite of all coercive rules, could be only momentarily delayed by Classicism, it came to pass that the era which began with Winckelmann’s conception of “vulgar nature” ended a generation later with her apotheosis. The thirty years from 1780 to 1810 denoted no more than a brief imprisonment for modern landscape, the luxuriantly blooming child being arbitrarily confined meanwhile in the strait-waistcoat of history. At first the phrase of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, which declared that landscape was no subject for painting because it had no soul, held painters altogether back from injuring their reputation by such pictures. And when, after the close of the century, some amongst them overcame this dread, Poussin the Classicist was of course set up as the only model. For an age which did not paint men but only statues, nature was too natural. As the figure painter subordinated everything to style and moulded the human body accordingly, landscape became mannered to suit an historical idea, and was used merely as a theatrical background for Greek tragedies. As the draughtsmen of the age freed the human figure from all “individual blemishes,” and thereby abandoned the most essential points of life and credibility which are bound up with personality, the landscapists wished to purify nature from everything “accidental,” with the result that dreary commonplaces were produced from her, the infinitely manifold. As the former sought the chief merit of their works in “well-balanced composition,” the latter regarded trees and mountains, temples and palaces, clouds and rivers, merely as counters which only needed to be changed in their mutual position according to acquired rules of composition to make new pictures. They did not reflect that nature possesses a more original force than the most able self-conscious work of man, or, as Ludwig Richter has so well expressed it, that “what God Almighty has made is always more beautiful than what men can invent.” There were summary rules for landscapes in the Poussin style, the beauty of which was sought above all in an opulent play of noble lines, corresponding to the fine and flowing lines of Carstens’ figures. But the conception was all the more pedantic whilst the drawing was hard and dry and the colour feeble and vitreous. Themost familiar of the group is the old TyroleseJosef Anton Koch, who came to Rome in 1796, and, during two years, had an opportunity of allying himself with Carstens. His pictures are usually composed with motives taken from the Sabine Mountains. A landscape with “The Rape of Hylas” is possessed by the Staedel Institute in Frankfort, a “Sacrifice of Noah” by the Museum in Leipzig, and a landscape from the Sabine Mountains by the New Pinakothek in Munich. All three show little promise in technique; it was only in water-colour that he painted with more freedom.
Without a doubt nature in Italy is favourable to this “heroic” style of landscape. In South Italy the country is at once magnificent and peaceful. The naked walls of rock display their majestic lines with a sharp contour; the sea is blue, and there is no cloud in the sky. As far as the eye reaches everything is dead and nugatory in its colour, and rigid and inanimate in form: a plastic landscape, full of style but apparently devoid of soul. Nowhere is there anything either stupendous or familiar, though, at the same time, there is no country on the earth where there is such a sweep of proud majestic lines. It was not the composition of Poussin, but the classic art of Claude—which aimed at being nothing but the transparent mirror of sunny and transparent nature—that gave perfect expression to this classic landscape; and in the nineteenth centuryKarl Rottmann, according to what one reads, has most completely represented this same classical form of art. His twenty-eight Italian landscapes in the arcades of the Munich Hofgarten are said to display a sense of the beauty of line and a greatness of conception paralleled by few other landscape works of the century. And those who draw their critical appreciations from books will probably continue to make this statement, with all the greater right since the world has been assured that the Arcade pictures are but a shadow of earlier splendour. To a spectator who has not been primed and merely judges with his own eyes without knowing anything about Rottmann’s celebrity, these pictures with their hard, inept colouring and their pompous “synthetic” composition seem in the majority of cases to be excessively childish, though it is not contested that before their restoration by Leopold Rottmann and their present state of decay they may very possibly have been good. Rottmann’s Grecian landscapes in the New Pinakothek are not ranked high even by his admirers. Standing in the beginning entirely upon Koch’s ground, he was led in these pictures to give more importance to colour and light, and even to introduce unusual phenomena,such as lowering skies, with rainbows, sunsets, moonlight scenes, thunderstorms, and the like. This mixture of classical principles of drawing with effect-painting in the style of Eduard Hildebrandt brought a certain confusion into his compositions, to say nothing of the fact that he never got rid of his harsh and heavy colour, Bengal lights, and a crudeness of execution suggestive of tapestry. His water-colours, probably, contain the only evidence from which it may be gathered that Rottmann really had an eminent feeling for great characteristic lines, and did not unsuccessfully go through the school of Claude with his finely moulded, rhythmically perfected, and yet simple conception of nature.
OtherwiseFriedrich Prelleris the only one of all the stylists deriving from Koch who rose to works consistent in execution. To him only was it granted to assure his name a lasting importance by exhaustively working out a felicitous subject. TheOdysseylandscapes extend through his whole life. During a sojourn in Naples in 1830 he was struck by the first idea. After his return home he composed for Doctor Härtel in Leipzig the first series as wall decoration in tempera in 1832-34. Then there followed his journeys to Rügen and Norway, where he painted wild strand and fell landscapes of a sombre austerity. After this interruption, so profitably extending his feeling for nature, he returned to theOdyssey. The series grew from seven to sixteen cartoons, which were to be found in 1858 at the Munich International Exhibition. The Grand Duke of Weimar then commissioned him to paint the complete sequence for a hall in the Weimar Museum. In 1859-60 Preller prepared himself afresh in Italy, and as an old man completed the work which he had planned in youth. This Weimar series, executed in encaustic painting, is artistically the maturest that he ever did. Of the entire school he only had the secret of giving his figures a semblance of life, and concealed the artificiality of his compositions. Nature in his pictures has an austere, impressive sublimity, and is the worthy home of gods and heroes. During his long life he had made so many and such incessant studies of nature in North and South—even at seventy-eight he was seen daily with his sketch-book in the Campagna—that he could venture to work with great, simple lines without the danger of becoming empty.
At the time when these pictures were painted the rendering of still-life inlandscape had in general been long buried, although even to-day it has scattered representatives in the younger Preller, Albert Hertel, and Edmund Kanoldt. As antique monuments came into fashion with Classicism, German ruins became the mode at the beginning of the romantic period and the return to the national past. For Koch and his followers landscape was only of value when, as the background of classical works of architecture, it directed one’s thoughts to the antique: shepherds had to sit with their flock around them on the ruins of the temple of Vesta, or cows to find pasture between the truncated pillars of the Roman Forum. But now it could only find its justification by allying itself with mediæval German history, by the portrayal of castles and strongholds.
“What is beautiful?—A landscape with upright trees, fair vistas, atmosphere of azure blue, ornamental fountains, stately palaces in a learned architectural style, with well-built men and women, and well-fed cows and sheep. What is ugly?—Ill-formed trees with aged, crooked, and cloven stems, uneven and earthless ground, sharp-cut hills and mountains which are too high, rude or dilapidated buildings, with their ruins lying strewn in heaps, a sky with heavy clouds, stagnant water, lean cattle in the field, and ungraceful wayfarers.”
In these words Gérard de Lairesse, the ancestor of Classicism, defined his ideal of landscape, and in the last clause, where he speaks of ugliness, heprophetically indicated the landscape ideal of the Romanticists, as this is given for the first time in literature in Tieck’sSternbald. For the young knight inSternbaldwho desires to become a painter exclaims with enthusiasm: “Then would I depict lonely and terrible regions, rotting and broken bridges, between two rough cliffs facing a precipice, through which the forest stream forces its foaming course, lost travellers whose garments flutter in the moist wind, the dreaded figures of robbers ascending from the gully, waggons fallen upon and plundered, and battle against the travellers.” Which is all exactly the opposite to what Lairesse demanded from the landscapist. Alexander Humboldt has shown that the men of antiquity only found beauty in nature so far as she was kindly, smiling, and useful to them. But to the Romanticists nature was uncomely where she was the servant of civilisation, and beautiful only in tameless and awe-inspiring savageness. The light, therefore, was never to be that of simple day, but the gloom of night and of the mountain glens. Such phenomena are neither to be seen in Berlin nor in Breslau, and to be a Romanticist was to love the opposite of all that one sees around one. Tieck, who lived in the cold daylight of Berlin with its modern North German rationalism, has therefore—and not by chance—first felt the yearning for moonlight landscapes of primæval forest;Lessing, from Breslau, was the first to give it pictorial expression.
Even in the twenties Koch’s classical heroic landscapes, executed with an ideal sweep of line, were contrasted with castle chapels, ruins, and cloister courts composed in a similarly arbitrary manner. Landscape was no longer to make its appeal to the understanding by lines, as in the work of the Classicists, but to touch the spirit by colour. The various hues of moonlight seemed specially made to awaken sombre emotions. But as yet the technique of painting was too inadequately trained to express this preconceived “mood” through nature itself. To make his intentions clearer, therefore, the painter showed the effect of natural scenery on the figures in his pictures, illustrating the “mood” of the landscape in the “accessories.” Lessing’s early works represent in art that self-consciously elegiac and melancholy sentimental rendering of a mood introduced into literature bySternbald, in his knights, squires, noble maidens, and other romantic requisites. The melancholy lingers upon rocks savagely piled upon each other, tumble-down chapels and ruined castles, in swamps and sombre woods, in old, decaying trees, half-obliterated paths, and ghostly gravestones; it veils the sky with a dark grey cerement. Amid hills and glens with wayside crosses, mills, and charcoal-burners’ huts may be seen lonely wanderers, praying pilgrims, priests hurrying from the cloister to bring the last consolation to the dying, riders who have lost their way, and mercenary soldiers lying dead. His first picture of 1828 revealed a desolate churchyard beneath a dark and lowering heaven, from which a solitary sunbeam bursts forth to illumine a grave-stead. Then followed the castle by the sea standing upon strangely moulded cliffs heaped in confusion; the churchyard in the snow where the nuns in the cloisters are followinga dead sister to the grave; the churchyard cloister, likewise in snow, where an old man has dug a fresh grave; the cloister in the light of evening with a priest visiting the sick; the landscape with the weary, grey-headed crusader, riding on a weary horse through a lonely mountain district, probably meant as an illustration to Uhland’s balladDas Rosennest—
“Rühe hab ich nie gefunden,Als ein Jahr im finstern Thurm”;
“Rühe hab ich nie gefunden,
Als ein Jahr im finstern Thurm”;
and then came the desolate tableland with the robbers’ den burnt to ashes, and the landscape with the oak and the shrine of the Virgin, before which a knight and noble lady are making their devotions. As yet all these pictures were an arbitrarypotpourrifrom Walter Scott, Tieck, and Uhland, and their ideal was the Wolf’s Glen in theFreischütz.
The next step which Romanticism had to take was to discover such primæval woodland scenes in actual nature, and as Italian landscape seems, as it were, to have been made for Claude, nature, as she is in Germany, makes a peculiar appeal to this romantic temperament. In certain parts of Saxon Switzerland the rocks look as if giants of the prime had played ball with them or piled them one on top of the other in sport. Lessing found in 1832 a landscape corresponding to the romantic ideal of nature in the Eifel district, whither he had been induced to go by a book by Nöggerath,Das Gebirge im Rheinland und Westfalen nach Mineralogischem und Chemischem Bezuge. Up to that time he had only known the romantic ideal of nature through Scott, Tieck, and Uhland, just as the Classicists had taken their ideal from Homer, Theocritus, and Virgil: in the Eifel district it came before him in tangible form. Flat, swampy tracts of shrub and spruce alternated with dark woods, where gigantic firs, weird pines, and primæval oaks raised their branches to the sky. At the same time he beheld the rude and lonely sublimity of nature in union with a humanity which was as yet uncultivated, and for that reason all the simpler and the healthier, judged by the Romanticist’s distaste for civilisation. Defiant cones of rock and huge masses of mountain wildly piled upon each other overlooked valleys in which a stalwart race of peasants passed their days in patriarchal simplicity. Here, for the first time, a sense for actual landscape was developed in him; hitherto it had been alloyed by ataste for knights, robbers, and monks. “Oh, had I been born in the seventeenth century,” he wrote, “I would have wandered after the Thirty Years’ War throughout Germany, plundered, ruined, and run wild as she then was.” Hitherto only “composed” Italian landscapes had been painted, the soil of home ostensibly offering nosujets, or, in other words, not suiting those tendencies which subordinated everything to style: so Lessing was now the first painter of German landscape. His “Eifel Landscape” in the Berlin National Gallery, which was followed by a series of such pictures, introduces the first period of German landscape painting. The forms of the ground and of the rough sides of rock are rendered sharply and decisively, from geological knowledge. On principle he became an opponent of all artistic influence derived from Italy, and located himself in the Eifel district. The landscapes which he painted there are founded on immediate studies of nature, and are sustained by large and earnest insight. He draws the picture of this quarter in strong and simple lines: the sadness of the heath and the dark mist, the dull breath of which rises from swampy moorland. Still he painted only scenes in which nature had taken the trouble to be fantastic. The eye of the painter did not see her bright side, approaching her only when she looked gloomy or was in angry humour. Either he veils the sky with vast clouds or plunges into the darkness of an untrodden forest. Gnarled trees spread around, their branches stretching out fantastically twisted; the unfettered tumult of the powers of nature, the dull sultry atmosphere before the burst of the storm or its moaning subsidence, are the only moments which he represents. But the whole baggage of unseasonable Romanticism, the nuns and monks, pious knights and sentimental robbers, at first used to embody the mood of nature, were thrown overboard. A quieter and more melancholy though thoroughly manly seriousness, something strong and pithy, lies in the representations of Lessing. The Romanticists had lost all sense of the dumb silent life of nature. They only painted the changing adornment of the earth: heroes and the works of men, palaces, ruins, and classic temples. Nature served merely as a stage scene: the chief interest lay in the persons, the monuments, and the historical ideas associated with them. Even in the older pictures of Lessing the mood was exclusively given by the lyrical accessories. But now it was placed more and more in nature herself, and rings in power like an organ peal, from the cloudy sky, the dim lights, and the swaying tree-tops. For the first time it is really nature that speaks from the canvas, sombre and forceful. In this respect his landscapes show progress. They show the one-sidedness, but also the poetry of the Romantic view of nature. And they are no less of an advance in technique; for in making the discovery that his haunting ideal existed in reality, Lessing first began to study nature apart from preconceived and arbitrary rules of composition, and—learnt to paint.
Up to 1840 there stood at his side a master no less powerful, the refractory, self-taughtKarl Blechen, who only took up painting when he was five-and-twenty, and became one of the most original of German landscapists, in spite of a ruined life prematurely closing in mental darkness and suicide. He possessed a delicate feeling for nature, inspiration, boldness, and a spirited largeness of manner, although his technique was hard, awkward, and clumsy to the very end. He might be called the Alfred Rethel of landscape painting. He was not moved by what was kindly or formally beautiful in nature, but by loneliness, melancholy, and solitude. Many of his landscapes break away from peaceful melancholy, and are like the pictures in some horrible nightmare, ghastly and terrifying; on the other hand, he often surprises us by the pleasure he takes in homely everyday things, a characteristic hitherto of rare occurrence. Whereas Lessing never crossed the Alps for fear of losing his originality, Blechen was the first who saw even modern Italy without the spectacles of ideal style. From his Italian pictures it would not be supposed that he had previously studied the landscapes of the Classicists, or that beside him in Berlin Schinkel worked on the entirely abstract and ideal landscape. As a painter Blechen has even discovered the modern world. For Lessing landscape “with a purpose” was something hideous and insupportable. He cared exclusively for nature untouched by civilisation, painted the murmuring wood and the raging storm, here and there at most a shepherd who indicated the simplest and the oldest employment on the earth’s surface. But the Blechen Exhibition of 1881 contained an entirely singular phenomenon as regards the thirties, an evening landscape before the iron works in Eberswald: a long, monotonous plain with a sluggish river, behind which the dark outlines of vomiting manufactory chimneys rise sullenly into the bright evening sky. Even in that day Blechen painted what others scarcely ventured to draw: nature working in the service of man, and thereby—to use Tieck’s expression—“robbed of her austere dignity.”
Lessing’s most celebrated follower,Schirmer, appears in general as a weakened and sentimental Lessing. He began in 1828 with “A Primæval German Forest,” but a journey to Italy caused him in 1840 to turn aside from this more vigorous path. Henceforth his efforts were directed to nobility of form and line, to turning out Southern ideal landscapes with classically romantic accessories. The twenty-six Biblical landscapes drawn in charcoal, belonging to the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle, the four landscapes in oil with the history of the Good Samaritan in the Kunsthalle of Carlsruhe, and the twelve pictures on the history of Abraham in the Berlin National Gallery, are the principal results of this second period—his period of ideal style.They are tame efforts at a compromise between Lessing and Preller, and therefore of no consequence to the history of the development of landscape painting. Amongst the many who regarded him as a model,Valentin Ruthsof Hamburg is one of the most natural and delicate. His pictures, however, did not display any new impulse to widen the boundary by proceeding more in the direction of healthy and honestly straightforward observation of nature, or by emancipating himself from the school of regular composition and the rendering of an arbitrary mood.
Meanwhile this impulse came from another quarter. At the very time when thegenreartists were painting their earliest pictures of rustic life under the influence of Teniers and Ostade, the landscapists also began to return to the old Dutch masters, following Everdingen in particular. Thus another strip of nature was conquered, another step made towards simplicity. The landscape ideal of the Classicists had been architecture, that of the Romanticists poetry; from this time forward it became pure painting. Little Denmark, which fifty years before had exercised through Carstens that fateful influence on Germany which led painters from the treatment of contemporary life and sent them in pursuit of the antique, now made recompense for the evil it had done. During the twenties and thirties it produced certain landscapists who guided the Germans to look with a fresh and unfettered gaze, undisturbed by the ideal, at nature in their own country, after the aberrations of Classicism and theone-sidedness of the Romanticists. Under Eckersberg the Academy of Copenhagen was the centre of a healthy realism founded on the Dutch, and some of the painters who received their training there and laboured in later years in Dresden, Düsseldorf, and Munich spread abroad the principles of this school.
J. C. Dahltaught as professor in the Academy of Dresden. At the present time his Norwegian landscapes seem exceedingly old-fashioned, but in the thirties they evidently must have been something absolutely new, for they raised a hue and cry amongst the German painters as “the most wild naturalism.” In 1788 Johann Christian Clausen Dahl was born in Bergen. He was the son of one of those Norwegian giants who are one day tillers of the soil and on the morrow fishers or herdsmen and hunters, who cross the sea in their youth as sailors and clear the waste land when they return home. As he wandered with his father through the dense, solitary pine forests, along abrupt precipices, sullen lakes, rushing waterfalls, silvery shining glaciers, the majesty of Northern nature was revealed to him, and he rendered them in little coloured drawings, which, in spite of their awkward technique, bear witness to an extraordinary freshness of observation. The course of study at the Copenhagen Academy, whither he proceeded in his twentieth year, enabled him to become acquainted with Everdingen and Ruysdael, and these two old masters, who had also painted Norwegian landscapes, stimulated him to further efforts.
Dahl became the first representative of Norwegian landscape painting, and remained true to his country even when in 1819 he undertook a professorship in Dresden. Italy and Germany occupied his brush as much as Norway, but he was only himself when he worked amongst the Norwegian cliffs. Breadth of painting and softness of atmosphere are wanting in all his pictures. They are hard and dry in their effect, and not seldom entirely conventional; especially the large works painted after 1830. In them he gave the impression of a bewildering, babbling personality. They have been swiftly conceived and swiftly painted, but without artistic love and fine feeling. In his later years Dahl did not allow himself the time to bury himself in nature quietly and with devotion, and finally—especially in his moonlight pictures—took to using a violet-blue, which has a very conventional effect. Everdingen sought by preference for what was forceful and violently agitated in nature; Ruysdael felt an enthusiasm for rushing mountain streams. But for Dahl even these romantic elements of Northern nature were not enough. He approached nature, not to interpret her simply, but to arrange his effects. In his picture the wild Norwegian landscape had to be wilder and more restless than in reality it is. Not patient enough to win all its secrets from the savage mountain torrent, he forced together his effects, made additions, brought confusion into his picture as a whole, and a crudeness into the particular incidents. His large pictures have a loud effect contrasted with the simple intuition of nature amongst the Netherlanders. Many of them are merely fantastically irrational compositions of motives which have been learned by heart.
But there were also years in which Dahl stood in the front rank of his age, and even showed it the way to new aims. He certainly held that position from 1820 to 1830 in those pictures in which, instead of making romantic adaptations of Ruysdael and Everdingen, he resembled them by rendering the weirdness and eeriness and the rough and wild features of Norwegian scenery: red-brown heaths and brownish green turf-moors, stunted oaks and dark pine forests, erratic blocks sown without design amid the roots of trees, branches snapped by the storm and hanging as they were broken, and trunks felled by the tempest and lying where they fell. In certain pictures in the Bergen and Copenhagen Galleries he pointed out the way to new aims. The tendency to gloom and seriousness which reigns in those Dutch Romanticists has here yielded to what is simple and familiar, to the homely joy of the people of the North in the crisp, bright day and the wayward sunbeams. He loves the glimmer of light upon the birch leaves and the peacefully rippling sea. Like Adrian van der Neer, he studied with delight the wintry sky, the snow-clad plains, and the night and the moonshine. He began to feel even the charm of spring. Poor peasant cots are brightly and pleasantly perched upon moist, green hills, as though he had quite forgotten what his age demanded in “artistic composition.” Or the summer day spreads opulent and real between the cliffs, and the warm air vibrates over the fields. Peasants andcattle, glimmering birches and village spires, stand vigorously forth in the landscape; even the execution is so simple that with all his richness of detail he succeeds in attaining a great effect. It is felt that this painting has developed amid a virgin nature, surrounded by the poetry of the fjord, the lofty cliff, and the torrent. In the same measure the Dutch had not the feeling for quietude and habitable, humble, and familiar places. And perhaps it was not by chance that this reformer came from the most virgin country of Europe, from a country that had had no share in any great artistic epoch of the past.
Caspar David Friedrich, that singular painter who carried on his artistic work in Greifswald, and later in Dresden also, is, if anything, almost more original and startling. Like Dahl, he studied under Eckersberg, at the Academy in Copenhagen, and it was this elder artist who opened his eyes to nature, in which he saw moods and humours as romantic as they were modern. His work was not seen in a right light until shown in the German Centenary Exhibition of 1906, when his just place was first, in the history of art, assigned to him.
For Munich a similar importance was won by the Hamburg painterChristian Morgenstern, who, like all artists of this group, imitated the Dutch in the tone of his colour, though as a draughtsman he remained a fresh and healthy son of nature. Even what he accomplished in all naïveté between 1826 and 1829, through direct study of Hamburg landscape, is something unique in the German production of that age. His sketches and etchings of these years assure him a high place amongst the earliest German “mood” painters, andshow that as a landscapist he had at that time made the furthest advance towards simplicity and intimacy of feeling. A journey to Norway, undertaken in 1829, and a sojourn at the Copenhagen Academy, where he worked up his Norwegian studies, only extended his ability without altering his principles; and when he came to Munich in the beginning of the thirties his new and personal intuition of nature made a revolution in artistic circles. The landscape painters learnt from him that Everdingen, Ruysdael, and Rembrandt were contemporaries of Poussin, that foliage need not be an exercise of style, and is able properly to indicate the nature of the tree. He discovered the beauty of the Bavarian plateau for the Munich school.
Even the first picture that he brought with him from Hamburg displayed a wide plain shadowed by clouds—a part of the Lüneberg heath—and to this type of subject he remained faithful even in later days. Himself a child of the plains, he sought for kindred motives in Bavaria, and found them in rich store on the shore of the Isar, in the quarries near Polling, at Peissenberg, and in the mossy region near Dachau. His pictures have not the power of commanding the attention of an indifferent spectator, but when they have been once looked into they are seen to be poetic, quiet, harmless, sunny, and thoughtful. He delighted in whatever was ordinary and unobtrusive, the gentle nature of the wood, the surroundings of the village, everything homely and familiar. If Rottmann revelled in the forms of Southern nature, Morgenstern abided by his native Germany; where Lessing only listened to the rage of the hurricane, Morgenstern hearkened to the quiet whisper of the breeze. The shadows of the clouds and the radiance of the sun lie over the dark heath, the moonlight streams dreamily over the quiet streets of the village, the waves break, at one moment rushing noisily and at another gently caressing the shore. Later, when he turned to the representation of the mountains, he lost the intimacy of feeling which was in the beginning peculiar to him. In mountain pictures, often as he attempted ravines, waterfalls, and snowy Alpine summits, he never succeeded in doing anything eminently good. These pictures have something petty and dismembered, and not the great, simple stroke of his plains and skies.
What Morgenstern was for Munich,Ludwig Gurlittwas for Düsseldorf—the most eminent of the great Northern colony which migrated thither in the thirties. His name is not to be found in manuals, and the pictures of his later period which represent him in public galleries seldom give a full idea of his importance. After a journey to Greece in 1859 he took to a brown tone, in which much is conventional. Moreover, his retired life—he resided from 1848 to 1852 in a Saxon village, and from 1859 to 1873 in Siebleben, near Gotha—contributed much to his being forgotten by the world. But the history of art which seeks operative forces must do him honour as the first healthy, realistic landscape painter of Germany, and—still more—as one who opened the eyes of a number of younger painters who have since come to fame.
Gurlitt was a native of Holstein, and, like Morgenstern, received his firstinstruction in Hamburg, where at that time Bendixen, Vollmer, the Lehmanns, and the Genslers formed an original group of artists. After this, as in the case of Morgenstern also, there followed a longer sojourn in Norway and Copenhagen. In Düsseldorf, where he then went, a Jutland heath study made some sensation on his arrival. It was the first landscape seen in Düsseldorf which had not been composed, and Schadow is said to have come to Gurlitt’s studio, accompanied by his pupils, to behold the marvel. In 1836 he migrated to Munich, where Morgenstern had worked before him, and here he produced a whole series of works, which reveals an artist exceedingly independent in sentiment, and one who even preserves his individuality in the presence of the Dutch. His pictures were grey in tone, and not yellowish, like those of the Dutch; moreover, they were less composed and less “intelligently” dressed out with accessories than the pictures of Dahl; they were glances into nature resulting from earnest, realistic striving. Even when he began to paint Italian pictures, as he did after 1843, he preserved a straightforward simplicity which was not understood by criticism in that age, though it makes the more sympathetic appeal at the present day. The strength of his realism lay, as was the case with all artists of those years, rather in drawing; but at times he reaches, even in painting, a remarkable clearness and delicacy, which at one time verges on the silver tone of Canaletto, at another on the fine grey of Constable.
Realism begins in German art with the entry of these Northern paintersinto Düsseldorf and Munich. They were less affected by æsthetic prejudices, and fresher and healthier than the Germans. Gurlitt was specially their intellectual leader, the soul, the driving force of the great movement which now followed. Roused by him,Andreas Achenbachemancipated himself from the landscape of style, and, in the years from 1835 to 1839, painted Norwegian pictures even before he knew Norway. Roused by Gurlitt, Achenbach set forth upon the pilgrimage thither, the journey which was a voyage of discovery for German landscape painting.
Until Achenbach’s death in 1905 he yearly exhibited works which were no longer in touch with the surrounding efforts of younger men, and there was an inclination to make little of his importance as a pioneer. What is wanting in his pictures is artistic zeal; what he seems to have too much of is routine. Andreas Achenbach is, as his portrait shows, a man of great acuteness. From his clear, light blue eyes he looks sharply and sagaciously into the world around; his short, thick-set figure, proud and firm of carriage, in spite of years, bears witness to his tough energy. His forehead, like Menzel’s, is rather that of an architect than of a poet; and his pictures correspond to his outward appearance. Each one of his earlier good pictures was a battle fought and won. Realism incarnate, a man from whom all visionary enthusiasm lay at a world-wide distance, he conquered nature by masculine firmness and unexampled perseverance. He appears as amaître-peintre, a man of cool, exact talent with a clear and sober vision. The chief characteristic of his organism was his eminent capacity for appreciating the artistic methods of other artists, and adapting what was essential in them to his own manner of production. One breathes more freely before the works of the masters of Barbizon, and merely sees good pictures in those of Achenbach. The former are captivating by their intimate penetration, where he is striking by his bravura of execution. His landscapes have no chance inspiration, no geniality. Everything is harmonised for the sake of pictorial effect. The structure and scaffolding are of monumental stability. Yet fine as his observation undoubtedly is, he has never surprised the innermost working of nature, but merely turned her to account for the production of pictures. For the French artists colour is the pure expression of nature and of her inward humour, but for Achenbach it is just the means for attaining an effectiveness similar to that of the Dutch. Penetrating everything thoroughly with those sparkling blue eyes of his, he learnt to render conscientiously and firmly the forms of the earth and its outward aspect, but the moods of its life appealing to the spirit like music were never disclosed to him. The paintings of the Dutch attracted him to art, not the impulse to give token to his own peculiar temperament. He thinks more of producing pictures which may equal those of his forerunners in their merits than of rendering the impression of nature which he has himself received. His intelligence quickens at the study of the rules and theories set up by the Dutch, and he seeks for spots in nature where he may exercise these principles, but remains chill at the sight of sky and water, treesand mountains. It is not mere love of nature that has guided his brush, but a refined calculation of pictorial effect; and as he never went beyond this endeavour after rounded expression, as it was understood by the Dutch, though he certainly set German landscape free from a romantic subjection to style like Schirmer’s, he never led it to immediate personal observation of nature. It is not the fragrance of nature that is exhaled from his pictures, but the odour of oil and varnish; and as the means he made use of to attain his effects never alter, the result is frequently conventional and methodic.
But this does not alter the fact that, when the development of German landscape painting is in question, the name of Andreas Achenbach will be always heard in connection with it. He united technical qualities of the higher order with the capacity of impressing the public, and therefore he completed the work that the Danes had begun. He was the reformer who gave evidence that it was not alone by cliffs and baronial castles and murmuring oaks that sentiment was to be awakened; he hated everything unhealthy, mawkish, and vague, and by showing the claws of the lion of realism in the very heart of the romantic period he came to have the significance of a hero in German landscape painting. He forced demure Lower German landscape to surrender to him its charms; he revealed the fascination of Dutch canal scenes, with their quaint architecture and their characteristic human figures; he went to the stormy, raging North Sea, and opposed the giant forces ofboisterous, unfettered nature to the tame pictures of the school of Schirmer. Achenbach’s earliest North Sea pictures were exhibited at the very time when Heine’s North Sea series made its appearance, and they soon ousted the wrecks of the French painter Gudin, which, up to that time, had dominated the picture market. For the first time in the nineteenth century sea-pieces were so painted that the water really seemed a fluent, agitated element, the waves of which did not look as if they had been made of lead, and the froth and foam of cotton wool. The things which he was specially felicitous in painting were Rhine-land villages with red-tiled roofs, Dutch canals with yellow sandbanks and running waves breaking at the wooden buttresses of the harbour, Norwegian scenes with stubborn cliffs and dark pines, wild torrents and roaring waterfalls. He did not paint them better than Everdingen and Ruysdael had done, but he painted them better than any of his contemporaries had it in their power to do.
As Gurlitt is connected with the present by Achenbach, Morgenstern is connected with it byEduard Schleich. The Munich picture rendering a mood took the place of Rottmann’s architectural pictures. Instead of the fair forms of the earth’s surface, artists began to study the play of sunlight on the plain and amid the flight of the clouds, and instead of the build of the landscape they turned to notice its atmospheric mood. Through Morgenstern Schleich was specially directed to Ruysdael and Goyen. In Ruysdael he was captivated by that profound seriousness and that sombre observation of nature which corresponded to something in his own humour; in Goyen by the pictorial harmony of sunlight, air, water, and earth. Schleich has visited France, Belgium, Hungary, and Italy, yet it is only by exception that he has painted anything but what the most immediate vicinity of Munich might offer. He chose the plainest spot in nature—a newly tilled field, a reedy pond, a stretch of brown moorland, a pair of cottages and trees; and under the guidance of Goyen he observed the changes of the sky with great care—the retreat of thunderclouds, the sun shrouded by thin veils of haze, the tremulous moonlight, or the hovering of the morning and evening mists. The Isar district and the mossy Dachauer soil were his favourite places of sojourn. He had a special preference for rain and moonlight and the mood of autumn, in rendering which he toned brown and grey hues to fine Dutch harmonies. His keynote was predominantly serious and elegiac, but he also loved scenes in which there was a restless and violent change of light. Over a wide plateau the sunlight spreads its radiance, whilst from the side an army of dense thunderclouds approaches, threatening storm and casting dark shadows. Over a monotonous plain, broken by solitary clumps of trees, the warm summer rain falls dripping down. Trees and shrubs throw light shadows, and the plain glistens in the beams of the sun. Or else there is a wide expanse of moor. Darkling the clouds advance, the rushes bend before the wind, and narrow strips of moonlight glitter amid the slender reeds. By such works Schleich became the head of the Munich school of landscape without having everdirected the study of pupils. Through him and through Achenbach capacity for the fresh observation of the life of nature was given to German painters.
Undoubtedly amongst the younger group of artists there was a great difference in regard to choice of subject. The modern rendering of mood has only had its origin in Germany; it could not finally develop itself there. Just as figure painting, after making so vigorous a beginning with Bürkel, turned togenrepainting in the hands of Enhuber and Knaus, until it returned to its old course in Leibl, landscape also went through the apprentice period of interesting subject, until it once more recognised the poetry of simpleness. The course of civilisation itself led it into these lines. When Morgenstern painted his first pictures the post-chaise still rattled from village to village, but now the whistle of the railway engine screams shrill as the first signal of a new age throughout Europe. Up to that time the possibility of travelling had been greatly circumscribed by the difficulties of traffic. But facilitated arrangements of traffic brought with them such a desire for travel as had never been before. In literature the revolution displayed itself by the rise of books of travels as a new branch of fiction. Hackländer sent many volumes of touring sketches into the market. Theodor Mügge made Norway, Sweden,and Denmark the scene of his tales. But America was the land where the Sesame was to be found, for Germany had been set upon the war-trail with Cooper’s Indians, it had Charles Sealsfield to describe the grotesque mountain land of Mexico, the magic of the prairie, and the landscapes of Susquehannah and the Mississippi, and read Gerstäcker’s, Balduin Möllhausen’s, and Otto Ruppius’ transatlantic sketches with unwearying excitement. The painters who found their greatest delight in seeing the world with the eyes of a tourist also became cosmopolitan.
In GenevaAlexander Calamebrought Germany to the knowledge of what is to be seen in Switzerland. Calame was, indeed, a dry, unpoetic landscapist. He began as a young tradesman by making little coloured views of Switzerland which foreigners were glad to bring away with them as mementoes of their visits, just as they now do photographs. Even his later pictures can only lay claim to the merit of such “mementoes of Switzerland.” His colour is insipid and monotonous, his atmosphere heavy, his technique laborious. By painting he understood the illumination of drawings, and his drawing was that of an engraver. An excellent drawing-master, he possessed an unusual mastery of perspective. On the other hand, all warmth and inward life are wanting in his works. Sentiment has been replaced by correct manipulation, and in the deep blue mirror of his Alpine lakes, as in the luminous red of his Alpine summits, there is always to be seen the illuminator who has first drawn the contours with a neat pencil and pedantic correctness. His pictures are grandiose scenes of nature felt in a petty way—in science too it is often the smallest spirit that seeks the greatest heroes. “The Ruins of Pæstum,” like “The Thunderstorm on the Handeck” and “The Range of Monte-Rosa at Sunrise,” merely attain an external, scenical effect which is not improved by crude and unnatural contrasts of light. And as, in later years, when orders accumulated, he fell a victim to an astounding fertility, many of hisworks give one the impression of a dexterous calligrapher incessantly repeating the same ornamental letters. “Un Calame, deux Calame, trois Calame—que de calamités,” ran the phrase every year in the Paris Salon.
But if France remained cool he found the more numerous admirers in Germany. When, in 1835, he exhibited his first pictures in Berlin, a view of the Lake of Geneva, his appearance was at once hailed with the warmest sympathy. The dexterity, the rounded form, the finish of his pictures, were exactly what gave pleasure, and the distinctness of his drawing made its impression. His lithograph studies of trees and his landscape copies attained the importance of canonical value, and for whole decades remained in use as a medium of instruction in drawing. Amongst German paintersCarl Ludwig,Otto von Kameke, andCount Stanislaus Kalkreuthwere specially incited by Calame to turn to the sublimity of Alpine nature. Desolate wastes of cliffs, still, clear blue lakes, wild, plunging torrents, and mountain summits covered with glaciers and glowing to rose colour in the reflection of the setting sun are the elements of their pictures as of those of the Genevan master.
After Achenbach there came a whole series of artists from the North who began to depict the mountains of their native Norway under the strong colour effects of the Northern sun. The majestic formations of the fjords, the emerald green walls of rock, the cloven valleys, the terrible forest wildernesses, and the mountains of Norway dazzlingly illuminated and reflecting themselves like glittering jewels in the quiet waters of sapphire blue lakes, were interesting enough to afford nourishment for more than one landscapist.
Knud Baade, who worked from 1842 in Munich, after a lengthy sojourn at the Copenhagen Academy and with Dahl in Dresden, delighted in moonlight scenes, gloomy fir forests, and midnight suns. The sea rises in waves mountainhigh, and tosses mighty vessels like withered leaves or dashes foaming against the cliffs of the shore. Fantastic clouds chase each other across the sky, and the wan moonlight rocks unsteadily upon the waves. More seldom he paints the sea lit up afar by the moon, or the fjord with its meadows and silver birches; and in such plain pictures he makes a far more attractive effect than in those which are wild and ambitious, for his diffident, petty execution is, as a rule, but little suited to restless and, as it were, dramatic scenes of nature.
Having come to Düsseldorf in 1841,Hans Gudebecame the Calame of the North. Achenbach taught him to approach the phenomena of nature boldly and realistically, and not to be afraid of a rich and soft scale of colour. Schirmer, the representative of Italian still landscape, guided him to the acquisition of a certain large harmony and sense for style in the structure of his pictures, to beauty of line and effective disposition of great masses of light and shade. This quiet, sure-footed, and robust realism, which had, at the same time, a gift of style, became the chief characteristic of his Northern landscapes, in which, however, the mutable and fleeting moods of nature were all the more neglected. Here are Norwegian mountain landscapes with lakes, rivers, and waterfalls, then pictures of the shore under the most varied phases of light, or grand cliff scenery with a sombre sky and a sea in commotion. Hans Gude, living from 1864 in Carlsruhe, and from 1880 in Berlin, is one of those painters whom one esteems, but for whom it is not possible to feel great enthusiasm—one of those conscientious workers who from their very solidity run the risk of becoming tedious. His landscapes are good gallery pictures, soberly and prosaically correct, and never irritating, though at the same time they seldom kindle any warm feeling.
Like Gude,Niels Björnson Möllerdevoted himself to pictures of the shore and the sea. Undisturbed by men in his sequestered retreat,August Capellengave way to the melancholy charms of the Norwegian forest. He represented the tremulous clarity of the air above the cliffs, old, shattered tree-trunks and green water plants, sleepy ponds, and far prospects bounded by blue mountains; but he would have made an effect of greater originality had he thought less of Schirmer’s noble line and compositions arranged in the grand style.Morten-Müllerbecame the specialist of the fir forest. His native woods where the valleys stretch towards the high mountain region offered him motives, which he worked up in large and excessively scenical pictures. His strong point was the contrast between sunlight playing on the mountain tops and mysterious darkness reigning in the forest depths, and his pictures have many admirers on account of “their elegiac melancholy, their minor key of touching sadness.” The Norwegian spring changing the earth into one carpet of moorland, broken by marshes, found its delineator inErik Bodom.Ludwig Munthebecame the painter of wintry landscape in thaw, when the snow is riddled with holes and a dirty brown crust of earth peeps from the dazzling mantle. A desolate field, a pair of crippled trees stretching theirnaked branches to the dark-grey sky, a swarm of crows and a drenched road marked with the tracks of wheels, a tawny yellow patch of light gleaming through the cloud-bank and reflected in the wayside puddles, such are the elements out of which one of Munthe’s landscapes is composed. ThroughEilert Adelsten Normannrepresentations of the fjords gained currency in the picture market. His specialty was the delineation of the steep and beetling rocky fastnesses of Lofodden with their various reflections of light and colour, the midnight sun glaring over the deep clear sea, the contrast between the blue-black masses of the mountains and the gleaming fields of snow.
Others, such asLudwig Willroider,Louis Douzette, andHermann Eschke, set themselves to observe the German heath and the German forest from similar points of view; the one painted great masses of mountain and giant trees, the other the setting sun, and the third the sea.Oswald Achenbach,Albert Flamm, andAscan Lutterothset out once more on the pilgrimage to the South, where, in contrast to their predecessors, they studied no longer the classic lines of nature in Italy, but the splendour of varied effects of colour in the neighbourhood of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples. The most enterprising turned their backs on Europe altogether, and began to paint the primævalforests of South America, to which Alexander Humboldt had drawn attention, the azure and scarlet wonders of the tropics, and the gleam and sparkle of the icy world at the ultimate limits of the Polar regions.Ferdinand Bellermannwas honoured as a new Columbus when in 1842 he returned home with his sketches, botanically accurate as they were, of the marvels of the virgin forest.Eduard Hildebrandt, who in 1843 had already gone through the Canary Islands, Italy, Sicily, North Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Sahara, and the Northern sea of ice, at the mandate of Frederich Wilhelm IV in 1862 undertook a voyage round the world “to learn from personal view the phenomena that the sea, the air, and the solid earth bring forth beneath the most various skies.”Eugen Brachttraversed Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, and returned with a multitude of studies from the sombre and majestic landscape of the desert, and from that world of ruins and mountains in the East, and developed them at home into as many pictures.
A modicum of praise is due to all these masters for having continually widened the circuit of subject-matter, and gradually disclosed the whole world; and if their works cannot be reckoned as the products of a delicate landscape painting, that is a result of the same taste which prescribed anecdotic and narrative subjects to thegenrepicture of those years. The landscape painters conquered the earth, but, above all, those parts of it which were geographically remarkable. This they did in the interest of the public. They went with a Baedeker in their pocket into every quarter of the globe, brought with them all the carmine necessary for sunsets, and set up their easels at every place marked with an asterisk in the guidebook. And in these fair regions they noted everything that was to be seen with the said Baedeker’s assistance. Through satisfying the interest of the tourist by a rendering, faithful to a hair’s breadth, of topographically instructive points, they could best reckon on the sale of their productions.
At the same time, their pictures betray that, during this generation, historical painting was throned on a summit whence it could dictate the æsthetic catechism. The historical picture represented a humanity that carried about with it the consciousness of its outward presence, draped itself in front of the glass, and made an artificial study of every gesture and every expression of emotion.Genrepainting followed, and rendered the true spirit of life, illustrating it histrionically, but without surprising it in its unconstrained working. And so trees, mountains, and clouds also were forced to lay aside the innocence of unconscious being and wrap themselves in the cloak of affectation. Simple reality in its quiet, delicate beauty, the homely “mood” of nature, touching the forms of landscape with the play of light and air, had nothing to tell an age overstrained by the heroics of history and the grimaces ofgenrepainting. A more powerful stimulus was necessary. So the landscapists also were forced to seek nature where she was histrionic and came forth in blustering magnificence; they were forced to send off brilliant pyrotechnics to fire out sun, moon, and stars in order to be heard, or, more literally, seen.
Instruction or theatrical effect—the aim of historical painting—had also to be that of the landscape painter. And as railroads are cosmopolitan arrangements, he was in a position to satisfy both demands with promptitude. As historical painters in the chase of striking subjects directed their gaze to the farthest historical horizon, and thegenrepainters sought to take their public captive principally through what was alien and strange, Oriental and Italian, the landscape painters, too, found their highest aim in the widest possible expansion of the geographical horizon. “Have these good people not been born anywhere in particular?” asked Courbet, when he contemplated the German landscapes in the Munich Exhibition of 1869. What would first strike the inhabitant of a Northern country in foreign lands was made the theme of the majority of the pictures. But as the historical painting, in illustrating all the great dramatic scenes from the Trojan War to the French Revolution, yielded at one time to a pædagogical doctrinaire tendency and at another to theatrical impassionedness, so landscape painting on its cosmopolitan excursions became partly a dry synopsis of famous regions, only justifiable as a memento of travel, partly a tricked-out piece of effect which, like everything obtrusive, soon lost its charm. Pictures of the first description which chiefly borrowed their motives from Alpine nature, so imposing in its impressiveness of form—grand masses of rock, glaciers, snow-fields, and abrupt precipices—only needed to have the fidelity of a portrait. Where that was given, the public, guided by the instinct for what is majestic and beautiful in nature, stood before them quite content, while Alpine travellers instructed the laity that the deep blue snow of the picture was no exaggeration, but a phenomenon of the mountain world which had been correctly reproduced. In all these cases there can be no possible doubt about geographical position, but there is seldom any need to make inquiries after the artist. The interest which they excite is purely of a topographical order; otherwise they bear the stamp of ordinary prose, of the aridity and unattractiveness which always creeps in as a consequence of pure objectivity. Works of the second description, which depict exotic regions, striking by the strangeness of various phenomena of light and the splendour and glow of colour, are generally irritating by their professional effort to display “mood.” The old masters revealed “mood” without intending to do so, because they approached nature piously and with a wealth of feeling. The new masters obtain a purely external effect, because they strain after a “mood” in their painting without feeling it; and though art does not exclude the choice of exotic subjects, it is not healthy when a tendency of this sort becomes universal. Really superior art will, from principle, never seek the charm of what is strange and distant, since it possesses the magical gift of bestowing the deepest interest on what lies nearest to it. In addition to this, such effects are as hard to seize as the moment of most intense excitement in the historical picture. As an historical painter Delacroix could render it, and Turner as a landscape painter, but geniuses like Delacroix and Turner are not born every day. As these phenomenawere painted at the time in Germany, the right “mood” was not excited by them, but merely a frigid curiosity. Almost all landscapes of these years create an effect merely through their subject; they are entertaining, astonishing, instructive, but the poetry of nature has not yet been aroused. It could only reveal itself when the preponderance of interest in mere subject was no longer allowed. As the figure painters at last disdained through narrative and “points” to win the applause of those who had no sensitiveness for art, so the landscape painters were obliged to cease from giving geographical instruction by the representation of nature as beloved by tourists, and to give up forcing a “mood” in their pictures by a subterfuge. The necessary degree of artistic absorption could only go hand in hand with a revolt against purely objective interest of motive, and with a strenuous effort at the representation of familiar nature in the intimate charm of its moods of light and atmosphere. It was necessary for refinement of taste to follow on the expression of subject-matter; and this impulse had to bring artists back to the path struck by Dahl, Morgenstern, and Gurlitt. To unite the simple, moving, and tender observation of those older artists with richer and more complex methods of expression was the task given to the next generation in France, wherepaysage intime, the most refined and delicate issue of the century, grew to maturity in the very years when German landscape painting roamed through the world with the joy of an explorer.