CHAPTER XXIX
REALISM IN GERMANY
InGermany the realistic movement was carried out in much the same way as in France, though it came into action two decades after its French original. Here also it was recognised that the well-meant but badly painted anecdote must give way to the well-painted picture: and if we inquire who it was that gave to Germany the first serious paintings inspired by the modern spirit the reply, without hesitation, must be Adolf Menzel. The pioneering work of this great little man, who for fifty years had embodied in their typical perfection all phases of German art, is something fabulous: the greatest and, one might almost say, the only historical painter of bygone epochs, the only one who knew a previous period so intimately that he could venture on painting it, was also the leader of the great movement which, in the seventies, aimed at the representation of our own life. His first appearance was in the time when the proud Titan Cornelius sought to take heaven by storm. Little Menzel was no Titan in those days; he seems in that generation like one bound to the earth, yet he belonged to the Cyclopean race. He was a mighty architect with the powers of a giant; and this uncouth Cyclops rough-hewed and chiselled the blocks, and, fitting each in its place, raised an edifice to as lofty a height as the Romanticists had reached on the perilous wings of Icarus. Having been first the draughtsman and then the painter of Frederick the Great, he gave up history after finishing the picture of the Battle of Hochkirch: his talent was too modern, too much set upon what was concrete, to admit of its being given full scope to the end by constructive work from amilieuthat was not his own. Until his fortieth year he had celebrated the glorious past of his country. When, with the death of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, a great and decisive turn was given to the politics of the Prussian state—one which put an end to the stagnation of civil life in Prussia and Germany, and ushered in a new and brilliant period for the realm and the heirs of Friedrich—the painter of Friedrich the Great became the painter of the new realm. After he had already, in the first half of the century, placed reality on the throne of art in the place of rhetoric and a vague ideal, he went one step further in the direction of keen and direct observation, and now painted what he saw around him—the stream of palpitating life.
“The Coronation of King Wilhelm at Königsberg” is the great and triumphant title-page to this section of his art. The effects of light, the redtones of the uniforms, the shimmering white silk dresses, the surging of the mass of people, the perfect ease with which all the personages are individualised, the princes, the ministers, the ambassadors, the men of learning, the instantaneousness in the movement of the figures, the absolutely unforced and yet subtle and pictorial composition, render this painting no picture of ceremonies, in the traditional sense of the phrase, but a work of art at once intimate and august in the impression which it makes. In the picture “King Wilhelm setting out to join the Army”—the representation of the thrilling moment, on the afternoon of 31st July 1870, when the King drove along the linden avenue to the railway station—this phase, which he began with the Coronation picture, was brought to a close. Everything surges and moves, speaks and breathes, and glows with the palpitating life which vibrates through all in this moment of patriotic excitement. But the painter’s course led him further.
He first became entirely Menzel when he made the discovery of toiling humanity. In 1867, in the year of the World Exhibition, he came to Paris and became acquainted with Meissonier and Stevens. With Meissonier in particular—whose portrait he painted—he entered into a close friendship, and it was curious afterwards to see the two together at exhibitions—the little figure of Menzel with his gigantic bald forehead and the little figure of Meissonier with his gigantic beard, a Cyclops and a Gnome, two kings in the realm of Liliput, of whom one was unable to speak a word of German and the other unable to speak a word of French, although they had need merely of a look, a shrug, or a movement of the hand to understand each other entirely. He also came into the society of Courbet, who had just made the famous separate exhibition of his works, at the Café Lamartine, in the company of Heilbuth, Meyerheim, Knaus, and others. Here in Paris he produced his first pictures of popular contemporary life, and if as an historical painter he had already been a leader in the struggle against theatrical art, he became a pioneer in these works also. Everywhere he let in air and made free movement possible for those who pressed forward in his steps. In the course of years he painted and drew everything which excited in him artistic impulse upon any ground whatever, and not one of these endeavours was work thrown away. A universal genius amongst the painters of real life, he combined all the qualities of which other men of excellent talent merely possessed fragments separately apportionedamongst them: the sharpest eye for every detail of form, the most penetrative discrimination for the life of the spirit, and at times a glistening play of colour possessed by none of his German predecessors.
Catholic churches seem always to have had a great attraction for him, as well as the people moving in them, and in this an echo of hisrococoenthusiasm is still perceptible. The quaint,rococochurches in the ornate style favoured by the Jesuits, which are still preserved intact in Munich and the Tyrol, were those for which he had a peculiar preference. He lost himself voluptuously in the thousand details of sculpture, framework, organs, balustrades, and carved pulpits, dimly outlined in the subdued light from stained-glass windows. In the gloom it was all transformed into a forest of ornaments, expanding their traceries like trees in a wood. Sick and infirm people, women in prayer burying their faces in their hands, and lame men with crutches, kneel or move amid the luxuriant efflorescence of stone and wood and gold, of angels’ heads and shrines, garlands of flowers, consoles, and fonts of holy water. Twisted marble pillars, church banners, lamps and lustres mount in a confusion of capricious outlines at once tasteful and piquant to the vaulted dome, wherethe painted skies, blackened by the ascending mist of incense, seem waywardly fantastic.
After the churches the salons appealed to him. There came his pictures of modern society: ladies and cavaliers of the Court upon ballroom balconies, the conversation of Privy Councillors in the salon, the marvellous ball supper, where a mass of beautiful shoulders, splendid uniforms, and rustling silken trains move amid mirrors, lustres, colonnades, and gilded frames. “The Ball Supper” of 1870 is a vivid picture, bathed in glistening light. The music has stopped. And from a door of the brilliantly lighted ballroom the company is streaming into the neighbouring apartment, where the supper-table has been laid, and groups of ladies and men in animated conversation are beginning to occupy the chairs and sofas. In 1879 there followed the famous “Levee”: the Emperor Wilhelm in the red Court uniform of theGardes du Corpsis talking with a lady, surrounded by a sea of heads, uniforms, and naked bowing shoulders. Though it was always necessary in earlier representations of the kind to have agenreepisode to compensate the insufficient artistic interest of the work, in Menzel’s pictures the pictorial situation is grasped as a whole. They have the value of a book; they neither falsify nor beautify anything, and they will hand down to the future an encyclopædia of types of the nineteenth century.
From the salon he went to the street, from exclusive aristocratic circles into the midst of the eddying crowd. For many years in succession Menzel was a constant visitor at the small watering-places in the Austrian and Bavarian Alps. The multitude of people at the concerts, in the garden of the restaurant, on the promenade, at the open-air services, were precisely the things to occupy his brush. The light rippled through the leaves of the trees; women, children, and well-bred men of the world listened to the music or the words of the preacher. One person leaves a seat and another takes it; everything lives and moves. Huge and lofty trees stretch out their arms, protecting the company from the sun. Unusually striking was “The Procession in Gastein”: in the centre was the priest bearing the Host, then the choristers in their red robes, in front the visitors and tourists who had hastened to see the spectacle, and in the background the mountain heights. The bustle of people gives Menzel the opportunity for a triumph. In Kissingen he painted the promenade at the waters; in Paris the Sunday gaiety in the garden of the Tuileries, the street life upon the boulevard, the famous scene in theJardin des Plantes, with the great elephants and the vivid group of Zouaves and ladies; in Verona the Piazza d’Erbe, with the swarm of people crowding in between the open booths and shouting at the top of their voices. Many after him have represented such scenes, although few have had the secret of giving their figures such seething life, or painting them, like Menzel, as parts of one great, surging, and many-headed multitude.
People travelling have always been for him a source of much amusement: men sitting in the corner of a railway carriage with their legs crossed and their hats over their eyes, yawning or asleep; women looking out of the windows or counting their ready money. Alternating with such themes are those monotonous yet simple and therefore genial landscapes from the suburbs of the great city, poor, neglected regions with machines and men at their labour. Children bathing in a dirty stream bordered by little, stunted willows; small craft gliding over a river, sailors leaping from one vessel to another, men landing sacks or barrels, and great, heavy cart-horses dragging huge waggons loaded with beer-barrels along the dusty country road. Or the scaffolding of a house is being raised. Six masons are at work upon it, and they are working in earnest. A green bush waves (German fashion) above the scaffolding, and further off long rows of houses stretch away, and the aqueducts and gas-works which supply the huge crater of Berlin, and day-labourers are seen wheeling up barrow-loads of stones. For the first time a German painter sings the canticle of labour.
From the streets he enters the work-places, and interprets the wild poetry of roaring machines in smoky manufactories. The masterpiece of this group is that bold and powerful picture, his “Iron Mill” of 1876. The workshop of the great rail-forge of Königshütte in Upper Silesia is full of heat and steam. The muscular, brawny figures of men with glowing faces stand at the furnace holding the tongs in their swollen hands. Their vigorous gestures recall Daumier. Upon the upper part of their bodies, which is naked, the lightcasts white, blue, and dark red reflections, and over the lower part it flickers in reddish, greenish, and violet tinges, on the creases in their clothing. The smoke rising in spirals is of a whitish-red, and the beams supporting the roof are lit up with a sombre glow. Heat, sweat, movement, and the glare of fire are everywhere. Dust and dirt, strong, raw-boned iron-workers washing themselves, or exhausted with hard toil, snatching a hasty meal, a confusion of belting and machinery, no pretty anecdote but sober earnest, no story but pure painting—these were the great and decisive achievements of this picture. Courbet’s “Stone-breakers” of 1851, Madox Brown’s “Work” of 1852, and Menzel’s “Iron Mill” are the standard works in the art of the nineteenth century.
Within German art Menzel has won anenclavefor himself, a rock amid the sea. In France during the sixties he represented German art in general. France offered him celebrity, and after this recognition he had the fortune to be honoured in his native-land before he was overtaken by old age. His realism was permitted to him at a time when realistic aims were elsewhere reckoned altogether as æsthetic errors. This explains the remarkable fact that Menzel’s toil of fifty years had scarcely any influence on the development of German painting; it would scarcely be different from what it is now if he had never existed. When he might have been an exemplar there was no one who dared to follow him. And later, when German art as a whole had entered upon naturalistic lines, the differences between him and the younger generation were more numerous than their points of sympathy, so that it was impossible for him to have a formative influence. He stood out in the new period merely as a power commanding respect, like a hero of ancient times. Even the isolated realisticonsets made in Berlin in the seventies are in no way to be connected with him.
If realism consisted in the dry and sober illustration of selected fragments of reality, if upright feeling, loyalty, and honest patriotism were serviceable qualities in art, a lengthier consideration should certainly be accorded toAnton von Werner. In hisgenrepictures of campaign life everything is spick and span, everything is in its right place and in soldierly order: it is all typically Prussian art. His portraits are casino pictures, and as such it is impossible to imagine how they could better serve their purpose. From the spurs to the cuirassier helmet everything is correct and in accordance with military regulation; even the likeness has something officially prescribed which would make any recruit form front if suddenly brought face to face with such a person. In his pictures of ceremonies his ability was just sufficient to chronicle the function in question with the conscientiousness of a clerk in a law court. The intellectual capacity for seeing more of a great man than his immaculately polished boots and the immaculately burnished buttons of his uniform was denied him, as was the artistic capacity of exalting a picture-sheet to the level of a picture.
Equipped with a healthy though trivial feeling for reality,Carl Güssowventured to approach nature in a sturdy and robust fashion in some of his works, and exhibited in Berlin a few life-sized figures, “Pussy,” “A Lover of Flowers,” “Lost Happiness,” “Welcome,” “The Oyster Girl,” and so forth. Through these he opened for a brief period in Berlin the era of yellow kerchiefs and black finger-nails, and on the strength of them was exalted by the critics as a pioneer of realism or else anathematised, according to their æsthetic creed. He had a robust method of painting muscles and flesh and clothes of many colours, and of setting green beside red and red beside yellow, yet even in these first works—his only works of artistic merit—he never got beyond the banal and barbaric transcript of a reality which was entirely without interest.
Max Michaelseems to be somewhat influenced by Bonvin. Like the latter, he was attracted by the silent motions of nuns, juicy vegetables, dark-brown wainscoting, and the subdued light of interiors. He was, like Ribot in France, although with less artistic power, a good representative of that “school of cellar skylights” which imitated in a sound manner the tone of the old Spanish masters. One of his finest pictures, which hangs in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, represents a girls’ school in Italy. A nun is presiding over the sewing-lesson; the background is brown; the light comes through the yellow glass of a high and small window (like that of an attic), and throws a brown dusky tone over the room, in which the gay costumes of the little Italian girls, with their white kerchiefs, make exceedingly pretty and harmonious spots of colour. No adventure is hinted at, no episode related, but the picturesque appearance of the little girls, and their tones in the space, are all the more delicately rendered. A refined scheme of colour recalling the old masters compensates for the want of incident.
In ViennaAugust von Pettenkofenmade a transition from the ossified, antediluviangenrepainting to painting which was artistically delicate. While the successors of Gauermann and Danhauser indulged in heart-breaking scenes or humorous episodes, Pettenkofen was the first to observe the world from a purely pictorial point of view. Alfred Stevens had opened his eyes in Paris in 1851. Troyon’s pictures and Millet’s confirmed him in his efforts. He was brought up on a property belonging to his father in Galicia, and had been a cavalry officer before he turned to painting: horses, peasants, and oxen are the simple figures of his pictures. In the place of episodic, ill-painted stories he set the meagre plains of lonely Pusta, sooty forges, gloomy cobblers’ work shops, dirty courtyards with middens and rubbish-heaps, gipsy encampments, and desolate garrets. There is no pandering to sentimentality or the curiosity excited bygenrepainting. There are delicate chords of colour, and that is enough. The artist was in the habit of spending the summer months in the little town of Spolnok on the Theiss, to the east of Pesth. Here he wandered about amongst the little whitewashed houses, the booths of general dealers, and the fruit-sellers’ stalls. A lazily moving yoke of oxen with a lad asleep, dark-eyed girls fetching water, poor children playing on the ground, old men dreaming in the sun in a courtyard, are generally the only breathing beings in his pictures. Here is a sandy village-square with low, white-washed houses; there is a wain with oxen standing in the street, or a postilion trotting away on his tired nag. Like Menzel, Pettenkofen paints busy humanity absorbed in their toil, simple beings who do not dream of leaving off work for the sake of those who frequent picture galleries. What differentiates him from the Berlin painter is a more lyrical impulse, something tender, thoughtful, and contemplative. Menzel gives dramatic point to everything he touches; he sets masses in movement, depicts a busy, noisy crowd, pressing together and elbowing one another, forcing their way at the doors of theatres or the windows of cafés in a multifarious throng. Pettenkofen lingers with the petty artisan and the solitary sempstress. In Menzel’s “Iron Mill” the sparks are flying and the machines whirring, but everything is peaceful and quiet in the cobblers’ workshops and the sunny attics visited by Pettenkofen. Menzel delights in momentary impressions and quivering life; Pettenkofen in rest and solitude. In the former every one is thinking and talking and on the alert; in the latter every one is yawning or asleep. If Menzel paints a waggon, the driver cracks his whip and one hears the team rattling over the uneven pavement; in Pettenkofen the waggon stands quietly in a narrow lane, the driver enjoys amidday rest, and an enervating, sultry heat broods overhead. Menzel has a love for men and women with excitement written on their faces; Pettenkofen avoids painting character, contenting himself with the reproduction of simple actions at picturesque moments. The Berlin artist is epigrammatically sharp; the Viennese is elegiac and melancholy. Menzel’s pictures have the changing glitter of rockets; those of Pettenkofen are harmonised in the tone of a refined amateur. They have only one thing in common: neither has found disciples; they are not culminating peaks in Berlin or Vienna art so much as boulders wedged into another system.
Whilst the realistic movement in both towns was confined to particular masters, Munich had once again the mission of becoming a guiding influence. Here all the tendencies of modern art have left the most distinct traces, all movements were consummated with most consistency. The heroes of Piloty followed the divinities of Cornelius, and these were in turn succeeded by the Tyrolese peasants of Defregger, and amid all this difference of theme one bond connected these works: for interesting subject was the matter of chief importance in them, and the purely pictorial element was something subordinate. The efforts of the seventies had for their object the victory of this pictorial element. It was recognised that the talent for making humorous points and telling stories, which came in question as the determining quality in the pictures of monks and peasants of the school of Defregger and Grützner, was the expression of no real faculty for formative art—that it was merely technical incompleteness complacently supported by the lack of artistic sensibility in the public which had produced this narrative painting. It was felt that the task of formative art did not consist in narrative, but in representation, and in representation through the most sensuous and convincing means which stood at its disposal. A renewed study of the old masters made this recognition possible.
Up to this time the most miserable desolation had also reigned over the province of the artistic crafts. But, borne up by the rekindled sentiment of nationality, and favoured by the high tide of the milliards paid by France, since 1870, that eventful movement bearing the words “Old German” and “Fine Style” on its programme had become an accomplished fact. The German Renaissance, which research had been hitherto neglected, was discovered afresh. Lübke explored it thoroughly and systematically; Woltmann wrote on Hans Holbein, Thausing on Dürer; Eitelberger founded the Austrian Industrial Museum; Georg Hirth brought out hisDeutsches Zimmer, and began the publication of theFormenschatz. The national form of art of the German Renaissance was taken up everywhere with a proud consciousness of patriotism: here, it was thought, was a panacea. Those who followed the artistic crafts declared open war against everything pedestrian and tedious.Lorenz Gedonin particular—in union with Franz and Rudolf Seitz—was the soul of the movement. With his black, curly hair, his little, fiery, dark eyes, his short beard, his negligent dress, and his two great hands expert in the exercise of every description of art, he had himself something of the character of an old German stone-cutter. His manner of expressing himself corresponded to this appearance. In every thing it was original, saturated with his own personal conception of the world. As the son of a dealer in old pictures and curiosities, he was familiar with the old masters from his childhood, and followed them in the method of his study. He was far from confining himself to one branch. The façades of houses, the architecture of interiors, tavern rooms and festal decorations, furniture and state carriages, statues and embellishments in stone, bronze, wood, and iron, portrait busts in wax, clay, and marble, models for ornaments, for iron lattices, for the adornment of ships and the fittings of cabins, all objects that were wayward, fantastic, quaint, and curious lay in his province; and for the execution of each in turn this remarkable man felt that he had in him an equal capacity. And, at the same time, the temperament of a collector was united in him with that of an artist in an entirely special way. In the bushy wilderness of a garden before his house in the Nymphenburger Strasse countless stone fragments of mediæval sculpture were strewn about, up to the very hedge dividing it from the street. Rusty old trellises of wrought iron slanted in front of the windows, and in the house itself the most precious objects, which artists ten years before had passed without heed, stood in masses together. As Gedon was taken from his work when he was forty his artistic endeavour never got beyond efforts of improvisation, but the impulse which he gave was very powerful. Through his initiative the whole province of the artistic crafts was brought under observation from a pictorial point of view. The bald Philistine style of decoration gave way and a blithe revel of colour was begun. The great carnival feasts arranged by him on the model of the Renaissance period are an important episode in the history of culture in Munich, and have contributed in no unessential manner to the refinement of taste in the toilette of women. The Munich Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts in 1876 (before the entrance of which he had erected that great portal made of old fragments of architecture,wood-carving, and splendid stuffs, and bearing the inscription “The Works of our Fathers”) indicated the zenith of that movement in the handicrafts which was flooding all Germany in those days.
The course which was run by this movement in the following years is well known, and it is well known how the imitation of the German Renaissance soon became as wearisome as in the beginning it had been attractive. After it had been a little overdone another step was taken, and from the Renaissance people went to thebaroqueperiod, and soon afterwards therococoperiod followed. In these days sobriety has taken the place of this fever for ornamentation, and the mania for style has resulted in a surfeit, a weariness and a desire for simplicity and quietude. Nevertheless the beneficial influence of the movement on the general elevation of taste is undeniable, and indirectly it was of service to painting.
In rooms where the owner was the only article of the inventory repugnant to the conception of style, only those pictures were admitted which had been executed in the exact manner of the old masters. Works of art were regarded as tasteful furniture, and were obliged to harmonise correctly with the other appointments of the room; they had, moreover, to be themselves legitimate “imitations of the Works of our Fathers.” And, in this way, the movement in the handicrafts gave an impulse to a renewed study of the old masters, carried out with far more refinement than had hitherto been the case. Amongst the costume painters spread over all Germany, the experts in costume, working in Munich during the seventies, form a really artistic race of able painters who were peculiarly sensitive to colour. They were the historians of art, the connoisseurs of colour in the ranks of the painters. Piloty did not satisfy them; they buried themselves in the study of old masters with a delicately sensitive appreciation of them; they began to mix soft, luxuriant, and melting colours upon their palettes, and to feel the peculiar joy of painting. Whilst they imitated the exquisite “little masters” of former ages, in dimly lighted studios hung with Gobelins, imitating at the same time the beautifying rust of centuries, they gradually abandoned all their own tricks of art; and whilst they devoted themselves to detail they brought about the Renaissance of oil-painting. Compared with earlier works, their pictures arelike rare dainties. They no longer recognised the end of their calling, as thegenrepainters had done, in a one-sided talent for characterisation, but tried once more to lay chief weight upon the pictorial and artistic appearance of their pictures. They were conscious of a presentiment that there were higher spheres of art than the commonplace humour ofgenrepainting, and this recognition had a very wide bearing. Pictorial point took the place of narrative humour. If artists had previously painted thoughts they now began to paint things, and even if the things were bundles of straw, mediæval hose, and the old robes of cardinals, they were no longer “invented,” but something which had been seen as a whole. It was a transition towards ultimately painting what had actually taken place before the artist’s eyes.
That sumptuous, healthy artist of such pictorial ability,Diez, the Victor Scheffel of painting, stands at the head of the group. From his youth upwards his chief place of resort had been the cabinet of engravings where he studied Schongauer, Dürer, and Rembrandt, and all the boon-companions and vagabonds etched or cut in copper or wood, and on the model of these he painted his own marauders, robber-barons, peasants in revolt, old German weddings and fairs. His picture “To the Church Consecration” recalls Beham, his “Merry Riding” Schongauer, and his “Ambuscade” Dürer, whilst Teniers served as model for his fairs. Diez knows the period from Dürer and Holbein to Rubens, Rembrandt, Wouwerman, and Brouwer as thoroughly as an historian of art, and sometimes—for instance in his “Picnic in the Forest”—he has even drawn the eighteenth century into the circle of his studies. His pictures had an unrivalled delicacy of tone, and could certainly hang beside their Dutch models in the Pinakothek without losing anything by such proximity.
Something of Brouwer or Ostade revived once more inHarburger, the talented draughtsman ofFliegendeBlätter, the undisputed monarch of the kingdom of slouching hats, old mugs, and Delft pipes. Pictures like “The Peasants’ Doctor,” “The Card-players,” “The Grandmother,” “By the Quiet Fireside,” “In the Armchair,” and “Easy-going Folk” were masterpieces of delicate Dutch painting: the tone of his pictures shows distinction and temperament; they have deep and finechiaroscuro, and are soft and fluent in execution.Loefftzwith his picture “Love and Avarice” appeared as Quentin Matsysredivivus, and then attached himself in turn to Holbein and Van Dyck; and exercised, like Diez, a great influence on the younger generation by his activity as a teacher.
Claus Meyer, who became one of the best known amongst the young Munich painters by his “Sewing School in the Nunnery” of 1883, is worthy of remark inasmuch as he acquired a method of painting which was full ofnuances, through modelling himself upon Pieter de Hoogh and Van der Meer of Delft. Through the windows hung with thin curtains the warm, quiet daylight falls into the room, glancing on the clean boards of the floor, on the polished tops of the tables, the white pages of the books, and the blond and brown hair of the children, playing round it like a golden nimbus. Another sunbeam streams through the door, which is not entirely closed, and quivers over the floor in a bright and narrow strip of light. The intimate representation of peaceful scenes of modest life, the entirely pictorial representation of peaceful and congenial events, has taken the place of the adventures dear togenrepainting. Old gentlemen with a glass of beer and a clay pipe, servant-girls peeling potatoes in the kitchen, pupils at the cloister sitting over their books in the library, drinkers, smokers, and dicers—such were the quiet, passive, and silent figures of his later pictures. The mild sunshine breaks in and plays over them. Light clouds of tobacco smoke float in the air. Everything is homely and pleasant, touched with a breath of pictorial charm, comfortable warmth, and poetic fragrance. A hundred years hence his works will be sold as flawlessly delicate and genuine old Dutch pictures.Holmbergbecame the historian of cardinals. A window, consisting of rounded, clumpy panes, with little glass pictures let in, forms the background of the room, and in the subdued oil-light which beams over splendid vessels and ornaments, chests and Gobelins, the white satin dresses of ladies in the mode of 1640, or the lilac and purple robes of cardinals from the artist’s rich wardrobe, are displayed, together with the appropriate models.
InFritz August Kaulbach, the most versatile of the group in his adoption of various manners, the essence of this whole tendency is to be found. He did not belong to the specialists who restricted themselves, in a one-sided fashion, to the imitation of the Flemish or the Dutch masters, but appeared like old Diterici, Proteus-like, now in one and now in another mask; and, whether he assumed the features of Holbein, Carlo Dolci, Van Dyck, or Watteau, he had the secret of being invariably graceful andchic.
When the German Renaissance was at its zenith he painted in the Renaissance style: harmlessgenrepicturesà laBeyschlag—the joys of love and of the family circle—but not being so banal as the latter he painted them with more delicate colouring and finer poetic charm. Certain single figures were found specially acceptable—for instance, the daughters of Nuremberg patricians, and noble ladies in the old German caps, dark velvet gowns, and long plaits like Gretchen’s, with their eyes sometimes uplifted and sometimes lowered, and their hands at one moment folded and at another carrying a shining covered goblet. Occasionally these single figures were portraits, but none the less were they transformed into “ladies in old German costume”; and Kaulbach understood how to paint, to the utmost satisfaction of his patrons, the black caps, no less well than the little veil and the net of pearls, and the greenish-yellow silk of the puffed sleeves, no less well than the plush border of the dark gown and the antique red Gretchen pocket. Many of them held a lute and stood amid a spring landscape, before a streamlet, or a silver-birch, such as Stevens delighted in painting ten years previously. At that time Fritz August Kaulbach, with greater softness in his treatment, occupied in Germany the place which Florent Willems had occupied in Belgium. Since then he has brought nearer to the public the most various old and modern masters, and he has done so with fine artistic feeling: in his “May Day” he has revived the pastoral scenes of Watteau with a felicitous cleverness; in his “St. Cecilia” he created a total effect of great grace by going arm in arm with Carlo Dolci and Gabriel Max; his “Pietà” he composed with “the best figures of Michael Angelo, Fra Bartolommeo, and Titian,” just as Gerard de Lairesse had once recommended to painters. Intermediately he painted frail flower-like girlsà laGabriel Max, charming little angelsà laThoma, children in Pierrot costumeà laVollon, and little landscapesà laGainsborough. He did not find in himself the plan for a new edifice in erecting his palace of art, but built according to any plans that came in his way; he simply chose from all existing forms the most graceful, the most elegant, the most precious, culled from their beauties onlythe flowers, and bound them into a tasteful bouquet. In his modern portraits of women, which in recent years have been his chief successes, he placed himself between Van Dyck and the English. Of course, a reallychicpainter of women, like Sargent, is not to be thought of in this connection; but for Germany these portraits were in exceedingly fine taste, had an interesting Kaulbachian trace of indifferent health, and breathed anodeur de femmewhich found very wide approval. In his “Lieschen, the Waitress of the Shooting Festival” he risked a fresh attempt at treating popular life, and made of it such a graceful picture that it might almost have been painted by Piglhein; while in a series of spirited caricatures he even succeeded in being—Kaulbach. The history of art is wide, and since Fritz August Kaulbach knows it extremely well, he will certainly find much to paint that is pleasing and attractive, “s’il continue à laisser errer son imagination à travers les formes diverses créées par l’art de tous les temps,” as theGazette des Beaux-Artssaid of him on the occasion of the Vienna World Exhibition of 1878.
After all, these pictures will have little that is novel for an historian of the next century. “Être maître,” says W. Bürger, “c’est ne ressembler à personne.” But these were the works of painters who merely announced the dogma of the infallibility of universal eclecticism, as the Caracci had done in their familiar sonnets: they were spirited imitators, whose connection with the nineteenth centurywill be known in after years only by the dates of their pictures. As old masters called back to life, they have enriched the history of art, as such, by nothing novel. Yet, in replacing superficial imitations by imitations which were excellent and congenial, they have nevertheless advanced the history of art in the nineteenth century in another way.
By the labour of his life each one of them helped to make a place in Germany for the art of oil-painting, which had been forgotten under the influence of Winckelmann and Carstens, and in this sense their works were very important stations, as one might say, on the great thoroughfare of art. Through systematic imitation of the finest old masters, the Munich school had in a comparatively short time regained the appreciation of colour and treatment which had so long been lost. At a hazy distance lay those times when the distinctive peculiarity of German painting lay in its wealth of ideas, its want of any sense for colour, and its clumsy technique, whilst the æsthetic spokesmen praised these qualities as though they were national virtues. These views had been altogether renounced, and a decade of strenuous work had been devoted to the extirpation of all such defects. Such an achievement was sufficiently great, and sufficiently important and gratifying. This last resuscitation of the old masters was capable of being turned into a bridge leading to new regions.
A feeling arose that the limit had been reached, and it arose in those very men who had advanced furthest in pictorial accomplishment, adapting and making their own all the ability of the old masters. Painters believed that they had learnt enough of technique to be able to treat subjects from modern life in the spirit of these old masters, not handling them any longer as laboriously composedgenrepictures, but as real works of art. And a group of realists came forward as they had done in France, and began to seek truth with scientific rigour and an avoidance of any kind of anecdotic by-play.
The greatest pupil of the old masters,Franz Lenbach, stands in a close andmost important relationship with these endeavours of modern art, through some of his youthful works.
The public has accustomed itself to think of him only as a portrait painter, and he is justly honoured as the greatest German portraitist of the century. But posterity may one day regard it as a special favour of the gods that Lenbach should have been born at the right time, and that his progress to maturity fell in the greatest epoch of the century. His gallery of portraits has been called an epic in paint upon the heroes of our age. The greatest historical figures of the century have sat to him, the greatest conquerors and masters in the kingdom of science and art. Nevertheless this gallery would be worthless to posterity if Lenbach had not had at his disposal one quality possessed by none of his immediate predecessors, a sacred respect for nature. At a time when rosy tints, suave smiles, and idealised drawing were the requirements necessary in every likeness, at a time when Winterhalter painted great men, not as they were, but as, in his opinion, they ought to have been—without reflecting that God Almighty knows best what heads are appropriate for great men—Lenbach appeared with his brusque veracity of portraiture. That alone was an achievement in which only a man of original temperament could have succeeded. If a portrait painter is to prevail with society a peculiar combination of faculties is necessary, apart from his individual capacity for art. Lenbach had not only an eye and a hand, but likewise elbows and a tongue which placed himhors concours. He could be as rude as he was amiable, and as deferential as he was proud; half boor and half courtier, at once a great artist and an accomplishedfaiseur, he succeeded in doing a thing which has brought thousands to ruin—he succeeded in forcing upon society his own taste, and setting genuine human beings of strong character in the place of the smiling automatons of fashionable painters. In comparison with the works of earlier portrait painters it might besaid that a touch of pantheism and nature-worship goes through Lenbach’s pictures.
And what makes this so invaluable is that his greatness depends really less upon artistic qualities than upon his being a highly gifted man who understands the spirit of others. It is not merely artistic technique that is essential in a portrait, but before everything a psychical grasp of the subject. No artist, says Lessing, is able to interpret a power more highly spiritual than that which he possesses himself. And this is precisely the weak side in so many portrait painters, since a man’s art is by no means always in any direct relationship with the development of his spiritual powers. In this respect a portrait of Bismarck by Lenbach stands to one by Anton von Werner, as an interpretation of Goethe by Hehn stands to one by Düntzer. To speak of the congenial conception in Lenbach’s pictures of Bismarck is a safe phrase. There will always remain something wanting, but since Lenbach’s works are in existence one knows, at any rate, that this something can be reduced to a far lower measure than it has been by the other Bismarck portraits. “Bien comprendre son homme,” says Bürger-Thoré, “est la première qualité du portraitiste,” and this faculty of the gifted psychologist has made Lenbach the historian elect of a great period, the active recorder of a mighty era. It even makes him seem greater than most foreign portrait painters. How solid, but at the same time how matter-of-fact, does Bonnat seem by Lenbach’s side! One should not look at a dozen Bonnats together; a single one arrests attention by the plastic treatment of the person, but if you see several at the same time all the figures have this same plastic character, all of them have the same pose, and they all seem to have employed the same tailor. Lenbach has no need of all that characterisation by means of accessories in which Bonnat delights. He only paints the eyes with thoroughness, and possibly the head; but these he renders with a psychological absorption which is only to be found amongst modern artists, perhaps in Watts. In a head by Lenbach there glows a pair of eyes which burn themselves into you. The countenance, which is the firstzone around them, is more or less—generally less—amplified; the second zone, the dress and hands, is either still less amplified, or scarcely amplified at all. The portrait is then harmonised in a neutral tone which renders the lack of finish less obvious. In this sketchy treatment and in his striking subjectivity Lenbach is the very opposite of the old masters. Holbein, and even Rubens—who otherwise sets upon everything the stamp of his own personality—characterised their figures by a reverent imitation of every trait given in nature. They produced, as it were, real documents, and left it to the spectator to interpret them in his own way.
Lenbach, less objective, and surrendering himself less absolutely to his subject, emphasises one point, disregards another, and in this way conjures up the spirit by his faces, just as he sees it. It may be open to dispute which kind of portraiture is the more desirable; but Lenbach, at any rate, has now forced the world to behold its great men through his eyes. He has given them the form in which they will survive. No one has the same secret of seizing a fleeting moment; no one turned more decisively away from every attempt at idealising glorification or at watering down an individual to a type. He takes counsel of photography, but only as Molière took counsel of his housekeeper: he uses it merely as a medium for arriving at the startling directness, the instantaneous impression of life, in his pictures. Works like the portraits of King Ludwig I, Gladstone, Minghetti, Bishop Strossmayer, Prince Lichtenstein, Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Paul Heyse, WilhelmBusch, Schwind, Semper, Liphart, Morelli, and many others have no parallel as analyses of the character of complex personalities. Some of his Bismarck portraits, as well as his last pictures of the old Emperor Wilhelm, will always stand amongst the greatest achievements of the century in portraiture. In the one portrait is indestructible power, as it were the shrine built for itself by the mightiest spirit of the century; in the other the majesty of the old man, already half alienated from the earth, and glorified by a trace of still melancholy, as by the last radiance of the evening sun. In these works Lenbach appears as a wizard calling up spirits, anévocateur d’âmes, as a French critic has named him.
But what the history of art has forgotten in estimating the fame of the portrait painter Lenbach is, that in the beginning of his career this very man paved the way for the “Realistic” movement in German painting which later he confronted so haughtily and with so much reserve. The first of these works of his, which have for Germany much the same significance as the early works of Courbet have for France, is the well-known “Shepherd Boy” in the Schack Gallery. Stretched on his back, he lies in the high grass where flowers grow thickly, and looks up while butterflies and dragon-flies flutter through the dusty air of a Roman summer day. Such a frank, an audacious, naked realism, breaking away from everything traditional in its representation of fact, was something entirely novel and surprising in Germany in the year 1856. Up to this time no one had seen a fragment of nature depicted with such unqualified veracity. The tanned shepherd lad, with his naked sunburnt feet, covered by a dark crust of mire from the damp earth, seemed to be lying there in the flesh, plastically thrown into relief by the glowing midday sun. The next of these pictures, “Peasants taking Refuge from the Weather,” which appeared in the exhibition of 1858, called down a storm of indignation on account of its “trivial realism.” Every figure was painted after nature with blunt and rigorous sincerity, and no anecdotic incident was devised in it.
After the sixties the influence of Courbet began to be directly felt. In the days when he worked in Couture’s studioVictor Müllerhad taken up some of the ideas of the master of Ornans, and when he settled in 1863 in Munich, Müller communicated to the painters there the first knowledge of the works of the great Frenchman. He did not follow Courbet, however, in his subjects. “The Man in the Heart of the Night lulled to Sleep by the Music of a Violin,” “Venus and Adonis,” “Hero and Leander,” “Hamlet in the Churchyard,” “Venus and Tannhäuser,” “Faust on the Promenade,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Ophelia by the Stream”—such are the titles of his principal works. But how far they are removed from the anæmic, empty painting of beauty which reigned in the school of Couture! Though a Romanticist of the purest water in his subjects, Müller appears, in the manner in which he handles them, as a Realist on whom there is no speck of the academical dust of the schools. The dominant features of Victor Müller’s pictures are the thirst for life and colour, full-blooded strength, haughty contempt for every species of hollow exaggeration and all outward pose, genuine human countenances and living human forms inspired with tameless passion, an audacious rejection of all the traditional rules of composition, and, even in colour, a veracity which in that age, given up to an ostentatious painting of material, must have had an effect that was absolutely novel. In 1863 the blooming flesh of his “Wood Nymph”excited the Munich public to indignation, just as the nude female figures of Courbet had roused indignation about the same time in Paris. Pictures painted with singular sureness of hand were executed by him during the few years that he yet had to live—portraits of dogs, landscapes of a flaming glow of colour, single figures of red-haired Bacchantes and laughing flower-girls, old men dying, and charming fairy pictures. The nearer he came to his death the more his powers of work seemed to increase. The most remarkable ideas came into his head. He drew, and painted without intermission designs which had occupied him for years. “I feel,” he said, “like an architect who has been commissioned to carry out a great building, and I cannot do it: I must die.”
But the impulse which he had given in more than one direction had further issues. As Hans Thoma in later years continued the work of the great Frankfort master in the province of fairy-tale,Wilhelm Leiblrealised Müller’s realistic programme.
Wilhelm Leibl, son of the conductor of music in the cathedral, was born at Cologne on 23rd October 1844. At Munich he entered the studio ofArthur van Ramberg, that unjustly forgotten master who, both by his own work and by his activity as a teacher, exercised upon the younger Munich school a far healthier influence than Piloty. Ramberg was a modern man, was always eager to come into immediate contact with life and break the fetters of tradition which hung everywhere upon that generation. He was an aristocrat and a dandy, and, having occupied himself in the beginning with romantic fairy subjects, he painted, soon after his migration to Munich, a series of pictures from modern life—“Dachau Girls on Sunday,” “The Return from the Masked Ball,” “A Walk with the Tutor,” “The Meeting on the Lake,” “The Invitation to Boat,” and others, which rose above the mass of contemporary productions by their great distinction, fragrance, and grace. At a time when others held nothing but the smock-frock fit for representation, Ramberg painted the fashionablemodern costume of women. And when others devoted themselves to clumsygenreepisodes, he created songs without words that were full of fine reserve, nobility, and delicate feeling.
Rudolf Hirth, who made a stir with his “Hop Harvest”;Albert Keller, the tasteful painter of fashionable life;Karl Haider, the sincere and conscientious miniature painter whose energy of manner had a suggestion of the old masters, together with Wilhelm Leibl, all issued from Ramberg’s school, not from Piloty’s.
The young student from Cologne was thus saved, in the beginning, from occupying himself with history, and he had no need to addict himself to narrativegenrepainting, since his entire organisation preordained him to painting pure and simple. Wilhelm Leibl was in those days a handsome fellow, with powerful limbs and shining brown eyes. He was realism incarnate—rather short, but strongly made, and with a frame almost suggesting a beast of burden, broad in the chest, high-shouldered, and bull-necked. His arms were thick and his feet large. His gait was slow, heavy, and energetic, and he made with his arms liberal gestures which took up a good deal of room. He had not the fiery spirit of Courbet, being more prosaic, sober, and deliberate, but he resembled him both in appearance and in the artistic faculty of eye and hand. “He had,” as a French critic wrote of him, “one of those organisations which are predestined for painting, as Courbet had amongst us Frenchmen. Such men extract the most remarkable things from painting.”
Even his first picture, exhibited in 1869, and representing his two fellow-pupils Rudolf Hirth and Haider looking at an engraving, had a soft, full golden harmony, which left all the products of conventionalgenrepainting far behind it, and came into direct competition with the refined works of the Dutch painter Michael Swert. His second picture, a portrait of Frau Gedon, made an impression even in Paris by its Rembrandtesque beauty of tone, and was awarded there in 1870 the gold medal which the judges had not ventured to give him the year before at Munich, because he was still an Academy pupil. Yet 1869 was the decisive year in Leibl’s life. The Munich Exhibition gave at that time an opportunity for learning the importance of French art upon a scale previously unknown. Over four hundred and fifty pictures were accessible, and the works of the smooth, conventional historical painters were the minority. Troyon was to be seen there, and Millet and Corot. But Courbet, to whose works the committee had devoted an entire room, was chiefly the hero, and one over whom there was much conflict. Opinions were violently at odds about him in the painters’ club. The official circle greeted the master of Ornans with the same hoot of indignation which had been accorded him in France. But for Leibl he became an adored and marvellous ideal. His eyes sparkled when he sat opposite him at theDeutsches Haus, and in default of any other means of making himself understood he assured Courbet of his veneration by sturdily drinking to him: “Prosit Courbet—Prosit Leibl.” He stretched his powerful limbs, and threw himself into vigorous attitudes to evince in sanguinary quarrels, when necessary, his enthusiasm for the great Frenchman. How false and paltry seemed the whole school of Piloty, with its rose-coloured insipidity and its conventional bloom of the palette, when setagainst the downright veracity and the masterly painting of these works!
In the same year he went to Paris, special occasion for the journey being given by a commission for a portrait which he received from the Duc Tascher de la Pagerie. There he painted “La Cocotte,” the portrait of a fat Frenchwoman seated upon a sofa and watching the clouds of smoke from her clay pipe. In its massive realism, and in the exuberant power of its broad, liquid painting, it might have been signed “Courbet,” and Leibl told afterwards with pride how Courbet slapped him on the shoulder when he was at his work, saying: “Il faut que vous restez à Paris.” The breaking out of the war brought his residence in Paris to an end more quickly than he had foreseen, but though he was there only nine months that was long enough to give for ever a firm direction to the efforts of the painter. Leibl became the apostle of Courbet in Germany, and in his outward life the German Millet. Back once more in Bavaria, he migrated in 1872 to Grasolfingen, then to Schondorf on the Ammersee, then to Berbling near Aibling, and in 1884 to Aibling itself; he became a peasant, and, like Millet, he painted pictures of peasants.
The poetic and biblical, the august and epical bias which characterises the works of Millet, is not to be expected in Leibl. A spirit bent upon what is great and heroic speaks out of Millet’s pictures. A Rembrandtesque feeling for space, the great line, the simplification, the intellectual restraint from anecdotic triviality of form, are the things which constitute his style. Leibl is at his best when he buries himself with delight in the hundred little touches of nature. He triumphs when he has to paint the faces of old peasant women, full of wrinkles, and furrowed with care; the ruddy cheeks of girls, sparkling in all their natural rustic freshness; figured dresses, the material and texture of which are clearly recognisable; flowered silk kerchiefs worn round theneck, coarse woollen bodices, and heavy hobnail shoes. He is to Millet what Holbein is to Michael Angelo.
Nor can he be called an artist of intimate feeling in the sense in which the Scandinavians are amongst the moderns. In Viggo Johansen the painter disappears; what he paints has not the effect of a picture, but of a moment of existence, a memory of something clear and familiar—something which has been lived and seen, but not fashioned with deliberate intention. His figures are like the sudden appearance of actual persons, spied upon, as if one were looking through the window into a strange room under cover of night. One feels that there is no occasion to pay the artist a compliment; but one would like to sit in such a warm, cosy room, impregnated with tobacco smoke, to inhale the fine cloud of steam issuing from the tea-kettle, to hear the water bubbling and humming upon the glimmering fire. But the painter is always seen in Leibl’s pictures. A communicative spirit, something which touches the heart and sets one dreaming, is precisely what is not expressed in them. The spectator invariably thinks, in the first place, of the astonishing ability, the incredible patience, which went to the making of them. And with all their photographic fidelity he is, moreover, conscious that the painter himself was less concerned in seizing the poetry of a scene, the instantaneous charm of an impression of nature, than in forcing into the foreground particular evidences of his technical powers which he has reserved for display. For instance, newspapers in which, if it is possible, a fragment of the leading article may be deciphered, earthen vessels, bottles, and brandy glasses, play in his pictures arôlesimilar to that assumed by the little caskets with brass covers that catchthe flashing lights, the overturned settles, the tapestry, and the globe in works of the school of Piloty.
Wilhelm Leibl is a good workman, like Courbet, a man of fresh, vigorous, and energetic nature and robust health, very material, and at times matter-of-fact and prosaic. Painting is as natural to him as breathing and walking are to the rest of us. He goes his way like an ox in the plough, steadily and without tiring, without vibration of the nerves, and without the touch of poetry. He goes where his instinct leads him and paints with a muscular flexibility of hand whatever appeals to his eye or suits his brush. Opposed to the neurotic and hurrying moderns, he has something of a mediæval monk who sits quietly in his cell, without counting the hours, the days, and the years, and embellishes the pages of his service-book with artistic miniatures, to depart in peace when he has set “Amen, Finis” at the bottom of the last page. But he has, too, all the capacity and all the boundless veneration for nature of these old artists. He is the greatestmaître peintrethat Germany has had in the course of the century, and in this sense his advent was of epoch-making importance.
Even Defregger had observed peasant life altogether from a narrative and anecdotic point of view. In Leibl this narrativegenrehas been overcome. He had ability enough to give artistic attractions even to an “empty subject.” To avoid exaggerated characterisation, to avoid the expression of anything divided intorôles, he consistently painted people employed in the least exciting occupations—peasants reading a newspaper, sitting in church, or examining a gun. Pains are taken to avoid the slightest movement of the figures. Whilst all his predecessors were romance writers, Leibl is a painter. His themes—simple scenes of daily life—are a matter of indifference; the beauty of his pictures lies in their technique. They are works of which it may be said that every attempt to give an impression of them in words is useless, for they have not proceeded from delight in anecdotic theme, but, as in the good periods of art, from the discipline of the sense for colour and from an eminent capacity for drawing: they are pictures in which mere interest in subject is lost in the consideration of their artistic value, while the matter of what is represented is entirely thrown into the background by the manner in which it is carried out. The chief aim of the historical as of thegenrepainters had been to draw a fluent cartoon based upon single studies, to mix the colours nicely upon the palette, lay them upon the canvas according to the rules, blend them and let them dry, so as then to attain the proper harmony of colour by painting over again and finally glazing. Leibl’s mastery, which of itself resulted in an astonishing truth to nature, lay in seizing an impression as quickly as possible, taking hold of the reality rightly at the first glance, and transferring the colours to his canvas with decision and sureness, in clear accord with the hues of the original. Lessing’s maxim, “From the eyes straightto the arm and the brush,” has been realised here for the first time in Germany.
As yet no German had, in the same measure, what the painter calls qualities, and even in France two apparently heterogeneous faculties have seldom been united in one master in the same measure as they were in Leibl: a broad and large technique, a boldalla primapainting, and, on the other hand, a joy in work of detail with a fine brush, such as was known by Quentin Matsys, the smith of Antwerp. “The Village Politicians” of 1879 was the chief work that he painted in Schondorf. What would Knaus, the king of illustration and the ruler over the province of vignettes, have made out of this theme! By a literary evasion he would have subordinated the interest of the picture to his ideas. One would have learnt what it is that peasants read, and received instruction as to their political allegiance to party and their offices and honours in the village: that would be the magistrate, that the smith, and that the tailor. In Leibl there are true and simple peasants, who, by way of relaxation from the toil of the week, listen stupidly and indifferently to the reading of a Sunday paper, in which one of them is endeavouring to discover the village news and the price of crops. They are harsh-featured and common, but they have been spared theatrical embellishment and impertinent satire; they are not artistically grouped, though they sit there in all the rusticity of their physiognomies, and all the angularity of their attitudes, without polish or Sunday state. Leibl renders the reality without altering it, but he renders it fully and entirely. The fidelity to nature held fast on the canvas surpassed everything that had hitherto been seen, and it was gained, moreover, by the soundest and the simplest means. Whereas Lenbach, in his effort to reproduce the colour-effects of the old masters, destroyed the durability of his pictures even while he worked upon them, Leibl seemed to have chosen as his motto the phrase which Dürer once used in writing to Jacob Heller: “I know that, if you preserve the picture well, it will be fresh and clean at the end of five hundred years, for it has not been painted as pictures usually are in these days.”
He took a further step in the direction of truth when he made a transition from the Dutch towards the old German masters. After he had, in his earlier productions, worked very delicately at the tone of his pictures, and, for a time, had particularly sought to attain specific effects ofchiaroscuro, attaching himself to Rembrandt, he took up an independent position in his conception of colour, painting everything not as one of the old masters might have seen it, but as he had seen it himself. All the tricks of painting and sleights of virtuosity were despised, special emphasis being scarcely laid upon pictorial unity of effect. Everything was simple and true to nature, and had a sincerity which is not to be surpassed.
The picture of the three peasant women, “In Church,” is the masterpiece in this “second manner” of his, and when it appeared in the Munich International Exhibition of 1883 it was an event. From that date Leibl wasestablished—at any rate in the artistic circles of Munich—as the greatest Germanpainterof his time. That Leibl painted the picture without sketching for himself an outline, that he began with the eye of the peasant girl and painted bit by bit, like fragments of a mosaic, was a feat of technique in which there were few to imitate him. The young generation in Munich studied the pages of the service-book and the squares of the gingham dress, the girl’s jug and the carvings of the pew, with astonishment, as though they were the work of magic. They were beside themselves with delight over such unheard-of strength, power, and delicacy of modelling, the fusion of colour suggesting Holbein, and the intimate study of nature. They perpetually discovered new points that came upon them as a surprise, and many felt as Wilkie did when he sat in Madrid before the drinkers of Velasquez, and at last rose wearily with a sigh.