W«rt(*™w«iii)«*»*te?na*i^^ :-'^jmi^imriV. • / Cornell University Library arY1224 The schools of modern art in Germany ttn««« Ill mil mil mil mil mil I II 3 1924 032 188 140 olm,anx THE SCHOOLS OF MODERN ART IN GERMANY BY J. BEAVINGTON ATKINSON, Author of ''An Art Toitr to Northern Capitals^ ''Studies amotig the Painters^ etc. Mtllj ^itnta'ous JUitstratlras. SEELEY, JACKSON, AND HALLIDAY, 54 FLEET STREET. LONDON. MDCCCLXXX. All rights reserved. <^\ Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924032188140 CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I.— INTRODUCTION i-8 Relation between German Races and German Schools of Art — Religious Wars : their Effect on Literature and Art — The Ethnological Map of Germany : its Boundaries with corre- sponding Divisions in National Art — The Interminghng of Schools through the Migration of Artists— The Historic Styles of Germany : the Byzantine ; the Romanesque ; the Medieval ; and the Modern — Connexion between Political and Commercial Conditions and Art Periods — Religion and Patriotism Inspirers of Painting — Aspects of Nature and Conditions of Climate reflected into Art — Schools of German Art the Products of surrounding Causes. CHAPTER XL— THE RISE IN ROME 9-21 Arrival of Cornelius and Overbeck in Rome — The Eternal City the Birth-place of the Revival — The Convent of San Isidore — Niebuhr, Bunsen, and the Palazzo Caffarelli — Overbeck and the Brothers Schadow join the Roman Church — Frescoes in the Casa Bartholdi, the Villa Massimo, the Vatican, and Sta. Trinitk — Parallel between German and English Pre-Raphaelitism — Three Friendly Critics : Schlegel, Niebuhr, and Bunsen — Goethe's ' Dichtung und Wahrheit' — Exhibitions in the Palazzo Caffarelli — Ludwig of Bavaria in Rome — Three Generations of German Artists — The Caffe Greco. CHAPTER III.— MUNICH 22-39 King Ludwig brings German Masters from Rome to Bavaria— Munich a Modern Athens — ■ Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, conjointly revived — Munich, in Situation and Climate, unsuited to the movement — Cornehus appointed Director of the Academy; he establishes a School of Fresco-painting in Munich — Fresco of the Last Judgment — Julius Schnorr; his Bible — Kaulbach succeeds Cornelius as Director of the Academy ; his Studio — Directorship of Piloty ; his Practice and Teaching; his principal Pictures; his great work in the Rathhaus; his Scholars — Recent Changes in the Munich School — High Art forsaken ; Naturalism and Genre in ascend- ency — An Artists' Festival — Munich a City of ' Processes;' Fresco-painting and 'Water-glass;' Piloty's Opinion and Practice. CHAPTER IV.— MUNICH {continued) , . 40-58 Munich a City in which the arts of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, have been revived in logical sequence — Styles, Classic, Christian, Romantic, and Naturalistic, contend for mastery — Klenze and the Munich School of Architecture — All Saints' Chapel and its Fresco- paintings — The Basilica of St. Boniface and its Polychromy — The Church of Sta. Maria Hilf, and its Painted Glass — Church Decorations in Munich as Aids to Devotion — Schwanthaler and his Sculpture — The Maximilianeum : its Picture Gallery and external Wall Paintings — The Bayerischer Museum: its Old Treasures, and New Frescoes — Rottmann and Landscape; ideal and real. The Munich School of Landscape-painting — International Exhibition, 1879; some chief Pictures and Masters: Franz Adam, Joseph Brandt, Hans Makart, Gabriel Max, Lietzen- Mayer, Franz Defregger, Mathias Schmid, Joseph Fliiggen, and Franz Lenbach ; Painters' Studios in Munich, Luxury and Sensationalism. CHAPTER v.— DiJSSELDORF 59-73 Diisseldorf well situated geographically as a School — The chief Seat of the Religious Revival — Spiritual Quietism in Art; its Fervour and its Infirmity — Styles supersensuous and non-naturahstic — Swedenborg, Oersted, Emerson, and Overbeck; the Doctrine of 'Corre- spondence;' the 'Over Soul' and ' Soul-painting'— Treatment of Draperies by German Artists: Byzantine, ItaUan, and Teutonic types; Picturesque Draperies; Costumes — Rhine Chapel at Remagen, the purest Manifestation of the Diisseldorf School on its spiritual side — Religious Pictures in the Churches of Diisseldorf— Frescoes by Cornelius and Lessing at Schloss Heltorf — Wall-paintings by Bendemann in the ' Realschule ' — Ludwig Knaus the Naturalist and Realist — Religious Prints published in Diisseldorf— Flowers, Children, Angels, in the Christian Art of Modern Germany — Associations of Artists in Diisseldorf. jy Contents. PAGE CHAPTER VI.— DUSSELDORF {continued) 74-91 What constitutes a School— Cornelius, as Director, took a middle course between Classicists and Medievalists; Schadow, his successor, threw the Academy over to the Spiritualists and Romanists; Lessing rebelled on the side of Protestantism, the champion of the Free Intellect; his Naturalism led him into Landscape ; his intellectual relations to Huss, Locke, and Comte— Alfred Rethel: his Frescoes at Aix-la-Chapelle ; his Genius; his Death— The Town of Crefeld; Historic Pictures by Janssen— Living Artists in Diisseldorf: Battle Painters; Rehgious and Romantic Painters— Dusseldorf the chief seat of Genre— KvxiX and Domestic Life in Germany favours Genre Painting— The Scandinavian branch of the Diisseldorf School; Pictorial Pro- testantism in Religious Worship— Landscape Painting— Schirmer and Preller : their Art Poetic and Ideal; animated by a Motive— Schirmer's Bible and Preller's Odyssey Cyclus ; 'the Union of Landscape and Figure into an indissoluble whole '—' The harmony between Human-Nature and Landscape-Nature '—Landscape descends from the Historic and the Poetic to Genre— Th.^ Diisseldorf 'Malkasten' or Artists' Club— Artists' Festivals ; the 'Kaiserfest '—Public Monument to Cornelius, and Fete in the Jacobi Gardens— The New Academy: WisUcenus succeeds Bendemann cvs Director. CHAPTER Vn.— BERLIN 92-109 Prussia late to acquire a position in Art — Berlin a Show Capital : her Academy ; Project for uniting her Art Institutions in the 'Island' — Kaulbach, his Parentage and Poverty; the Merits and Defects of his Art ; his Pictorial Cyclus in the New Museum — Polychrome and the 'Water-glass' Process; Opinion of Maclise, R.A. — Illustrations to ' Reineke Fuchs' — 'The Deluge' — Kugler and Dr. Waagen as Critics; Local Relations between Literature and Art — Voltaire, Frederick the Great and Adolph Menzel — Rivalry between Germany and France ; M. Renan — Relation between Scandinavian Sagas and Teutonic Legends ; Folk-lore and Fairy-land — Prussian Painters and German proclivities ; four periods in the Berlin School — Prevaihng Styles in Sculpture and Architecture ; Public Monuments ; the New Rathhaus ; Terra-cottas — The new National Gallery ; principal Painters honoured with a place therein — ■ Berlin a City of Progress — Art Prospects. CHAPTER VIII.— CENTRAL GERMANY . • 11CK126 Schools of Art in Central Capitals — Frankfort : the Stadel Institut — Steinle, Director : his Works ; his Style— Pictorial Cycles— Philip Veit : his Frescoes — Recenr Changes in Frank- fort ; the Cathedral, the Rathhaus, New Gallery and Academy ; chief Pictures '; transfer of Fresco from wall to canvas — Dresden : the residence of remarkable Men ; Sculptors and Painters; Rietschel, Bendemann, Schnorr, Ludwig Richter, Peschel— Wall-paintings in the Palace, the Kreuzschule, the Opera House, and at Meissen ; present Aspect of the Dresden School— Weimar ; Carstens, Genelli, Schwind, Preller— Goethe, Schiller, Madame de Stael— Schiller's Philosophy of Art— German Metaphysics ; their bearing on Modern Art. CHAPTER IX.-VIENNA AND THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE . . . 127-146 Austria : her Schools of Art diverse as her Nationalities —Vienna the chief centre ; Architectural Developments ; Brick Structures and Terra-cottas— Luxury in Life ; Romance and Colour m Art-Fresco-painting-Moritz Schwind ; his gay Companions and his sportive Art-Hans Makart, the Veronese of Vienna— The Religious School of Overbeck obsolete— Feuerbach leads back to the C\^%Az-Genre Painting-Hungary ; Pesth, its Position, PubHc Institutions, and Pictures- Hungarian People: their Aspirations; their Art a part of their Patriotism ; chief Artists-Fresco-painting-Munkdcsy ; his Career and Works-The Danube, and Cities on its Banks ; Gran : its commanding position ; its Cathedral and Frescoes- Bohemia ; the Character of her National School; some chief Painters-Gabriel Max; his principal Works- Frescoes-Prague and Pesth sister cities; unrivalled Panorama-Austrian- Poland; Cracow; the Poles an Artistic People - Conclusion ; Modern German Art not a Fragment but a Whole. ILLUSTRATIONS. The Visit, by Franz Defregger ; engraved by Rauscher The Villa Borghese, by F. Heilbuth ; engraved by E. Mohn The Four Riders of the Apocalypse, by Cornelius Christ among the Doctors, by Overbeck .... The Last Judgment, by Cornelius Jesus appearing to the Disciples at the Sea of Galilee, The Return of tHe Prodigal Son, by Julius Schnorr Iphigenia, by Anselm Feuerbach The Death of Wallenstein, by Carl Piloty Nero among the Ruins of Rome, by Carl Piloty Galileo, by Carl Piloty ; engraved by F. L. Meyer . The pet Page, by Hans Makart ; etched by W. Unger . Margaret at the Confessional, by A. Lietzen- Mayer The Jewel Casket, by A. Lietzen-Mayer . , . . Canal, Rotterdam, drawn and etched by G. Schonleber The Engotlen Alp, by E. T. Compton Ruins of the Castle of Misocco, by E. T. Compton , The White Y{gk?,y., drawn and etched by L. Hartmann Edelweiss Gatherers, by Mathias Schmid .... Familien Gluck, by J. Fliiggen ; engraved by E. Mohn . Madonna and Child, by L. Knaus ; etched by W. Unger Frieze, by Bendemann Peasant of the Black Forest, by L. Knaus The Waters of Babylon, by Bendemann .... ECCELINO IN Prison, by K. F. Lessing; engraved by E. Mohn Charlemagne's Entry into Vavik, by A. Rethel Frontispieci Page IO 13 15 26 by Jidius Schnorr 28 29 30' 32^ 33 34 36 46 47 48 50 51 52 55 56 60 68 70 71 74 1^ VI Illustrations. Coronation of Charlemagne, by A. Rethel Death as a Friend, by A. Rethel Domestic Devotion, by C. Lasch ; engraved by Biirkner Hanging the Fox, by W. Kaulbach .... The Sick Lion, by W. Kaulbach The Deluge, by W. Kaulbach ; etched by L. Friedrich . Frieze, by W. Kaulbach Frieze, by W. Kaulbach ...... Bringing Home the Bride, ^j'/. E. Steinle ; engraved by L. Friedrich Germania, by Veit The Wise and Foolish Virgins, by Schadow Posting in Wallachia, by A. Schreyer ; etched by IV. U7tger The Meeting of Rebecca and Isaac, by Julius Schnorr The Introduction of the Arts, by Moritz Schwind A Shepherd : The Approach of Wolves, by Otto Thoren ; etc/ted by W. Preparing for Scu.001,, by Michael Mimkdcsy ; etched by W. Unger Jairus'S Daughter, by Gabriel Max ; engraved by E. Mohn . Unger PAGE 77 79 84 94* 95 96 98 99 no 1X2 "3 118 121 131 134 138 144 PREFACE. I DO not attempt more than a broad sketch of the varied phases assumed by German Art during the present century. An exhaustive compilation is not my aim, but rather a simple record of my own observations over a period of thirty years. My knowledge of the Modern Schools dates back to 1848, when I was accustomed to visit the studio of Overbeck. I have since, from time to time, made repeated journeys to Munich, Diisseldorf, Berlin, Frankfort, and Vienna, and notes were taken on the spot of the works described in these pages. Some of the results have, during the last twenty years, appeared in 'Blackwood's Magazine,' the 'Art Journal,' the ' Portfolio,' and the ' Saturday Review.' The present volume is in good measure an amplification of past experiences ; but several months have been spent in Germany last year and this, in order to gather fresh information, and to make the book a chronicle of the existing state of the German Schools. I beg to offer these pages as an earnest, though slight, contribution to a great theme, for which I preserve an abiding love. Since the above was written an accident to an illustration has delayed the publication of the work, though the greater part was already in print ; and during the interval some few deaths and events have occurred, which, for the sake of completeness, must be here briefly recorded. Carl Friedrich Lessing, who in these pages occupies as a historic painter a prominent position, died at Carlsruhe in July, 1880, aged seventy-two. Holding by no means an onerous office, as Director of the Gallery in that capital, practising leisurely his art, enjoying social intercourse with congenial friends, and obtaining the confidence of the reigning sovereign, the closing scenes of life had for some years glided tranquilly and pleasantly. Lessing at the age of seventy was still hale ; on his birthday he received hearty congratulations, and he was honoured by his brother artists with a fete, but soon his strength gave way, and his end, though at last sudden, was scarcely unforeseen. Up to last June he worked at his easel : in July he lay dead : the final seizure was apoplexy. Art, and the profession of the artist, which Lessing had done so much to elevate in his life, received honour in his death. His funeral might have been that of a prince. The cortege which followed the body to the grave was joined by the Grand Duke of Baden, by ministers and councillors of state, by military dignitaries and by deputations from the art academies of Germany. The public journals added a critical estimate of the painter's character and genius. Lessing, the grand-nephew of the great philosopher, not unnaturally made his art the reign of reason ; his historic pictures manifest the struggle waged with superstition and oppression, and proclaim the victory of truth and liberty. His heroes were Huss and Luther : his theme was the German Reformation. I have just come from his portrait in the Town Gallery of Diisseldorf: the head rises with amplitude in the coronal regions ; the eye and nose are eagle-like in ken and curve : keen is the outlook on the world : sensitiveness, coupled nevertheless with strength and resolve, pronounce the artistic temperament. Lessing had a noble bearing, in presence he showed himself independent and self-sustained ; in society he was laconic yet out-spoken ; his purest enjoyment sprang from nature and his art. I trust the reader will find in these pages appreciative tribute to this great man : ' Lessing as a star shines near and far.' Franz Ittenbach, worn by the bodily suffering of years, passed into rest the last night in November, 1879, ^^ ^^^ ^S^ °^ sixty-seven. Less than two months before, when I saw him in his studio, he was downcast, and evidently stricken, and I felt that one of the few bright lights of the Spiritual School still shining was flickering low; and when came the cold winds of winter the vital spark went out. With Ittenbach art was a religion ; a picture an answer to a prayer ; money had never been a primary motive, and yet fortunately penury did not enter the frugal dwelling. Ittenbach, a devout disciple in the German School of Christian Art, died in the faith, and in the Church of Overbeck and Schadow. Anselm Feuerbach, attacked with disease of the heart, was found on the morning of the 4th of January, 1880, at the comparatively early age of fifty-one, dead in his bed in viii Preface. Venice, a city whereunto, like Albert Diirer three centuries before, he had come from Nuremberg for the practice of his art. He had already taken measures for return to the old town which he had made his home ; but it was not living that he was to go. Four days after death, a gondola with three Germans and two Italians, conveyed the body along the noiseless water-streets of Venice to the point of departure for Bavaria. And so at length all that is mortal of the great painter was laid in the ancient cemetery of St. John, at Nuremberg, in a grave appropriately placed between the tombs of Albert Diirer and Wenzel Jamnitzer. The whole story reads sadly. Feuerbach died in sleep — he was called away in a dream — his death, like his life, was in silence and solitude ; no one was present to close his eye, or to mark his expiring breath ; and Melancholy, which had shadowed his days, and darkened his art, alone kept watch over his bed. Certain umbrageous heads by this painter, taking inspiration from Da Vinci, owe in part their soul-moving spell to this spirit of mysterious and abiding melancholy. When Feuerbach was laid in sleep, one of the very few painters passed away who, in these material times, still hold faith in an ideal. The Exhibition in Diisseldorf, which while I write is attracting crowds of visitors, has more value in the department of Industries than of Arts. The sculpture is insignificant, while the paintings and drawings, nearly one thousand in number, though fairly represen- tative of many leading masters, offer few, if any, fresh points for notice. I am glad, how. ever, of the opportunity of greeting in these galleries Rudolf Bendemann, from whom, as the son of the venerable professor, works of high order are naturally looked for. Removed from the prevailing naturalism of the day is the Burial of a Bard, lyre in hand, raised on a bier, borne by a company of young maidens clad in white and strewing flowers. It is to be regretted that such conceptions of poetic beauty are now rare in Germany. Some important works in course of execution it may be well just to mention. Professor janssen's large, historic wall-paintings, nine in number, the figures over life-size, for the Rathhaus, in the old town of Erfurt (mentioned page 79), are being pushed forward by the artist on the spot, from whom I have just received a letter. The cartoons, which I saw some months since in the studio in Diisseldorf, are carried out, not on canvas, as might have been feared, but upon the walls. The process, however, is not that of the old Italian fresco painted on the wet wall : a new method has been preferred, applied to the dry plaster, described as 'wax-medium,' and not unlike Gambler Parry's 'spirit fresco,' recently adopted by Sir Frederick Leighton in his wall-picture in the South Kensington Museum. A similar medium is employed for the mural paintings in the old Schloss at Meissen (see page 122). To be noted among fresh products in the pre-eminently art city of Berlin are two friezes, each twenty feet long, on canvas, by Professor Knille, destined for the staircase of the University Library. The themes are : Athens — Plato with His Scholars, and Paris — The Sofbortne, Disputation before St. Lewis. Furthermore, I find that in the continuous adorning of the capital of Prussia, the wall-painting in the Arsenal (mentioned page 106) are making, in the hands of Friedrich Geselschap, persistent progress. Eminently successful is a circular composition on a ceiling, representing Greece triumphant over land and sea, wherein a tragic muse and a dethroned queen play conspicuous parts. The style, as befits the subject, is imaginative and ideal. The large wall-paintirtgS by Professor Wislecenus, in the Kaiserhaus, at Goslar, in the Hartz Mountains, are making satisfactory progress. This historic series extends from Charle- magne to the reigning emperor Wilhelm, and the work will occupy at least ten years. The stately building for the Diisseldorf Academy (described page 91) was opened with ceremony in October last, and the classes are now in working order. At the inaugural banquet, the Minister of Public Instructiofl testified to the need of a thought-inspired art as an ennobling power in a commercial community ; while Dr, Woermann, the local professor of art history, dwelt on the use of Academies in directing the ideal development of a people : ' Let the motto over the Diisseldorf Academy be, " Nature and Genius." ' In giving this book to the public, I feel to be parting with an old friend — the com- panion of many years. And I have watched so fondly over the volume's gtowth, that perchance at length I am blinded to its shortcomings : a stranger, seeing for the first time the imperfect work, can hardly be expected to take a like lenient view. J. B. A. Diisseldorf^ August, 1880. THE SCHOOLS OF MODERN ART IN GERMANY. CHAPTER I.— INTRODUCTION. THE object I propose in the introductory remarks is to take a general view of the wide and discursive subject which will be treated in the sequel in detail. I have thought it, on the whole, best to describe and discuss ' The Schools of Modern Art in Germany ' at the several localities where they have arisen, and where they may still be seen and judged by master- works. Thus the reader is conducted by successive stages from one great city to another as a chief centre of creation : he passes from Munich to Diisseldorf and Berlin, and thence by way of Central Germany to Vienna and Pesth. And in taking this circuit he makes the acquaintance of conspicuous artists — of Cornelius and Overbeck, of Kaulbach and Piloty, of Rethel and Bendemann, of Knaus, Matejko, and Munkacsy ; he sees these painters on the very spots whereon they have lived and laboured, surrounded by the circumstances which have done much to form their personal character and to determine their individual style. But the danger is that under such an arrangement each successive panorama may stand apart in isolation, and therefore I think it well, in these opening observations, to strive to collect materials somewhat scattered into a collective whole. The divers manifestations presented stand as the effects of more or less ascertained causes ; they are connected with an antecedent history, they are the issue of distinctive races of mankind, they are the products of social and political conditions, they have been controlled by local circumstances" of climate and physical geography. These are the bonds which unite the somewhat varied arts of Germany into a common nationality. Ethnology does not throw as much light on what is obscure in the arts of Germany as might be expected. Indeed in such inquiries, especially as conducted by such critics as Mr. Fergusson, is sometimes incurred the fallacy of arguing in a circle : thus certain races are tacitly assumed to be aesthetic, and therefore to have given birth to art ; and then, again, when certain arts are found to exist it is inferred that the resident races must be eminently artistic. It is obvious that little progress can be thus secured. It might evidently be more to the purpose to consider whether there had not been operative anterior circumstances and causes which made the races what they are ; whether, in fact, favouring climate, beauty in outward nature, and ease and luxury of life, had not been, indeed, the primary and generating source of art. In Germany, certainly, all such conditions have to be taken into consideration. Furthermore, these investigations encounter, in Central Europe especially, perplexities arising from mixed races. These races, moreover, are not among the primal and strongly-marked divisions of the human family, but are sometimes little else than minor varieties, generated by the migrations of a tribe or the inroad of an army. The whole question, in fact, of the relation between ethnology and art is beset, as already said, with doubt and difficulty: so fundamental a point, for instance, as whether the collective art of the whole world, civilised and uncivilised, can have come from one source and can claim a B 2 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. common parentage, or whether it sprang from distinct races and was evolved at distant centres, Germany being one, will, perhaps, never be determined. The inquiry, as before remarked, becomes, in Central Europe, the more complex and confused, because circumstances have formed the races, and the races in turn have determined the circumstances, and neither alone, but both conjoined, have conspired to fashion what is termed the national art. Religious wars, too, have disturbed Teutonic races. The contests extending from the Council of Constance to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, though they did not alter the boundaries of the German race, gave rise to sundry immigrations and local modifications. Dr. John Beddoe of Clifton, who is well known to have given great attention to this line of inquiry, considers that these religious wars had three notable results. First, they crushed the rising civilisation of the Bohemians, the most active and intellectual of the Sclavs — a people, however, rather imitative than creative in art. Second, they impoverished Germany and withered its rich and quaintly mediaeval civilisation ; and subsequently, after the peace of Miinster in 1648, when commerce recovered and the arts began to revive, the Germans took to copying French models in every- thing, and copied badly. How this fatal mistake led to a reaction in favour of what was old and original in the national literature and art will become apparent in subsequent pages. The third effect of the religious wars ensued on the great immigration of the Huguenots or their descendants into Prussia, and especially Berlin. The rather slow Teutons dwelling in these territories were quickened and enlivened by these incursive Frenchmen ; and among the fruits in literature of this animating stock may be named Chamisso, the author of ' Peter Schlemil,' and La Motte Fouqu^, the writer of the poetic and popular romance ' Undine.' Let us now turn to the ethnological map of Germany to observe how the several races .or varieties lie and intermingle. The territory occupied by the arts which here fall under review comprises, towards the north, Prussia and Prussian Poland ; on the south, Bavaria and the Austrian Tyrol ; on the west, the regions around the Rhine; and on the east, the empire of Austria and Hungary traversed by the Danube. The varied population dwelling over this wide- stretching surface may be set down roughly at 80,000,000. The constituent races are as follows : — The Teutonic, or the German proper, seated in the centre, west, and north of the empire. This race, in the isth and i6th centuries, may be said to have obtained art- manifestation in the school's of Holbein and Albert Diirer. Though now tolerably homo- geneous, and possessing a distinct character, this race is, in fact, an amalgamation of two chief elements ; the one primitive, homely, and industrious, best represented in the present day in the Black Forest, in Swabia, and Bavaria, and finding its congenial art-manifestation in subjects of domestic life and scenes of naturalism ever dear to the German people ; the other intrusive, conquering, vigorous, of Northern type and Scandinavian origin. To this last is due the gloomy and weird mythology of the old Germans, together with the fantastic and ghostly imagery in which mediaeval Teutons delighted. Literature and Art here fell under a like spell. Sagas and legends wild, and dances of death, came with the advance of the fierce hordes that descended upon Germany from storm-beaten and rock-bound regions lying on the further north. The Teutonic race, which is supposed to have held possession of Germany from time immemorial, received repeated incursions from ■ neighbouring peoples. On the part of the North, proximity to Scandinavia led, as we have seen, to intercourse with the shores held by the sea-kings. On the side of the West— that is, in provinces bordering on Gaul, or France— an intermixture of Celtic blood obtained,' making the ethnological compound known as the Germano-Celtic. This variety, which extends beyond the German frontier into France, seems connected in the arts with the highest development of Gothic architecture. Its geographic distribution is somewhat wide : sweeping across the plains of Lombardy, it transplants Northern types— partly Gothic, yet in the rounded arch pre-Gothic— into Southern latitudes, and seeking political action it finds issue in the faction of the Ghibelins as opposed to the Italian Guelphs. Turning to the eastern boundaries of Germany the ethnological conditions are wholly altered. The Teutonic race there naturally receives foreign elements from the adjacent territories. Introduction. ■ 3 Accordingly Eastern Prussia, Prussian Poland, Austrian Poland, Moravia, Bohemia, and the regions round about Vienna, are inhabited by populations in which the Sclavs intermingle with the Teutons. It is difficult to assign any express art-results to this Sclavonic consanguinity. It^ is true that the Bohemians are distinguished by genius, and their chief city, Prague, combines with the most picturesque of positions art-treasures, ancient and modern, of singular interest. Identified with this capital is the family of Max : the father a sculptor, who has adorned the public places of the city with patriotic monuments ; the son, the celebrated painter, whose picture, Jairus's Daughter, illustrates these pages. But, for the most part, the Sclavs are little else than imitative. So far as they are responsible for the products of the Russian school they show less power of creation than of adaptation and mechanical manipulation. Lastly, somewhat unexpectedly intrudes, not on Germany proper but on Hungary, at the eastern extremity of the Austrian Empire, the Magyar race, which stands almost as much of an anomaly in Europe as the Turks. European ethnology, or at any rate civilisation, is often referred back to the migrations from the east of peoples known generically as Indo-Europeans. The testimony of art, like that of language, bears out this conclusion. Such emigrations from the East have been repeated and continuous. The Gipsies, as late as the fifteenth century, swarmed over the eastern frontiers of Europe to the number of several hundred thousands ; and Bohemia has been named as their most favoured resting-place. This erratic people, known to be scattered as wanderers over the face of the earth, can claim, of course, but remote and accidental connexion with the arts, save as painters' models. The Magyars, however, have made for themselves a position wholly different. Persistently, as early as the sixth, ninth, and twelfth centuries, they formed settlements on the Danube, where they still dwell, to the number of about six millions, having for their seat of dominion the twin-capital Buda-Pesth. The people have always borne a character for bravery and independence. Attila, chief of the tribe which brought in the first wave of the Hungarian migration, was chosen by Kaulbach as the hero in his grand composition, the Battle of the Huns — a conflict wherein, according to tradition, the strife waxed so fierce that after night-fall the spirits of the slain renewed the battle in the upper air. The Fine Arts — pictorial, and especially decorative — identified with the Magyars, as displayed in the galleries and the miscellaneous museums of Pesth, are distinguished by intrepidity and enterprise, by discursive variety and nomadic restlessness, and by an orientalism lavish in ornament and sumptuous in colour. The preceding recital may prepare the reader for the condition of the Germanic peoples under those comparatively recent art revivals which, beginning towards the end of last century, reach down to our own day. In the first place we have seen that the Teutonic race, though from time to time undergoing change, has never lost its identity, and accordingly German art preserves a national character, distinguished from that of the French on the one hand and that of the Italians on the other. In the second place we have found that the Teutonic stock has, in the lapse of centuries, assumed sundry varieties ; and so in like manner, especially within the last hundred years, German art has, in the midst of a dominant unity, developed multiform phases, and now presents what is known as ' unity in variety.' The national unity has been manifest in the love for all that belonged to the Fatherland, whether in old sagas or in people's songs, or in tales of romance or in stories of valour, in scenes laid in caverns or forests, by rivers and rocks, or around feudal castles. The lore and the legends were woven into poetry and wrought into painting. But this fundamental oneness has ever, like the German families, been diversified by changeful variety. Art has passed from grave to gay, from the high even to the low : by turns she enters the church, the palace, and the cottage ; she has dealt with things sacred and secular ; she has added sanctity to the altar, and brought sympathetic succour to the domestic hearth. Indeed much in German painting is so peculiarly national as to lie beyond the regard of foreign lands. These relations between German races and German arts would assuredly have remained closer had it not been for disturbing circumstances. As before shown, legitimacy in descent 4 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. has been intercepted by the inroads of Scandinavians, Celts, and Slavs ; and so it comes to pass in Germany as in the British islands, purity of blood is exceptional. Furthermore, present tendencies all the world over lead to the breaking down of old barriers : commerce, the facility • of personal transit, the free interchange not only of commodities in trade but of current thoughts through widely-diffused literature, science, and art, have done much to render civilisation cosmo- politan, to make of one family all the dwelkrs on the earth, and thus to merge tlie differences of race in a common humanity. But more than all, within the province of art it is found that the interchange in picture galleries and international exhibitions, that the educational intercourse between masters and pupils, often coming together from geographic points wide asunder, together wjth the friendly interchange of ideas between studio and studio, have, particularly of late years, done much to obliterate the distinctive outlines which once divided national schools. Not only within the circuit of the sister empires of Germany and of Austria has there been the transference of professors and scholars from city to city, not only did Cornelius pass from the directorate of the Academy of Diisseldorf to that of Munich, not only did Kaulbach divide his labours and distribute his master-works between Munich and Berlin, not only are the pupils of Piloty trained in Munich and then transplanted to Vienna and other capitals, but Gerriian painters and sculptors now-a-days wander beyond their frontiers, and establish colonies in Rome, Paris, and even in London. Nevertheless, these disturbing causes have their limits. Artists have been for centuries migratory. Mabuse visited Italy, Albert Diirer tarried in Venice, and fell under the spell of Venetian forms and colour in the time of the Bellini, and yet Teutonic schools maintained their distinctive characteristics. And so it has been within the last and the present generation. Governing minds do not readily throw aside the allegiance of ancestry, tradition, faith ; and I think there can be little question that the genius and the works of Cornelius, Kaulbach, and Piloty in Munich ; and of Bendemann, Rethel, Lessing, and Knaus, in. Diisseldorf, not to mention other scarcely less signal examples, are strictly the offspring of Teutonic races, the products of Germanic soils. Rightly to understand the modern phases of German art it is needful to take a retrospective glance of prior historic styles. For the sake of clearness and brevity it may be best to throw the pictorial phenomena into groups. First, then, is the pre-historic period, distinguished by flint implements, &c., the ages of stone, bronze, iron. Secondly, the Roman epoch, pronounced along the two great arteries of Germany — the Rhine, and the Danube — and displayed in museums such as those of Mannheim and Pesth. Neither of these eras exerts an appreciable influence on the extant schools of Germany, though the early architecture and sculpture known as Romanesque are due more or less directly to the conquering arms and civilising arts of Rome. Next to the Roman Empire of the West succeeded the supremacy of the Empire of the East, and accordingly from Constantinople was transferred to the borders of the Rhine a Byzantine art, which survived to the fourteenth century at Cologne in the,_j pictures of Wilhelm Meister and his coadjutors, and is hkewise seen in the Byzantine forms of many churches still standing in the Rhineland. Byzantine types are generally accepted as closely akin to spiritual schools, and certainly the attenuated figures, the careworn and wasted faces, and the long-drawn draperies of the old Byzantine painters and sculptors, find sympathetic response in the creations of the Christian school of Diisseldorf. Two or three centuries later there grew up in central and southern Germany — as may still be witnessed in pictures, statues, and in domestic and municipal architecture of Nuremberg, Ulm, Augsburg, and other cities — a style which of all others most deserves to be designated German or Teutonic. If asked in what masters national characteristics became most pronounced, I should unhesitatingly say in Wohlgemuth, Lucas Cranach, Albert Diirer, Martin Schon, and , Hans Holbein. The pictures by these masters have a firmness in form, a rigidity in outline, an austerity, fixedness, and concentration in expression, and often a wildness of imagination, as in the Dance of Death, by Holbein, and the Knight, Death, and the Devil, by Albert Diirer, with sundry weird' fantasies by Martin Schon. This singularly marked, and in some measure Introduction. 5 exceptional manifestation in the world's historic arts, has found a resuscitation among modern Germans, and signally with Alfred Rethel, in such designs as Death the Avenger, Death the Friend, and the Dance of Death, the last a commentary on the horrors of war. Also the same wild weird sph-it impels the movements, while it petrifies the forms, of the Four Riders of the Apocalypse by Cornelius. But the expressly national art identified with Diirer and other like-minded men soon lost its integrity by submission to the sway and surrender to the allurements of Italian genius. Hence sprang up a hybrid progeny, which for a period of well-nigh two hundred years became more and more degenerate, till at length, at the end of the last century, the art of Germany had fallen into an estate so effete that revolt was provoked, and a movement claiming to be little short of a resurrection ensued. The reaction, revival, and new birth, under Overbeck, Veit, Cornelius, and Schnorr, sought to rekindle the old fires that had been extinguished, to reanimate a former life that had been lost. In the sequel it will be seen how, by reverting to the true and vital creations of prior periods, these devoted pioneers strove to restore art to its original purity, health, and strength. Periods of art revival have often been coincident with times of political activity and commercial prosperity : the excitement of war, the struggle for independence, the accumulation of wealth among merchant princes, have incited to mental action, not only in philosophy, which belongs to the region of the reasoh, but in literature and art, which pertain to the imagination. And sometimes these epochs of creative life and beauty have sprung out of . political and social troubles and revolutionary struggles ; as, for example, in the stormy reigns of Queen Elizabeth, of Charles the First and Second, and of James the First, in England, signalised by the genius of Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton, Lord Bacon, and others. But of all the great tidal waves that have swept over kingdoms or continents, bearing on their surgy crests the highest creations of the human intellect, ranks foremost the great French Revolution, with its attendant movements. In France, under the excitement and passion, appeared Napoleon, Mirabeau, Rousseau, Voltaire, Madame de Stael, and the painter David. In England, Nelson, Wellington, Byron, Shelley, Scott, Wordsworth. In Germany, Schiller, Goethe, Lessing, Richter, Niebuhr, Winckelmann ; and among artists, Overbeck, Cornelius, Veit, Lessing, and many others. Thus the rise of the modern German school of art is identified with a potent and wide-extending movement; it rises as an effect out of common and pervading causes. But yet, on the other hand, many of the manifestations grow not so much from excitation as from the opposite condition of tranquillity. Not a few painters, of the more recent period especially, have lived in the lull which follows after the storm ; the inspiration came not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire, but in the still small voice. Not rough seas but tranquil streams do mirror Nature's beauty. Wordsworth's theory of poetic production bears closely on the painter's state when in the act of creation. Communion with Nature, induced by moods of quietude, sometimes leads to states of high mental action. ' From Nature doth emotion come, and moods of calmness equally are Nature's gift;' 'hence Genius is born to thrive by interchange of peace and excitation.' With Overbeck and artists begotten of the spirit, ' excitation ' took the form- of religious fervour, while their ' peace ' followed as a beatitude, and was as an expectant waiting of what Heaven should reveal. But short of such super- sensuous and transcendental states, the artist's intellect in Germany loves to dwell in calm aesthetic culture — a placidity of mental tone which prompts to pictures symmetric in composition and equally balanced in light, shade, and colour. The epic has given place to the pastoral and the lyric. Fliiggen and Munthe, among living painters, breathe the atmosphere of repose. And then, again, repose leads on to contentment, enjoyment, and even to estates of luxury, and so imagination warms into romance and fancy toys with beauty. The present phases of German art have taken on this complexion and colouring; they are quietly meditative as Wordsworth's ' Excursion ;' they soar on the wings of the dove, not on those of the eagle ; they linger, like our own Wilkie, around the peasant's cot ; they dwell near to Nature, and speak of peace and joy. C 6 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. The political condition of Germany, no less than that of ancient Greece and of middle-age Italy, has done much to mould the form and motive of the national art. Foremost always comes the question whether there be a nation at all worthy of the devotion of great and ardent minds, whether there be- at stake a national cause and interest worth fighting for, either by the sword, the pen, or the pencil. Patriotism it " is that inspires to noble deeds in heroic action, in written words, in pictorial or plastic form. , History it is that 'makes the historic painter : a people without a history can hardly possess high art. On the other hand, the man who feels himself to be an integral part of a great commonwealth gains accumulative power. , The artist who, casting a retrospective glance over wide tracts of historic time, or the landscape-painter who, turning his eye across forest, river, mountain, plain, pronounces the name ' Fatherland,' grows superior to the unit and the individual, and swells as with the impulsive movement of multitudes. German artists have not been wanting within their own territories in animating themes. In Nuremberg, on the walls of the Rathhaus, is depicted the triumph of Maximilian, assigned to the time of Albert Diirer ; in Aix - la - Chapelle are modern frescoes by Alfred Rethel commemorative of the achievements of Charlemagne ; at the entrance to Unter den Linden, Berlin, stands Rauch's Frederick the Great, the finest equestrian composition of our century. It is scarcely necessary to say how greatly the feeling of patriotism and nationality has recently been extended and intensified by perils of battle and prizes of victory. It has often . been affirmed that the songs of a people tell more of their estate than their political legislation ; and certainly on the breaking out of the Franco-Germanic war the passion of patriotism was in no way more pronounced than by the strains of the ' Wacht am Rhine,' which swept as wild-fire through the length and breadth of the land. In past times a marked feature in the map of Central Europe was its subdivision into a' multitude of minor states ; a political condition which had indeed its parallel in classic Greece and mediaeval Italy during the signal art epochs. And this separation into distinct kingdoms and capitals is seized on in the classification here adopted, on the assumption that Berlin, Munich, and Vienna are. severally creative centres. But political tendencies throughout Europe for the last quarter of a century have been towards . amalgamation, aggregation, concentration. Small kingdoms have been annihilated or merged, large states have grown larger and stronger; and so in the apportionment of the world's empire has been accomplished the saying, ' To those who have, to them shall be given, and tliey shall have more abundantly ; but those who have not, from thenj shall be taken even that which they have.' The problem which has been worked out, more especially in Germany, is to reconcile the democracy of the many with the oligarchy of the few and the monarchy of the one — the personal liberty of the indi- vidual with the absolute authority of the collective government. It is under such happy conditions that German artists of the present generation have found a free and full development. Unshackled in thought, sufficiently prosperous though possibly somewhat poor, contented in a sphere simple, true, and near to nature, they feel a pride and a sustaining power as members of a great commonwealth, — a Fatherland bound together in the unison of one language, law, literature, and art. Religion, both as a faith of the heart and a creed of the intellect, has, it is well known, been ever a paranibunt power in German art. Devotion in its most earnest and sometimes in its austerest forms is deeply engraven on the early panels found in the Rhine C9untry. And this steadfastness of expression and earnestness of motjve have, in our times, been perpetuated by Philip Veit, in his profoundly studied fresco in the Stadel Institut, the Introduction of Christianity into Germany through the Arts. In dealing with this branch of the subject it is • to be observed, that under the Reformation the independence of the human intellect began to assert itself in art : Luther was the friend of Albert Diirer and Lucas. Cranach, and the pictures of St. Paul and St. Mark in the Old Pinakothek Introduction. 7 of Munich by Diirer, are impressed by an individuality and a strength of purpose characteristic of the new creed. The two conflicting faiths of Roman Catholicism on the one side and of Protestantism on the other divide German art down to the present day. Overbeck and his devoted phalanx raised anew the sacred standard of Christian and Catholic art, and many are the wall and easel pictures which proclaim the fervour of their faith. But under the leadership of'Lessing, who chose as his hero John Huss, there subsists what may.be termed pictorial Protestantism, distinguished by a noble humani- ■tg.rianism and by a singular breadth and boldness of hand. Which of the two Churches dividing the world asunder is best suited to pictorial purposes may be matter of opinion. But, speaking generally, it can be safely affirmed that the creed which has in it the greatest credulity is most liberal in its art-promises, if not also, indeed, in its fulfilments. Cardinal Newman, it may be remembered, pleaded that his Church must ever retain supreme sway, because it gave victory to the imagination, thfe strongest faculty in the human breast. On the other hand. Protestantism exalts conscience and establishes the right of private judgment — primary virtues which are commanding in council-chamber or in senate, as witness Lessing's composition, Huss before the Council of Constance. Yet, so far as Protestantisoi is a negation, it can scarcely serve for inspiration ; and when faith becomes merged in what is called German Rationalism the ideas, for the most part, are too abstract to assume visual form. On the other hand, prevailing phases of thought take on- a positivism, a realism, and a naturalism, which go far to determine the art-manifestationsjpeculiar to the present century. On the whole it is evident, that the existing relatiops .between religion arid the arts are complex and many-sided, and it seems the duty of the impartial critic to give full credit all round for whatever creed proves best for the interest of art. The aspects of nature — the physical geography of Germany — have necessarily been reflected into art. It is to be remembered that in Central Europe winter reigns with terror. In Nuremberg, in the month of January, the traveller makes the circuit of the city walls in a sledge, the grave of Albert Durer is covered with snow, and the roof of the house in which he dwelt, like the other structures in the town, is steep in pitch for the sake of giving avalanches of ice an easy descent. The pictures of Altdorfer and 'others are girt with precipices and with mountains which cradle storms. Such savage scenes, grand arid terrible in rugged outline, in breadth and depth of shadow, rouse strongly the imagina- tion, and poets as well as painters conjure up conceptions wild, and people the waste solitudes of nature, not with the angels and fairies that float and sport in a sunny clime, but with demons, and dragons, and sprites of evil intent. Scandinavia, clad in black pine forests and entrenched with serrated rocks, bred northern hordes that gave, as we have , seen, to Germany inspiration wild and warlike ; and German arts, even to this day — as seen in pictorial interchanges between the School of Diisseldorf and the Academies of Copenhagen, Christiania, and Stockholm — hold sympathetic fellowship with mountain-land and stormy wave. Doubtless, in great measure, is due to climate and to the northern aspects of nature the character of German art as distinguished from Grecian and Italian. Lord Byron would seem to have been inspired by the spirit of the North in the awe-moving drapia of 'Manfred:' the witch of the Alps could hardly have been encountered in the Apennines. Northern art, in short, is moulded in its structure and modulated in its spirit by northern climes and northern nature. It has ever tended to hardness of outline, severity in anatomy, and coldness and even crudity in colour. The German temper wants the passionate ardour of Italy,: instead, it possesses cool calculation and a clearness of intellect, which some have gone so far as to connect with the Reformation in religion. Mr. Ruskin, with his usual point and paradox, puts the matter as follows: — 'We in the North produce our Shakespeare and Holbein ; the Italians their Petrarch and Raphael. And it is scarcely possible for you to study Shakespeare and Holbein too much and Petrarch and Raphael too little.' The purpose of the preceding remarks has been to point to the causes that have conduced 8 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. to the recent revivals in German art. Given the creative genius, and ascertained the sur- rounding circumstances, the consequent results can be pretty fairly predicated. The genius may be said to have been supplied by Overbeck, Cornelius, Veit, Schadow, Bendemann, Steinle, Lessing, Kaulbach, Piloty, and others ; and the attendant surroundings came with conditions of race, climate, politics, religion, manners, and customs. In Germany, as in other countries, the phenomena presented by art are naturally in close correspondence with the mani- festations in literature : like causes in the two 'sister spheres necessarily produce cognate results. The same line of argument has been taken by M. Taine. This distinguished French critic lays down the law that the artist is not an isolated unit ; that he is, on the contrary, part ,of a collective whole greater than himself ; that his art receives its body and spirit through the forces operating around him. This philosophic inquirer urges that the family of artists is comprised in an assemblage more vast — a world to the fashion whereof the painter conforms his tastes. The artist is not dissevered or secluded ; for him, thought and the state of manners are the same as for the public : ' It may be that it is the voice of art alone that we now hear across the distant centuries ; but under that sonorous voice we distinguish a dull murmur— the grand and multitudinous voice of a people singing in unison. The artist had not been great but by reason of this harmony.' Schijler tells us that it is given to art the future to foresee, 'the coming age to foreshadow. The more the artist charms, the more the thinker knows ; the more the thought with the emotion blends, the more the soul aspires ; the toils of science swell the wealth of art, and the imagination, striving for the Beautiful through the True, gains for the arts the assurance of a great hereafter. CHAPTER II.— THE RISE IN ROME. I FEEL it a privilege to enter once more on a subject dear to me while in Rome. Some sixty years ago a small company of German painters, of whom Cornelius and Overbeck were guiding spirits — dissatisfied with the state of art in their own country — betook themselves to Rome, and proclaimed as their mission a more excellent way. The movement may be briefly designated as Christian by religious inspiration, classic under a desire for the highest typical beauty, romantic in consequence of occasional erotic p^-ssion, and, above all, national in the love of country and in the faith that for the German peoples there remained" in art' a work and a destiny. This movement had its antecedents and its sequel, so that the German manifestation, taken as a whole, may be divided into three distinctive periods. First, the Classic, identified with Raphael Mengs, who reached the city in 1741, and further signalised by the painter Carstens, who, in his Roman studio, executed works inspired by the antique. Thorwaldsen migrated to the Eternal City in 1798 : he studied in the Capitol and the Vatican Museums, and his renowned figures of Mercury, Venus, and the Graces, proclaim the bent of his genius. The Italian Canova, with the great English sculptors, Flaxman, Wyatt, and Gibson, were infused by one spirit. Painters in Italy, and indeed throughout' Europe, emulating the French David, trod in the same classic path. In literature the teaching lay in like lines. Winckelmann, in his History of Ancient Art, Lessing in his Laocoon, and Goethe by his Italian Tour; consolidated and intensified this classic revival by appeal to ancient history and to the master works of Greece and Rome. John Gibson, the last survivor of this compact party, I' had the advantage of knowing pretty intimately ; and the ruling maxim which he oft repeated was, ' The Greeks are always right.' This, of course, I do not think, neither do I propose to speak further of this first period, but shall at once pass to the second. The second phase of German art commenced about 1810, with the arrival in Rome of Cornelius, Overbeck, Veit, Schadow, Schnorr, and others. The objection has been raised that these pioneers, as certain of our own ' Pre-Raphaelite Brethren,' sought to follow servilely in the footsteps of the early Italian masters ; but the answer is, that this revival and reaction formed part of a wide-spread agitation, roused by such writers as Tieck, Novalis, and the brothers Schlegel, who awakened the memory of a native poetry, and led the love of the people back to mediaevalism and romanticism. The ardour of the Germans was further fired by a natural hatred of the French, provoked to a high pitch of patriotism by the humiliating conquests of Napoleon. The French, from the time of the first republic, espoused an illicit classicism; this in itself was a reason why the Germans should fly wildly, yet not blindly, into the opposite direction. Cornelius and Overbeck — the one in Dilsseldorf, the other in Vienna — rebelled against the classic and academic teachings to which they had been sub- jected ; they broke into open revolt, and chose Rome for a resting-place, as high and neutral ground. The third, and expressly naturalistic period, is supposed to have begun about the year 1830, and reaches down to the present day. It came as a reaction, and even as a revenge, on what had gone before. Cornelius and Overbeck had flown into the sky; hence the desire was felt for a return to a firm footing on mother earth. The number of German artists resident in Rome has always been, and still is, considerable. Count Raczynski, writing in 1841, enumerates no less than seventy-seven painters and sculptors who had lived, or were still working, in Rome. Among these and those who followed in later years, the best known are Raphael Mengs, Carstens, Cornelius, Overbeck, Koch, Fuhrich, Veit, D lo The" Sehbols of Mod^ierk Art in Germany. Schnorr, ^William .arid Rudolph Schadbw, Schirmer, Schinkel,' Rauch; -Wolff,; Schwanthaler, Kaulbach,;Hess, Piloty, .Rahl," Steinle, Rudolph Lehmann, Kopf, Meyer, MulW of Coburg, LindemarimFrommel, Riedel,'Otto Brandt, . Heilbuth, • aind many others. ' I need 'not say that tHese names are' distributedj'though unequally, between the three arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting — sister arts which, in the German revival, 'have ever been conjoiried and co- operative ;''also that these artists collectively more or less represent the Classic, the Christian, and the Naturalistic phases of Teutonic schools. "The time embraces "more than a'/centery, thearea covers the whole of "Central Europe; comprising vast populations, varied in'religiofa;' race, educa- tion; and modes of life. ' ' -' ■ • • ' . ■•■..\J, ' .. ■ - i. 'v ~ German artists, whether of classic, mediaeval, or naturalistic proclivities, have done well to choose R.om'e as a common gi'oun'd. I speak from personal experience when T- say' there is rio city in "the world more favourable to artistic growth. "Ardent minds can here withdraw 'froin the busy world, and 'dwell in an ideal sphere peopled with' pictures, marbles, and -relics of the past'; they may, at choice, wander among ruins or mingle with a. picturesque peasantry. Men given to aesthetic' culture or delight here steal from the turmoil of the busy^world, and' gently glide alorig . the secluded paths of life. ' Thiis 'meciftative and recipient were Overbeck arid others of 'the sacred flock. ' Hawthorne, -the* American novelist, chose Italy* as the' site of a' well-known roma.nce,because he wanted to make his characters live in a land removed 'from broad";' open' day- light,"and common-place proslierity. ' InTtaly;a'nd especially in- Rome, the 'mind's vision stretches across .shadowy backgrounds arid far-off distances clouded 'with riiystery— an iSjI^mosphere which passes from the sphere of the known to the unknown. "While as for foregrounds, the painter ca:n 'plant his sketching^tool a'mong crumbling ruins overgrowri - with ■ lichen, -ivy, ' and the maiden-hair.' The historian Gibbon fells us that it was w^^ he 'sat miisiri'g- amid. .the ruins of the Capitol, within sound of vespers' sung by the barefooted friars in tbe church'* of Ara Cceli, that the idea of wntirig the 'Decline and Fall of the Empire' first started 'to "his mind. Goethe, dn' reaching "the Eternal 'City, wrote: 'A' true new birtli'' dates frorii the^-'day- 1 entered Rome.' Thor^dldse'n,' following somewhat later, was accustomed to say;'-' I- was born on'the 8th March, 1798 ; before, that day I did -not exist' 'Bu'ri's'en, iri his inaugural address oh opening the German Archaeological Institute close, to the Capitol, chose for hi-s thenl'e the words of Goethe : '-Rome is ^ the' High-school of Europe.' • Arid- when Cornelius, in' 181 i, on appfo'aching'the" city,' saw from afar 'the ■ cupola of St- Peter's, the dome seemed to him to proclaim faith ' triumphant : ' Upon this r6ck,"said he,' I will-' build' my school, arid 'from this city will proclaim truths'that shall bring to' the art of,my 'country deliverance.' ' "^ ■ " . ' ■ ' The 'pilgrim painters found a' congenial ' abode in the cells of San Isidoro, a convent cbmmorily 'spoken ' of as -still siippressedi- 'I :have- just returned from a visit to thisnio'st pleasantly placed dwelling of the "'Irish- Grey 'Effars. It is said that this Fraternity ' deserve well''of*their countrymen, as they are dependent on charity and devote their lives to good works. It further appears that these picturesque monks were turned out of' possession by 'Najjoleon,' arid that ther^ part, at least, of 'the tenement wals let to" the German Brotherhood at -'-a- rental. ~-0'n the 'fin '"oP the First ' Empire the convent once more reverted to the occupation' of the Fraternity, by whom 'it is still held. Fbrtunatel'y, Overbeck and his followers had foiirid siibstiritial adherents' to their -school, so that' they hived off easily into tiew homies. The present S't^perior of the Order has, politely shown me the refectory, also a large hair used for re'ligipus teaching, with other rooriis, great and ''sriiall, ' ranged around -a' cloister planted -with 'orange- trees; ■ These were the dwellirig-places and studios ' of the exiles from ' Germany. Such ■ a resting-place 'must" have proved a congenial!" birthplace for nascent Christian art-- These persistent students worked hard while it -was "day, and when evening' dimmed ^the flight within their painting-rooms they mourited" to the belvedere" at the house-top,' protected' by a. roof which 'in 'heat served for a shade 'and iri cold -for a 'shelter.; ' .Wishing to realize a situation that was 'for Overbeck arid others a daily resort, I have'^m'ade it" niy- pleasure to walk' to and fro in this 'blelvedere,' specially at the- hour of' Ave' Maria, when iDells'from "riiany a campanile o X ■X. (-1 The Rise in Rome, 1 1 sound a chorus in the sunset sky. Around stretch the ilex groves of the Ludovisi Villa, with the blue Alban hills beyond ; on the other side rise St. Peter's and the Castle of St. Angelo ; the panorama sweeps round Monte Mario to the pine-clad Pincian, with^ the Villa M'edici as a finis. It was among scenes and associations such as these that men, neglected and unknown, studied from morning till night, cheered by the hope of animating a dead art into life. On Sundays the work of the week was submitted to free criticism, and I have always found studio criticism more free in Rome than in any other city. But, unhappily, all this activity, though sound as training and serving to fill portfolios, brought no. commissions. The German Pre-Raphaelites were declared to be by Niebuhr and Bunsen without worldly wisdom, and withal they were poor. Niebuhr writes from Rome on Christmas Eve, 1816: 'Cornelius has a wife and two children ; he is very poor, because he labours for conscience and his own satisfaction, and purchasers for works of such high standard are not to be found.' Niebuhr and Bunsen, then dwelling on the Capitol, fortunately espoused the good cause, which might otherwise have expired. The Prussian Government, with prescience, ambitiously planted its Embassy and Archaeological Institute in and about the Palazzo Caffarelli, an elevated position which commands the Tarpeian Rock, the Forum, and the Palace of the Caesars. An illustration in the 'Life of Bunsen' pleasantly realizes the spot, which I now find encompassed by gardens and terraces clothed with stone-pines, palms, cypresses, and eucalyptus trees. Here it was during the evenings of the Roman winter, after the day's work was done, that Cornelius and his company met for social converse. The custom was to read books and talk of pictures. Niebuhr and Bunsen, like all true students down even to the present hour, shunned' ' the devouring horde of tourists greedy for vagrant gossip.' For congenial companionship they gladly sought the German geniuses who had broken loose from conventional routine. Bunsen' writes : 'The society of Cornelius and Overbeck gives an inspiring variety to the day's occupations, and one or other of these intellectual companions seldom fail to join our evening walks.' Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, whose Bible illustrations are seen almost wherever the Bible is read, lived under the same roof as Bunsen, and thus was engendered a life-long friendship. Niebuhr also writes : ' Among the present occupants of Rome our German artists alone have any worth ; and in their society, as far as their sphere reaches, you may sometimes transport yourself for a few hours into a better world.' The creed of the confraternity was sufficiently pronounced : the works of Domenichino, Guercino, and others of the Decadence, were condemned ; the profligate habits of the artists of the day, whether German or Italian, were eschewed ; communion was opened with Francia, Perugino, Pinturicchio, and the saintly Angelico, and a religious life was sought as an access to a heaven-born art. To live out a doctrine was the way to know of the doctrine. Such faith has been earnestly and eloquently proclaimed by Rio, Montalembert, and Pugin. Yet it is but fair to admit that these circumscribed principles were pushed rather far, and enemies in the opposite camp nicknamed the new saints ' Nazarites ' and ' Pre-Raphaelites.' It is further laid to their charge that they fell into small affectations, such as mediaeval costume and the cultivation of long hair, divided over the forehead, and descending in disorder down to the shoulders. A more weighty matter is, that the fervour of these German novices passed into fanaticism. About the year 18 14 Overbeck, and the two brothers Schadow, went over to the Roman Church ; and in taking this step it was believed that their art as well as they passed through a baptism and obtained regeneration. Niebuhr and Bunsen did all they could to avert Ultramontane proclivities. Post-haste the writings of Luther were called for from Berlin ; but too late. Niebuhr expressly states that Cornelius was the only painter strong enough to make for himself a middle path between reason and faith, between Classicism on the one hand and Catholicism on the other. The Palazzo Caffarelli served as neutral ground, as may be judged from an anecdote related by Niebuhr as follows : — ' That Cornelius is a healthy-minded man I will give you a proof. The evening after Bunsen's child was baptized,* we and several more were at his house, which overlooks the Palentine hill, As we were 1 2 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. standing on the open loggia we saw Jupiter sparkling in the sky, as if he were looking down on his own Tarpeian rock. We were drinking healths. I said to Thorwaldsen, "Let us drink to old Jupiter !" "With my whole heart," he replied, in a voice full of emoton. Some were startled, but Cornelius touched our glasses and drank the hfealth.' Cornelius, among his earliest works in Rome, executed the Cartoons for the mythological compositions in the Glyptothek, Munich, and among the latest he made studies for the ' Christian Pictorial Cycle,' designed but never carried out for a projected Cathedral and Campo Santo in Berlin. One of the series, the Four Riders of the Apocalypse, serves as an illustration to this chapter. To the same arduous labour belonged the Advent of the Last Judgment, the drawing for which when seen in Rome, on ,its way to Berlin,' betrayed, as I heard John Gibson say, the enfeebled hand of old age. Cornelius died in Rome in 1867, at the age of eighty-four, after the lapse of more than half a century since the year when he first entered the city. These German painters,' scanty in education but all athirst for knowledge, were at once fortunate and unfortunate in their learned friends — Niebuhr, Bunsen, Frederick Schlegel, and others. Literary men are not always the safest guides for artists : they assume too much, they pretend that they alone can supply the soul, while the artist adds the body only : they lay stress upon the axiom, that ' a picture is an intermediate something between a thought and a thing,' and they honour ' thought ' and disparage ' the thing.' They are ' subjective ' at the expense of the 'objective:' they lay stress upon motive, the inner life, the creative act, and thus they fall into the error of those who exalt faith to the neglect of works. Hence, the faults to which the nascent school had been but too prone were confirmed : technique became subordinate to intention ; colour, texture, light and shade, were held wholly subservient to form and expression. Thus an art primarily didactic disdained to please. A rapid recital of the events that followed is all I can attempt in this introductory notice. A forlorn hope found its small fulfilment when the Prussian Consul Bartholdi, uncle by marriage of Mendelssohn, gave the commission to decorate with frescoes a chamber in the house of the Zuccheri on the Pincian 'Hill. The painters employed were Cornelius, Overbeck, Veit, and Schadow ; the subject .selected was the story of Joseph and his Brethren, a theme happily placed between expiring naturalism and incipient spiritualism. The seven compositions' which cover the entire walls of this small room, not more than twenty- four feet square, are well known by engravings. Once more I am impressed with the con- viction of how thoroughly these Germans from the first mastered the underlying principles of wall-painting as well as the difficult technique of fresco ' buono e puro.' The pigments remain to this day sound. The room is pleasantly placed so as to command from its windows the dome of St. Peter's, Monte Mario, the Pincian hill, with the golden sunset sky. All that has been written for many years in praise of these frescoes I confirm. They may fairly be subjected to criticism, but, on the whole, I know of nothing better after their kind in modern times. The example set by the Prussian Consul was quickly followed on the part of the Italians when the Marquis Massimo devoted his pleasantly-placed villa near the Lateran to experimental fresco-painting. The themes taken for illustration are from the pages of Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso. Revisiting the villa after an interval of fifteen years I confess my disappointment ; these three dozen or more frescoes are most unequal, partly because Overbeck from ill-health, and Cornelius from the necessity of making cartoons for the Glyptothek, were compelled to throw up their commissions. The work consequently fell into inferior hands, such as Fiihrich and Koch. Very poetic, imaginative, and impressive, however, is a ceiling by Veit; resplendent with visions from 'II Paradiso,' conceived in the pure and beality-loving spirit of the early Italian painters, representing interviews, after the manner of Sante Conversazione, between Dante, Apostles, Saints, and Fathers of the Church. The action is laid mid-heaven, the light radiates from a central source of light, where the Madonna is enthroned, and Dante and his guide are kneeling at her feet. Overbeck also shows well ; though always of feeble physique, he proves himself "equal to a large and intricate composition about fifteen feet long by thirteen feet The Rise in Rome. 13 high : the chief action is the interview between Peter the Hermit and Godfrey de Bouillon. Here and there are touches of a naturalism which Overbeck surrendered in after years ; it is here seen that he could draw accurately and tenderly from the living model before the days when, like Fra Angelico, he believed himself empowered to throw his innermost soul upon wall or canvas, without coming into contact with the outer world. The entrance-hall devoted to Ariosto displays the daring thought, the ready invention, the facility of composition, which belong to Schnorr, Of this painter it might be said that he possessed every power save that of making his art pleasant ; but in apology maybe pleaded the gross reparations to which these frescoes have been subjected. THE FOUR RIDERS OF THE APOCALYPSE. BY CORNELIUS, Yet wall-decorations often gain in their surroundings accidental and extraneous charms. This villa has the advantage of being planted among cypresses, bay-trees, ilexes, stone-pines, and palms ; the Claudian aqueduct and the Alban hills are within sight, and the murmur of fountains steals upon the ear. The other works which these ' Tedeschi ' left in Rome may be soon enumerated. A side- chapel in the Church- of Sta. Trinita on the Pincian, received from the hands of Veit the Annunciation,^^ Immaculate Conception, and the Salutation; and the same artist painted a lunette in the long gallery of the Vatican, commemorative of the triumph of Christianity over the ruins of the Coliseum. The style of the last is learned as it is lovely; the work specially impressed me by a quietism all the more striking when last I saw it, while thousands of the Italian people on th^ day of the funeral of King Victor Emmanuel moved tumultuously beneath the immobile com- E 14 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. position. Also worthy of notice are certain other frescoes in La Triniti; by the pupils of Over- beck. Likewise to be held in rnemory are fourteen small water-colour compositions by Overbeck of the Via Croce, hung in the Camera di Udienza of the Vatican. The reading of these themes, the thinking out of the ideas, lies far away from the beaten track ; the style is learned and recondite ; the drawing and the lines of composition are thoroughly studied. The chief fault may be that the sentiment degenerates into spiritual spasm, and that the handling betrays physical infirmity. ©ut it is well to remember that Overbeck's aim was to gain deep religious expression through form, and that the laying on of colour came but as a means to that end. In some of the figures before me, however, mental states might seem to have induced abnormal bodily conditions, which threaten the last gasp of physical life. Overbeck died in Rome in 1869, at the age of eighty^ having dwelt in that city for nearly sixty years. His art is described by his German biographers as distinguished by truth and subtlety of drawing, beauty of form, and, above all, by mysticism and, symbolism. Among the many privileges of a life, in which art has been dear to me, there are none greater than the knowledge I was permitted to have here in Rome of this divine artist and his works. It was my custom, as far back as 1848, to visit his studio when it was open on Sundays in the Cenci Palace. I shall never forget the aspect of Overbeck, as he was accustomed to glide gently into his painting-room, with drooping head and frame emaciated, and when last I saw him life was already in the clutch of death. The works on the easel comprised large designs in charcoal and an oil picture painted for Pius IX. : to the former class belongs Christ among the Doctors, chosen as an illustration to this introductory chapter. Overbeck passed as a shadow by, the emblem of an art which belonged to two worlds, and with a voice faint as if it issued from the tomb, he spoke in a whisper to his visitors, and gave explanations of the works which embodied his very soul. The. lives of Cornelius and of Overbeck, in the outset in Rome, lay in parallel lines, though, in the long run, two men so far- asunder in spirit were sure to diverge widely. The world of modern Teutonic art soon divided itself into sister hemispheres : Overbeck ruled, as the German Raphael, supreme in the one ; Cornelius, as a German Michael Angelo, governed in the other. Overbeck might be compared with St. John, who leant on the bosom of his Lord ; Cornelius could have personified St. Peter, who was impetuously tempted even to deny his Master, yet bore the keys. And as with Michael Angelo followers were wanting, so with Cornelius — he walked in that terribiV via wherein few can venture to tread. Overbeck, on the contrary, like Raphael, his forerunner, gathered around him disciples drawn by human sympathy and a love for beauty akin to goodness. A modern French critic has well said, that for Overbeck painting is not so much an art as a religion. He paints because he has believed ; and his works, conceived in the spirit of prayer, are themselves a new prayer addressed to God. German Pre-Raphaelitism, which took its rise in Rorne, not unnaturally suggests comparison with its namesake in England. But the two movements, though in some points parallel, became divergent. The German revival retained throughout a historic basis; the English has, been in part historic, but in the main naturalistic. Our own Pre-Raphaelites declared their faith and practice through their literary organ 'The Germ,' otherwise called 'Art and Pdetry,' published a quarter of a century ago. The art came from the pencils of Holman Hunt and Madox Brown, the poetry and the prose from the pens of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, and Thomas Woolner, R.A. We read as follows : — ' What an array of deep, earnest, and noble thinkers, like angels armed with a brightness that withers, stand between Giotto and Raphael ; — to mention only Orcagna, Ghiberti, Masaccio, Lippi, Fra Beato Angelico, and Francia. Parallel them with Post-Raphael artists. If you think you can, you have dared a labour of which the fruit shall be to you as Dead-Sea apples, golden and sweet to the eye, but in the mouth ashes and bitterness.' So far our English Pre-Raphaelites and their German brethren are in perfect accord. Next comes the question. To what modern uses shall the old historic art be put ? Our English Reformers give the answer in the following words : — ' The modern artist seeks to use early mediaeval art as a fulcrum to raise through, but •The Rise in Rome. 15 .only as a fulcrum • for he himself holds the lever whereby he shall both guide and fix the stones of his art-temple, for God and his endeavours prospering him, there shall be yielded up unto his hands discoveries as man-worthy as any hitherto beheld by men or conceived by poets.' Thus, instead of the finality of Overbeck, we have the promise of an endless progression ; and this indefinite advancement comes not by a dead tradition but through the instrumentality of an ever-living Nature. Accordingly we again read among our English Pre-Raphaelites of what may be called in the world of art the doctrine of 'natural selection,' the choice between CHRIST AMONG THE DOCTORS. BY OVERBECK. what in the past is worn out and what is for all time vital and enduring. We are told that ' the artist chooses to avoid that which he believes to be bad, and to follow that which he holds to be •good, and blots out from his eye and memory all art between the present time and the first taint of heathenism and ascends to the art previous to Raphael ; and he ascends thither, not so much for the forms of art as he does for its Thought and Nature! Hence the divergence before referred to : on the one hand, our English Pre-Raphaelites have pledged themselves more and more to Naturalism ; on the other side, the Germans boast of a Spiritualism which is non-natural. On the one part we find Mr. Holman Hunt dwelling in Jerusalem, in order 1 6 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. that, on the very spot and in the presence of the actual surroundings, he may the more thoroughly realise scenes and actions in the life of Christ just as they verily occurred. But the German Pre-Raphaelites, on the contrary, trust to tradition, to pictorial precedent, and greatly to the promptings of imagination and to the tuition of the inner sense. Accordingly German artists, whether dwelling in Rome, Munich, or Diisseldorf, meditate and work in the church and in the cloister and do not find it needful to visit the Holy Land. They end as they commenced their career with the early Italian painters of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and they only occasionally allow Nature to intrude within their studios. It js their creed, as we have seen, that their divine conceptions are soul-born. Frederick Schlegel, son-in-law of the Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, and the Step-father of the painter, Philip Veit, a convert, moreover, in common with Overbeck and others of the Brotherhood, to Roman Catholicism, constituted himself the critic and the champion of the new school. He became a rhapsodist while singing the praises of the young painters. Overbeck fell under his sway, and is known to have, by means of pictorial form, embodied his ideas, Schlegel's inspiring strain may be judged from passages of which the following is the purport. He urged that the new style must be emulative and aspiring, ever absorbed in the pursuit of lofty ideas. The painter, the poet, and the musician, should, in spirit, be an emanation of celestial light ; his soul must become itself illumined, a radiant centre, taking from daily existence the reflection of all outward and material objects, which in turn become interpenetrated by jts brightness and remodelled by its influence. A more than earthly aspect thus possessing the soul, the mortal life becomes animated with spiritual Jove, and art uprising from the dark night breaks as the morning dawn from heavy clouds, a flash of heavenly beauty. The spirit spurns to remain in thraldom to a lifeless frame, th0 aspiring principle of intellectual development communicates a restless pulse and throb to natural life — a renovated life to which a new art is bora, The soul alone can comprehend the truly beautiful, the eye gazes on the material and outei: veil — the ynioq pf inner sou] and outward form constitutes noblest art. In those days bright hopes were kindled for the coming possibilities of painting, Kiebuhr, sharing the faith of Schlegel, writes ; ' I confidently believe we are on the eve of a new era of art in Germany, similar to the sudden bloom of our literature in the eighteenth century.' He grounded his anticipations on historic experience ; his knowledge of the past endowed him with prophetic prescience, He was the first to recognise men yet unknown as the martyrs to a noble cause, the founders of the German historic school. He discerned in the movement an unaccustomed spiritual phenomenon ; one of those manifestations of the national mind which is ever potent in the history of humanity. He felt there was an outburst of organic force, a life-begetting genius in Germany ; a life and a genius which had inspired Lessing, Kant, and Goethe ; which had given birth to a profounder philosophy and science, and had finally animated a whole; people with self-sacrificing spirit to do battle, amid national songs and hymns, even to the death, for the cause of their King and of their Fatherland. ' A new life,' exclaims Schlegel, ' can spring only from the depths of a new love.' A new impulse has stirred the mind of Germany, and already art gives something more than promise of a loftiness and beauty commensurate with the conceiving thought. The German artists in Rome tebelled against a withering subjection to Gaul, and grafted a vital growth on the old Teutonic stock. The three friendly critics who, as we have seen, kindly guided the neophytes in the way they should go, were not wholly free from frailties. Niebuhr was learned, but some- what dry: Bunsen was pious, but unquestionably prosy; and Schlegel might be philosophic, but withal must be accounted rather flighty. Bunsen's influence among his com- patriots could not have been otherwise than elevating ; but it is conceded that he had neither knowledge of, nor love for, the fine arts as such ; they were valued only as one of The Rise in Rome. 1 7 the languages by which noble ideas could obtain expression, and he placed them in a subordinate position to literature, science, and philosophy. Madame Bunsen writes of her husband that 'he accepted the Fine Arts as realities worthy of a rational man, so far only as he discerned in them the intelligible utterance of principles and feelings such as have a right to exist — moral, devotional, philosophical, humanitarian ; understanding by the latter term the shadowing forth of such varieties in man as the "fine spirit" discerns in national melodies. Thus in painting, he admitted little within the sphere of his admiring acceptance but the grand productions of the most ancient Italian art, portraying elevation of character, intensity of divine love, human devotedness, and self-sacrifice in all the dignity of moral and physical beauty. Yet he could bring himself to go far in grouping with those unapproachable standards of excellence, the best attempts by the modern revival of painting in their aspirations after them.' This extract would make it appear that Madame Bunsen's use of English grammar was even more imperfect than her husband's, knowledge of art. It is further avowed ' that for landscape painting Bunsen would allow no place other than that of an innocent amusement and decoration, except where the figures inserted tell a story and give a sense to the whole.' Yet that Bunsen proved himself a sympathetic and hospitable friend to the German artists during his re- sidence of twenty-two years in the Palazzo Caffarelli on the Capitol, is abundantly evident from the 'Memoirs.' In 18 17, we read as follows: — ' The society of Brandis, Cornelius, Overbeck, Platner, gave an inspiring variety to the day's occupa- tions, and one or more of these intellectual companions failed not to join us in our evening walks. . . . Overbeck was for a fortnight in August a welcome guest in the Casino Accorambuoni, where he was busied with designs for the fresco paintings 'after the " Gerusalemme " of Tasso, to be executed in the Villa Massimo at Rome, and where he finished the last water-colour drawing that ever came from his hand — a very lovely Madonna with the infant Jesus — of which he permitted a copy to be taken, still extant and valued as a record of the time, and of the short-lived intimacy with the gentle and heavenly-minded artist, who soon after this period withdrew from all companions of a different religious persuasion from that which he had adopted. .Cornelius and Platner, each with his wife, and each pair having two infant daughters, were lodged in a house close to the entrance-gate of Frascati, which had been by the generous kindness of Niebuhr hired for the summer months and given for the use of both families, who had. each a separate apartment in it. Cornelius was engaged in designs for the fresco paintings from Dante, for the Villa Massimo : his first great works in fresco, in the Casa Bartholdy, Via Sistina, being nearly, if not quite, completed.' Bunsen, in a critical estimate of ' Niebuhr as a Diplomatist in Rome,' records that he who was so sparing of his time towards men of show and fashion, considered it as his duty, and as an agreeable part of his vocation, to render the German disciples of high art every assistance and encouragement. It can hardly be too often repeated, that ' to him belonged the glory of having been the first to recognise the men who have founded the historic school of painting ; an art which after philosophy, poetry, and philology, is, of all the manifestations in this epoch of the German mind, the most important to the history of humanity : to Niebuhr belongs the honour of having loved them, of haying encouraged them with a devoted friendship, as modest as it was generous, of having rendered them pecuniary assistance when necessary. They are now appreciated and admired both in their own country and abroad : at that time they were the martyrs of an exalted and noble aspiration, that had to fight its way through the wickedness not less than the shallowness of the times ; and against which the low and false taste of the leading connoisseurs and patrons of art of that day had joined in a conspiracy with the licentiousness and incapacity of most of the artists. The re- membrance of 1 8 13 was still warm in every heart when Niebuhr came to Rome. The modern German art, the only one which deserves this name, arose at the same time, after similar mental struggles ; and though it sprang up in a foreign land, yet it was impressed with the spirit of the nation, and laboured in its service. That this school alone had struck out the right path, and was pursuing the proper aim, could not but be recognised by Niebuhr ; who had already so early F i8 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. perceived and admired in the great historic artists, from Giotto to Raphael, the compeers of the ancient Hellenic schools of art — brethren in spirit of Dante and Goethe. In spite of the indi- vidual defects and incompletenesses of the early works of this modern school, Niebuhr perceived and appreciated in its founders the vital principles which animated them in their opposition to the spirit of the age ; and he had confidence in that creative power which had united itself, in them, with clear insight and a determined will. To this faith he adhered with unshaken firm- ness, and on it he acted at a time when the germ from which he announced a great and historically important development was wholly unknown or unappreciated in Germany, while in Rome it was despised, derided, and vituperated.' At the risk of repetition, I venture to quote from ' Niebuhr's Life and Letters,' the following :— 'Rome, date 1816. ' Niebuhr associated much with the young artists who were then studying in Rome and laying the foundation of the present German school of historic painting. Among them he was particularly intimate with Cornelius, Plainer, Overbeck, and the two Schadows. He made their acquaintance on the anniversary of the battle of Leipsic, eight days after his arrival. The artists celebrated the day by a dinner, to which they invited Niebuhr and Brandis. Niebuhr sat between Thorwaldsen and Cornelius, who both instantly inspired him with the strongest interest, and he made an equally favourable impression on ihem.' Niebuhr to Madame Hensler. 'Rome, -^oth October, 1816. ' Among .the artists, the two whose conversation I find the most agi'eeable are Cornelius and William Schadow. The latter is particularly refined and intellectual ; but he is unfortunately a convert to Catholicism. Overbeck, to whom he yields precedence as an artist, and whose physiognomy is very prepossessing, is taciturn and melancholy. Rome is a terrible place for any one who is melancholy, because it contains no living present to relieve the sense of sadness.' Niebuhr to the same. Niebuhr finds in the Vatican valuable manuscripts, and writes : — ' Rome, 2.0th November, 18 16. ' I should like to sell them in England for a good price, by way of earning some money for our young artists. Among these there are some really excellent young men, who are languishing for the means of cultivating their talents, and are at the same time hard put to it for daily bread. I should like to get enough money to set a few of them to paint a fresco in the Library. Some of the ecclesiastical officials reject all fees : these I shall also lay aside for this object. Cornelius is the most intellectual of them. Overbeck and William Schadow are amiable men and very clever artists, notwithstanding their proselytizing spirit.' Niebuhr to Savigny. 'Rome, 1.6th February, 1817. ' Cornelius of Diisseldorf, Platner from Leipsic, Koch from the Tyrol, Overbeck from Liibeck, Moseler from Coblentz, and William Schadow from Berlin, were assembled in Brandis's apartment with Bunsen. In different ways and degrees we are attached to them all, and think them all men of talent. Their society is the only pleasure we derive from human beings here, and they have already performed much in their art and promise more for the future. I believe confidently that we are on the eve of a new era of art in Germany, similar to the sudden bloom of our literature in the eighteenth century, and that it only needs z. little encouragement on the part of our governments to render us the participants of this beautiful development. Cornelius and Platner are, strictly speaking, intimate family friends, and so are their wives The artists in Rome are divided, by a broad line of demarcation, into two parties — ^the one consisting of our friends and their adherents, the other of the united phalanx of those who sit round the burning bush of the Blocksberg. At the head stand the fellows who know the world, who ingratiate themselves with the foreigners, and to whom our academical colleague, Goliath (Hirt), pays all respect. This set intrigue, and lie, and backbite ; they intend there shall not be light, come what will. The former are exemplary in their life ; the latter display the old licentiousness which characterised the German artists at Rome thirty years ago. Happily, at the present moment, the more talented of the new-comers range theriiselves on the side of the former ; the latter, too, are not wanting in recruits. It is significant, however, that some foreigners, and even Italians, are beginning to pay attention to the works of our friends. The Marchese Massimo has commissioned Cornelius and Overbeck to paint two apartments in a villa, and will pay them handsomely. Cojrnelius means to paint a series of subjects from Dante, Overbeck from Tasso.' The Rise in Rome. 1 9 NiEBUHR TO Madame Hensler. 'Rome, 20th June, 1817. ' I associate chiefly, indeed almost exclusively, with the artists who belong to the religious party, because those who are either decidedly pious, or who strive after piety, are by far the noblest and best men, and also the most intellectual, and this gives me an opportunity of hearing a good deal on faith and its true nature.' Goethe naturally became a bone of contention among the German scholars and German artists dvirelling in Rome. His ' Dichtung und Wahrheit ' when read at the social gatherings of the brethren, provoked brisk debate. Niebuhr did not hesitate to assert that this arch-critic ' vifas utterly destitute of susceptibility to impressions from the fine arts, that he had not by nature the inward insight which reveals what is really beautiful, at least when in opposition to the taste of the age.' And Cornelius, who was so thorough an enthusiast for Goethe, and owed so much to his inspiration, broke into deep lamentation that his hero should have taken so one-sided a view of the arts of Italy ; assuredly, he urged, this great intellect must have been frozen up, when it gave itself over to the cold formal classicism of Palladio, and stood aloof from the impulsive and waywardly passionate Gothic of Germany, not giving a place in his pages to cathedrals, which might be said to enshrine the Middle Ages. Then the company with one accord lifted up their voices in lamentation over that fatal court-life at Weimar, where Samson had been shorn of his locks. But though Goethe's criticisms may be open to the charge of dilettanteism, and even of levity, yet while in Rome he threw out thoughts which glitter as sparks and shine as jewels. And the following shows a shrewdness akin to satire which Goethe possessed in common with Shakespeare. ' Of the artistic sense of Germans, and of their artistic life, we may well say that we hear sounds, only they are not in unison ;' and then comes the expression of a hope that the glorious masterpieces of art may be in the end understood aright. Also the following, which dates from Rome in 1786, and remains equally true now, reads as a just balance struck between the eternal concord of nature and the pervading harniony of genuine art, as contrasted with the fleeting folly of fashion : — ' After Nature, wjio in all her parts is true to herself and consistent, nothing speaks so loudly to an intelligent man as that genuine art, which is no less consistent and harmonious than herself. Here, in Rome, we feel this right well — a city where so many an arbitrary caprice has had its day, where so many a fictitious folly has immortalized itself by power and gold.' The German painters resident in Rome in 18 19 held in the Palazza Caffarelli, with the per- mission of the Prussian Consul, an exhibition which Frederick Schlegel pronounced as ' surpassing in richness, variety, and intrinsic value, all that had been produced by any other modern and rising school for a long period of time.' We are told that the public in general, and ' illustrious spectators ' in particular, bestowed discriminate and even unqualified praise on the productions of the two Schadows, Philip Veit, and Wash. The head of the Madonna in a Holy Family, by Wilhelm Schadow, is said to have been 'exquisitely finished, and full of expression, soul, and beauty.' But Cornelius and Overbeck were universally acknowledged the foremost among the painters of the new era. The cartoon by Overbeck, for the 'Jerusalem Delivered,' then exhibited and subsequently executed in fresco in the Villa Massimo, proved his faculty for invention, power of expression, and determined his vocation in art. The distinguishing genius of Cornelius was in a different direction made manifest in a cartoon for one of the frescoes which now adorn • the Glyptothek in Munich. The composition ' represents the entire mythic cycle of Night, with her numerous allegorical retinue treated after the manner of the ancients with simplicity, fidelity to nature, and dramatic energy.' It is added that each of these masters was happily imitated by many younger artists, ' all uniting in earnest emulative efforts to restore art to its original elevation. The general struggle of the German artists in Rome daily excites more and more attention, and its progress is watched with cordial sympathy by the illustrious men of many other countries.' A few years afterwards was held another exhibition, to which Bunsen 20 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. approvingly refers in a letter to his friend Schnorr, dated 8th of November, 1828. The curt account runs as follows : — ' A general German Exhibition was arranged in the hall of the Palazzo Caffarelli, to which forty artists (twenty-five of whom were Prussians) united to contribute, and although it had not been made a matter of previous preparation it formed a fine whole and met with universal approbation.' Fifty years later, in 1878, within the same Palazzo Caffarelli, a spot around which has by this time gathered interesting associations, both personal and historic, was held an exposition of pictures and statues by artists resident in Rome. ' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' an idea which, as already seen, first entered the mind of the historian Gibbon within a stone's throw of this palace, presents scarcely a more signal overthrow than that of the great German school as here displayed in its decadence. In lieu of the grand cartoons of Cornelius and Overbeck, the visitor is invited to admire a graceful composition by Carl Wunnenberg — exquisite, indeed, in its way — a girl feeding swans. The lines are well brought into harmony, and the light, shade, and colour are toned down under a sense of the beauty which loves repose. This pretty example of the prevailing romance of the period was fitly chosen as the chief prize in the lottery or art union. Otto Brandt of Berlin, rather after the naturalistic manner of Knaus, contributes clever, brilliant, and realistic genre subjects in oil and water-colours ; Herr Steinhardt of Frankfort treats, after romantic fashion, A Nymph at a Bath ; Herr Riedel, once famous for female nudities illumined by supernatural light, degenerates into detestable colour when .portraying the Madonna and Child; Herr Lindemann- Frommel, reputed one of the best landscape-painters now remaining in Rome, commands a style solid and powerful, yet atmospheric ; and Herr Welsch depicts ' the Pyramids ' with a master's hand, and with even more than accustomed glory of colour in the sunset sky. Among the sculpture, mostly mediocre, Emile Wolff of Berlin, whose studio in Rome has been visited for more than twenty years, stands conspicuous in the figure of Circe, and Carlo Begas, also of Berlin, models busts with great delicacy and detail. But altogether the collection leaves the impression that the genius of Germany prefers now-a-days to dwell on the Rhine, the Isar, and the Danube, rather than on the banks of the Tiber. Rome has known at least three generations of German artists, and the third period, still paramount, is pronounced by a realism and a naturalism which Germany but shares with the rest of the world. King Ludwig, when Crown Prince, and afterwards as King, made himself pleasantly at home among the artists of the Fatherland ; a fdte was given to the Prince, and it is recorded that ' the admired of the evening was the future wife of Overbeck, a young Viennese, beautiful and engaging.' The recurrent f^tes of the German artists have, with the change from idealism to realism, assumed a more naturalistic phase. I well remember a few years ago, on a lovely spring day in the Campagna, one of these picturesque festivals : the costumes were in character; I drove to the place of meeting iii company with one painter who was dressed as an Italian, knight, and with another disguised as an English miller, well floured. The President, Carl Haag, wore an imperial mantle, and the American sculptress, Miss Hosmer, made a reputation by her spirited horsemanship. On successive visits to Rome I have always found the Germans in sufficient force to assume a distinctive nationality, united by kindred motives and animated by a common esprit de corps. The Caffe Greco has been their resort — a place renowned for coffee, tobacco, noise, and dirt. I have turned in at early morning, and found a sprinkling' of artists breakfasting betimes, by candle-light. The Germans enter as a boisterous crew, accompanied occasionally by a rough dog : they are bearded, sturdy fellows, of physique and countenance in complete contrast with the ascetic super-sensuous figure and head of Overbeck. Towards noon comes a second gathering, and again in the evening flocks in a more general assembly, blatant in the strife of tongues and the clatter of cups ; then the German guttural and the American brogue break into a republic of discord, glorying in the biggest of words and the thickest of smoke. Gei man artists in Rome are gregarious, and somewhat Bohemian ; they congregate The Rise in Rome. 2 1 promiscuously, they talk freely of what they are painting, without fear of plagiarism ; they arrange sketching excursions to Tivoli, Frascati, and Albano, and under the prevailing spirit of the time are content with costume and cattle, a ruin, and a distant hill. They meet as hail fellows well met ; they are kindly in heart, in the hour of weal they show themselves joyous, in woe they lend to a brother a helping hand. The number of German artists resident in Rome within comparatively recent days far exceeds limits of enumeration. It will readily be believed that there is scarcely a painter or sculptor of note who has not made the City of the Seven Hills a place for pilgrimage or a resting-place for study. Steinle came here, and followed in the footsteps of Overbeck ; Oswald Achenbach, of the opposite school of naturalism, is known by pictures taken from within and without the city. It may be remembered, also, that ' Piloty the Realist ' matured studies on the Palentine for his grand composition, Nero walking among tlie Ruins of Rome — a work which, in the London International Exhibition of 1862, stood as the most worthy representative of German art in its present phase of historic realism. And within my own observation of the transitional stage appeared a highly popular picture by Mr. Rudolph Lehmann, taken from Lamartine. I also recall, in the studio of Riedel, romantic scenes of nymphs bathing under a supernatural glow of light and colour. To still more recent days belongs Herr Heilbuth, born in Hamburg. A residence in Rome has favourably identified his talents with cardinals and other dignitaries of the Romish Church, placed picturesquely on the Pincian, at St. John Lateran, or in the Borghese Gardens. I owe it to the courtesy of Mr. Frederick Lehmann that the present chapter is illustrated by a characteristic composition which a walk among the trees and terraces of the Borghese Villa proves to be most true to the spot. This brief notice of the rise of the Modern German School may fitly close with the words of Frederick Schlegel : ' Believe not that the glory of Art is passed away : the hope is not vain that there is a rekindling of former fires : hold above all the faith that Art, like Nature, renews her life." Among the authorities consulted are : ' Histoire de I'Art Moderne en AUemagne,' par Comte Raczynski ; ' Die Kiinstler aller Zeiten und Volker,' von Professor Fr. Miiller ; ' Zeitungzur Bildende Kunst ;' ' Ansichten tiber die Bildende Kiinste,' von einem Deutschen Kiinstler in Rom ; ' Die Deutsche Kunst in unserem Jahrhundert,' von Dr. Hagen ; ' Geschichte der Bildenden Kiinste im neunzehnte'n Jahrhundert,' von Anton Springer ; ' Die Konig- liche Kunst-Akademie in Diisseldorf und die Diisseldorfer Kiinstler,' von R. Wiegmann ; ' Blicke in das Diissel- dorfer Kunst und Kiinstlerleben,' von Friederich von Uechtritz. 22 CHAPTER III.-MUNICH. THE first scene of the German Revival, as shown in the preceding- chapter, was laid in Rome ; the second soon followed in Munich. It has been said that the fire kindled in Italy speedily hurst into ilames north of the Alps, and, spreading from capital to capital, environed at length the whole of Central Europe. It has also been observed, as the sequel will show, that the artists — such as Cornelius, Veit, Overbeck, and Schnorr — who as pilgrims and pioneers suffered hardship in Rome, had, almost without a single exception, the privilege and the well-earned reward of returning from time to time homewards, and of executing great and enduring works in the land of their birth. That Munich became the earliest recipient of the new-born art was due to King Ludwig — a prince who, though laughed at as a poetaster and a dilettante, possessed beyond doubt a true foresight as to the provisions needed for a national revival. Under the French Empire, Bavaria having fallen under the galling yoke of Napoleon, young Ludwig had become disgusted with politics and betook himself to the arts ; and his purpose was to unite painting, architecture, and sculpture, in conjoint action, so as to embody through public monuments the aspirations and the noble deeds of the Germanic people. When Crown Prince of Bavaria he took frequent excursions into Italy, made himself pleasantly at home among the artists, and formed preliminary alliances which bore abundant fruits in after years. The young prince was not free from foibles, and it soon became evident that he could not get on well with such men as Bunsen the pietist, the patriotic politician, and the speculative philosopher. The heir-apparent, however, showed a certain shrewd political prescience, as when, at a jovial gathering of artists, he proposed as a toast that ' All who speak German must become German ;' and such a distinctive nationality he desired for art. He also, as far back as 1818, held the conviction that the German provinces of Alsace and Lorraine would some day be recovered ; and he went so far as to say that the business could only be settled at the gates of Paris. Thus, again, it is seen how awakened patriotism rekindled a national art. The Prince, when in Rome, penned an address declaring the mission of sovereigns to be to foster great artists whose works would survive the fall of dynasties. In gratitude, a f^te on a grand scale was got up : the walls of a villa were gaily decorated with allegories and with figures of poets, painters, sculptors, and architects. . The rejoicings included music, dancing, and feasting, and it is recorded in the memoir of the grave and decorous Bunsen, that ' none who witnessed this f^te will ever have beheld again such an amount of poetic and artistic talent brought together to decorate and dignify a moment.' The guests wore mediaeval German costume : the whole conception was chiefly due to the ready resource of Cornelius, for whose widely-comprehensive genius nothing, on the authority of Madame Bunsen, was too great or too small ! At length, about two o'clock in the morning, the Prince shook hands with each person present, and at once left Rome for Munich, there to meet once more the artists who at his bidding were to decorate his capital. Munich, though the most imposing of show capitals, has often been subjected to hostile criticism. All but destitute of mediaeval association, and wanting connecting pedigree from the Classic, the city stands as a pretended Athens, yet without groves or Acropolis ; a modern Rome, not on seven hills, but set upon a bald, bleak plain, without genial shelter for any one of the Muses nine or the Graces three. In this chosen spot for ambitious pretence and jarring incongruity everything has been attempted — architecture, sculpture, and bronze- casting ; painting in its highest walks^ — on walls for churches, palaces, and museums — on canvas for cabinets, on glass for chapels, even on porcelain for domestic use and decoration. From prince to peasant, from artist to artisan, every body in this favoured capital is presumed to share in an existence of refined culture and enjoyment ; the daily walk of life lies in the Munich. 23 midst of triumphal arches, porticoes, and statues, Museums rich in historic treasures invite to study ; churches ornate in decoration, solemnised by sacred art, make Religion herself a luxury, and give to worship the thrill of aesthetic emotion. It might be supposed that here a broad way was laid down leading direct to heaven ; yet soon it is discovered that the Church abuts upon the Foundling Hospital, and that Lachryma Christi wine takes the taint of Bayerischer beer. It has been said in satire that Apollo walks in the open street arm-in-arm with Silenus, that the Vestals keep company with Satyrs, and that the feast of the gods is held sometimes in a palace, and occasionally in a garret or a cellar. The Munich school, under the sway of Cornelius and his followers, became severe,' elevated, and grave; it was distinguished by immense fecundity, and largeness of scale was deemed essential to grandeur. It has been said that the works executed were in spirit religious, chivalrous, and romantic, that they were sustained by an idea, and took an epic or lyric form. Munich has this distinction, that she is the only city within living memory that has exemplified a theoretic and systematic development of the three sister arts in their mutual relations. The revival came as the renewal of life ; pride and patriotism, as before seen, aroused a passion for whatever was national in art and in literature, and thus the manifestation did but obey a universal law, it responded to a widely-spread and deeply-seated popular feeling. And this impulse, as already said, assumed in the philosophic German mind a systematic form ; and specially in Munich, for better and for worse, the arts were evolved in logical sequence. Architecture, as the parent art, naturally led the way, and then followed in order due sculpture and painting. At the present moment a fourth sister, ' the music of the future,' rises in consistent sequence and some- what as a theoretic necessity. The notion is that, as a starting-point, there must be -a grand idea, a noble conception, taken perchance from the ever-recurring poem of the 'Niebelungen Lied.' First comes the necessity of a poet, then the need of a creative and responsive musician, afterwards the requirement of an architect to rear the local habitation, and lastly, the aid of a monumental sculptor and decorative painter, who may serve to adorn and realise the dramatic situation. And thus once again is exemplified, i outrance, the doctrine that no one art ought to stand in isolation. It need scarcely be added that these fundamental principles, true in the abstract, ■find confirmation in the practice of the great schools in classic, mediaeval, and renaissant times. Munich, I think it must be admitted, scarcely offered the most fortunate conditions for the manifestation of this idea. It is true that, so far as she was a chief centre among Teutonic peoples, she might give local colouring and expression to what may fairly claim to be national aspirations. In geographic position she had the distinction, exceptional though not wholly felicitous, of being the highest capital in Europe, with perhaps the single exception of Madrid. She was planted, like the capital of Spain, on a bare and bald plateau, so intolerably cold in winter and hot in summer that statues and pictures in the nude, or in demi-toilette, found themselves uncomfortable and out of place. It may be urged that Albert Diirer, Holbein, Martin Schon, and many others, made designs and painted pictures while snow and ice were lying in the streets ; and I was able to realise like atmospheric conditions, not very stimulating it must be admitted, to the ' Bliithezeit,' either of the 15th or of the 19th century, when I traversed the ice-bound roads which lead from the railway station to the Bayerische Hof, in an omnibus that had surrendered its wheels for a sledge. Also in a sledge and a fur coat I made the circuit of the walls of the city of Albert Diirer. There seems in the nature of things a correspondence between climate and art : for instance, the festive arts of Italy flourish fittingly in a land of the olive and the vine, of sunshine and of song. But north of the Alps I have never found open porticoes and colonnades, basilicas and Byzantine churches fresco-painted, quite at home in proximity with dark pine forests, and in the midst of snow-clad squares and streets. Some have supposed that the beautiful lies in the inherent fitness of things, and I confess that I always feel a natural harmony between the mellifluous sounds of the Italian tongue and its beauty-loving art ; while, on the other hand, I find the correspondence between the harsh guttural of the German speech not in the classic columns, the porticoes, and the triumphal arches of Munich or 24 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. of Berlin, but in the narrow, shady streets of Nuremberg and Augsburg. It may be said that the language of towns in Northern Europe is shadow, while in the south it is sunshine. It has been truly observed that Munich the school, extending over only sixty years, is little more than the history of the Munich Academy. That Academy has been exceptionally fortunate in the brief space of three generations to have been guided and governed by three master minds. First came Cornelius, appointed Director in 1824. Four capitals— Diisseldorf, Rome, Munich, and Berlin — have successively fallen subject to his sway; but Munich alone gives the full measure of his gigantic, yet sometimes grotesque genius. His works in the Bavarian capital, such as the classic creations in the Glyptothek and the Christian compositions in the Ludwigskirche, all .bear the impress of his power ; yet prolific as the productions of Giotto, Raphael, the Carracci, and others, they are far too numerous and large to have come from any unaided hand. Like the great Italian painters, Cornelius formed a school in the older sense of the word : he gathered around him pupils whose great privilege it was to aid the master in making Munich one of the wonders of the modern world. In common with other men of indomitable will, he is known to have held young minds for their good under his powerful grasp : his scholars, who followed wherever he led, were inspired by his thought and impelled by his enthusiasm. Mr. Cave Thomas, who numbered in the favoured rank of his pupils, gives an interesting account of experiences in Munich to the following effect. It would appear that Cornelius, contrary to the received opinion of him, inculcated a close and rigorous study of nature ; not, however, in the way of the constant copying from the life, but more in an inquiring and scientific study. The advice given was, ' Study Nature in order that -you may become acquainted with her essential forms.' Mr. Cave Thomas, describing the personal appearance of his master, says the impression conveyed was that of a man energetic and resolute. Cornelius ' was below the middle height and squarely built : there was evidence of power about his broad and overhanging brow, and in his eagle eyes and firmly-gripped attenuated lips, which no one with the least discrimination could misinterpret ; and yet there was a sense of humour and a geniality which drew men towards him, and to those young artists who sought his teaching and his criticism he always exhibited a calm patience.' Cornelius holds, as seen in the last chapter, an honoured position in the ' Life and Letters of Niebuhr.' The historian, in 1816, writes: — 'Cornelius is entirely a self-educated man. His taste for art is quite for the sublime, the simple and grand. We are constantly becoming more intimate and may already call ourselves friends. He has an excellent wife, a native of Rome. He is very poor, because he works- for conscience and his own satisfaction, and purchasers who would or could measure their remunerations by the same standard are not to be found. I cannot afford to. give the artists work, but I am glad to be able to help them as a friend when their necessities are pressing.' In the year 18 17 Niebuhr testifies that 'Cornelius is a very high-minded, intellectual, and amiable man; a Catholic by birth, but so little a zealot that when we were talking with him about his favourite idea of painting a Last Judgment, though he refused our request that Luther might be translated into the heavenly glory, on the plea that he dared not do that, he said that he should be represented as holding up the Bible to the Devil, and the latter retreating at the sight of it.' Cornelius judged by his art can scarcely be said to have been strongly possessed by the spirit of religion. With him, as with his forerunner, Michael Angelo, Christianity served, however, as a grand theme on which to expatiate ; and the Last Judgment of each painter degenerates into a display of power through gigantic forms and vehement muscular action. The Munich school, as the creation of King Ludwig, could scarcely be expected to assume an eminently religious aspect ; in fact, it often becomes latitudinarian, though not in a bad sense, and occasionally it falls into voluptuousness. However, it is but fair to quote Niebuhr's justifi- cation of Cornelius, to the following effect : — ' Cornelius alone, among the artists who belong to the religious party, seems to have grown up from qhildhood with uniform and lasting habits and convictions, which are as rooted in him as the facts of his Munich. 25 experience. This Catholicism is at bottom nothing more than the creed of the old Protestants. This he owes to the training he received from a pious and by no means bigoted mother and to his completely unlearned education, in which the Bible (though in a Catholic family) was his only book. The case appears to me very different with those who are born in the Catholic faith and have grown up in indifference. Of those who have been converted to this religion, Overbeck is an enthusiast, and quite illiberal : he is a very amiable man, and endowed with a magnificent imagination, but incapable by nature of standing alone, and by no means so clear-headed as he is poetical. He bends easily and naturally under .the yoke which Platner — another of our intimate friends, who has taken the same false step — has constantly to impose upon himself afresh, because it slips off him.' The memoirs of Bunsen, equally w^ith the letters of Niebuhr, pay tribute to the com- manding powrer of Cornelius. The master, having' in Munich established his position as the greatest of mural painters, visited England ; and Bunsen, renewing the acquaintance first formed in Rome, writes from London in October, 1841 : — ' I have spent a deeply interesting day with Cornelius at Windsor and Hampton Court, chiefly before the precious Cartoons of Raphael, which I had never before seen so well. This was for Cornelius the fulfilment of the longing of his life, and his expectations were even exceeded in point of execution, in particular by the cartoon of the Death of Ananias: It may not be wholly out of place to quote a little more to the like effect. Bunsen in the same month writes : — ' On Saturday I was to have dined with Peel to meet Cornelius, but was engaged to Sir Robert Inglis. I, however, passed the evening at Peel's. Cornelius preached in the cause of fresco-painting in the Houses of Parliament, which seems as good as decided upon.' In the inquiry before the select committee of the House of Commons on the Fine Arts, Cornelius was duly accredited with having ' established the school of fresco-painting at Munich,', and with holding the first position as a mural artist in Germany. He had already spoken as an enthusiast, and when he heard of the building of the Houses of Parliament .' he said that he could not conceive a more admirable opportunity, not merely for illustrating all the great actions and events of our history, combining them with our national poetry, but for what he regarded as still more valuable, the means it presented for founding a school of fresco-painting, which would emulate, if not surpass, that of any other in Europe.' -It may here be added that Bunsen, on the appearance of Mrs. Grote's 'Life of Ary Scheffer,' in i860, expressed surprise that little or no mention is made of' Cornelius and his fellow-labourers. Ary Scheffer was German on his father's side, and his biographer thinks it needful to apologise for the metaphysical, mystical, and -Germanic spirit of his style as ' the. ineffaceable, qualities of "race" whenever, and in whatever form, the "aesthetic" vein finds vent' Bunsen writes complainingly, — 'It has struck me that Scheffer had taken no cognisance of the greatest artistic movement of the century, which is, and remains, the reawakening of true historic fresco-painting by Cornelius, Overbeck, Veit, and Schnorr, from 1812 to 1830. I am convinced that he would therein have recognised an essentially cognate mental direction to his own, although he was more lyrically subjective than they ; for that school of art, Uke his own, strove after the re-establishment of inward truth, which the school of the eighteenth century had lost.' I will here venture to give the substance of a criticism I wrote in 'Blackwood's Magazine' nineteen years ago .on the Last Judgment, by Cornelius, in the church -of St. Ludwig, Munich. This composition is one of the largest, most elaborate, and famous of modern times. It is the mature work of at least ten years. In scope of thought and symmetry of arrangement it is, in great measure, a compilation from well-known Italian frescoes, such as Orcagna's master-piece in Pisa and Michael Angelo's mighty effort in Rome. Christ, a figure said to be no less than twelve feet high, seated among clouds, surrounded by angels, prophets, patriarchs, and apostles, proclaims, with upraised arms, the general resurrection and final judgment of both quick and dead. Beneath His feet sits the angel with the open. Book of H 26 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. Life, and on either side are other angels sounding trumpets through heaven and earth. Borne upon clouds stands St. Michael, the archangel,' with sword and shield, severing the evil from THE LAST JUDGMENT. the good. On the right, Satan guards the entrance to the fiery deep ; on the left, angels on wing lead the way, the guides and guardians of happy beings, to the skies. Hand in hand. Munich. 2 7 Fra Angelico the Blessed and Dante the Divine, float through the lower air to the serener sphere of heaven. Some stand in blissful contemplation by ; others in agony of suspense doubt- fully wait their doom. Demons secure their prey, and monsters, the ministers of Satan, do iierce justice upon their victims. Some, eager to fly away, are driven back by guardians on heaven's frontier ; others, wholly given over to their tormentors, are borne down to the gulph where ' their worm dieth not and the iire is not quenched.' Surely a subject more mighty could not tax the powers of pictorial art ; and the difficulty, in some degree, arises from the prior theological perplexity: 'How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?' The creative painter is required to give to the ' new immortal ' a spiritual body, an ideal memory of an earthly reality ; and as a help he finds that earth foreshadows the heavens, that the world is still a temple, though in ruins, that in the actual walks of life are beings bright in ethereal light, the bodily drapery of the flesh, almost gauze-like and evanescent, showing the indwelling spirit through, the outward visible lines undulating with the throb of the inner life. Religious art has ever sought for this supersensuous manifestation. Ideality is avowedly the aspiration of modern German painters ; and Cornelius, by a process of what may be termed transcendental induction, has striven to make the forms. of earth typical of heaven. lii this vast and populous composition occur passages of almost superhuman dignity. The angel holding the Book' of Life, the archangel with upraised sword' and shield, a penitent sinner kneeling for pardon, and the ascending figures of Dante and Fra Angelico, are all of an ennobled beauty seldom surpassed by the purest spiritual painters. Yet the whole work wants fire and impulse, and the general effect is too much that of a coloured bas-relief Perhaps the art of painting labours under disadvantage. The Last Judgment has been treated musically by Spohr, and perhaps it were unreasonable to look in a fresco for consummations commensurate with the melody of sweet sounds. Again, the reader may recall three sermons by Jeremy Taylor, on Christ's Advent to Judgment, and it is scarcely likely that pictorial art can emulate the glowing language of the preacher. Yet all honour to Cornelius for the high endeavour : it is much almost to have succeeded in a sphere wherein Michael Angelo failed. I have watched this fresco of the Last Judgment for twenty years, and now, on my last visit to Munich in 1879, I still find it uninjured by time. The composition seems as grand as at the first. It impresses me by its simplicity and symmetry : the figures are noble, even statuesque; the groups, separately and collectively, assume compact and well-balanced pro- portions ; the handling, though kept broad, is studiously elaborated ; the colour too, if harsh, stands superior to the allurements of decoration. The chief character, that of Christ, the most difficult of all, shares dignity and command with the Romanesque and Byzantine figures in • the old mosaics. Professor Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld — an artist bearing a name which oft recurs in the biographical pages of Germany — belonged to the same generation as Cornelius, Overbeck, and Veit. He painted, much — rather in a romantic way — for King Ludwig in the royal palace, yet he became more widely esteemed byhis Bible Illustrations. Schnorr, unlike several of his associates, was little of a bigot : his sacred compositions take a broad and unsectarian view of Christianity, and his friend Bunsen writes, on the morning of Whit Sunday, ' You have in spirit made me so cheering a visit with- a new series of Bible Illus- trations that I cannot celebrate the Festival of the Spirit without a thankful greeting to you. The Spirit maintains youth and animation in you.' I recognise ' a faithful adherence to, and an intellio-ent carrying out of, a high and fruitful life-task.' Schnorr left Rome in 1825 for Munich. I am enabled, through the courtesy of Messrs. Blackie, Glasgow, 'to give two compositions from Schnorr's Bible : the one, Jesus appearing to His Disciples at the Sea oj Galilee the other, the, Return oJ the Prodigal Son. These Biblical illustrations have .awakened considerable interest in England. Bunsen, a constant correspondent of the painter, whom he usually addresses in a religious strain, as if they had Christian faith in common, again and again refers to this labour of love. These sacred compositions seem to have bound the two 28 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. friends of many years all the closer together. Bunsen writes to Schorr in 1837, 'Sooner- or later I shall surely accomplish seeing you and yours ;' and ten years after we read, ' Undisturbed affection and friendship preserved in my heart. You will find here in London many who admire your works.' And from Heidelberg, in 1855, comes a letter containing the following criticism : — ' The representation of the Flood struck us peculiarly by a grandeur which reminds one of Michael Angelo, and yet it is your own original conception ; but the rest (mostly old friends from our acquaintance with the drawings) are also full of life arid truth. The product which lies before us is not less satisfactory as an achievement of man and as a JESUS APPEARING TO THE DISCIPLES AT THE SEA OF GALILEE. deed accomphshed than as a work of art' In the same year Bunsen writes from Charlottenberg, — 'Again you have made an apparition, like the heavenly ones, not in person but by a heart-cheering communication. Your fine Book 'of Psalms is indeed a grand work, and principally by the designs visibly revealing the life of prayer and adoration.' That a man as strong and self-asserting as Cornelius should provoke antagonism is nothing more than might be expected :. accordingly an opposite party long existed. How- ever, it could scarcely be said that there occurred any break in continuity when Kaulbach, the pupil of Cornelius, was, in the year 1849, promoted from the office of Professor to the dignity of Director of the A.cademy. High art still remained in supremacy, and the coming change' to realism and genre, though silently working its way, had not made itself potent in palace or picture-gallery. I shall have occasion to speak again of Director Kaulbach, who by turns Munich. 29 passed from styles classic and Christian to manners romantic and genre. But I cannot deny myself the pleasure, while now reviving experiences in Munich, of describing a visit which I paid to the artist's studio. My first call proved inopportune : a model, probably more or less nude, was sitting, and Kaulbach, with palette in hand and cigarette in mouth, half opened .the door cautiously, and, with genial smile and twinkling eye, postponed the visit for an hour. I found in an hour's time a studio spacious and lofty ; it was hung with a miscellany of pictorial properties befitting a broad acreage of history as well as the bye-ways of genre painting. A large cartoon, which was being rapidly peopled from the painter's prolific pencil, he expounded in its aim and its dramatis personce. Illustrations in monochrome on an easel. THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL SON. awaiting a few finishing touches, betrayed the voluptuousness into which the master's last manner degenerated. Kaulbach I found crowded with commissions as usual, the works were executed under pressure, and strewn in disorder on the floor lay rolls of pictures, fragments of first thoughts, painting materials, plaster casts, books — proofs of restless imaginings and fugitive study. The painter stood as the personal embodiment of his art : he talked as he designed, with voluble enthusiasm, and the utterances became now and again pungent with caustic words. The man, like his art, was many-sided — he passed rapidly from grave to gay, from the grand to the grotesque. He moved to and fro in his spacious studio constantly, as if creative ideas struggling for exit from an excited brain allowed rest not even to the body. Perhaps for relief from nervous tension, one hand played with a brush; while the other toyed with a cigarette ; the latter went out at least half a I ^o The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. dozen times under gusty and peripatetic discourse. He calmed down under praise, to which he was evidently responsive, though in his time he must have had almost too much of it ; and then, with some modesty, he would dwell with excusable complacency on the aim he . had held before him, and at the same time he expressed regret as to the change towards naturalism in the Munich school, which placed him in comparative isolation.. When I then saw Kaulbach he was touched with age, his head was weather-beaten, his intelligent face furrowed, his scanty hair as thinned by time gave prominence to his well-developed fore- head ; yet his keen eye rekindled with its former fire and a genial smile played among his IPIIIGENIA. BY FEUERBACH. foiobile features, especially when he happened to speak of friends and pupils whom he held dear. Kaulbach, while yet he had good work in him, died in Munich of the cholera in 1874, at the age of sixty-nine. An illustration to this chapter comes from the pencil of A. Feuerbach, an artist who dwelt and worked in Munich under romantic and imaginative influences. He is accredited by the biographers of his country with an ideal conception, a dignity of form, and purity of style, akin to the Greeks and to the Italian masters of the Renaissance. The Iphigenia here published gives a fair example of the artist's manner. Feuerbach will receive further notice. . On the death of Kaulbach the Munich school entered on its third and present phase, Munich. 31 when Carl Piloty became Director of the Academy. The new chief had issued from the schools of Cornelius and of Kaulbach ; here again, fortunately, . was no break in continuity. Piloty followed for the most part in the footsteps of his precursors ; the guiding principles had been already .firmly established ; the students had been trained to accuracy and severity of drawing ; antique sculpture had been rightly used as a means to a certain ideal rendering of nature. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the teaching had tended to the exaltation of the conception, or the idea, at the expense of manipulation and of colour. Director Piloty, while in no way reversing the somewhat ultra-academic training, made his own personality and opinions felt. He told his students plainly that it was not enough to have a fine conception, and that even the power of drawing should be used as a means to an end. The charge had not unfairly been made that Cornelius and Kaulbach did not paint pictures, but merely gave colour to bas-reliefs. Piloty led on to the present phase. While he did not dissever painting from the parent arts of architecture and sculpture, he restored its specific character : he made it something more than a bas-relief or an abstract idealism ; he gave to it a concrete realism, not a shadow but a substance ; he added to its surface texture, so that a stone wall or a sandy foreground might not only be seen by the eye but felt by the finger. Hence Piloty has been designated ' the Realist,' but he was something more ; realism was for him but the appointed means of expressing inward thought. Colour, in like manner, was made subordinate to higher aims. I remember to have met Piloty in Venice. The interchange in commerce and the intercourse in art between that city and the German territory, of which Nuremberg and Munich are the capitals, dates back more than three centuries. Albert Diirer, in his letters to his friend Pirkheimer in Nuremberg, speaks in warmest admiration of the Bellini, and other masters in Venice, and such pictures as the Feast of the Rose Garden respond to the warm colouring in which the ' Queen of the Adriatic ' has been traditionally clothed. It was suggestive of speculation here to see Piloty, the head of the German school of the 19th century, as Diirer, on the same spot, had been representative of the school of the i6th century. The Director of the Munich Academy had around him some half-dozen pupils, who, after the good manner of the olden times, followed in their master's footsteps. The later pictures of Piloty, such as the Triumph of Germanicus, which made no small sensation in the International Exhibition of Vienna, specially show the spell of passionate painters like Titian and Veronese. Yet German genius, cold, calculating, and above all ' philosophic,' makes surrender even to passion with caution and discretion. Hence Piloty has never, in his most ardent moments, transgressed the bounda- ries of moderation. His colours are arranged on the strict principle of equations and equiva- lents ; they obey the nicest laws of the scientific intellect, accordingly they do not come seething as from a cauldron fired by Titian or Rubens. The practice and teaching of the present Director of the Munich Academy may be summed up briefly as follows : — First, the choice of a subject noble in thought ; second, the theme selected to be suited to pictorial treatment. This canon strikes at a common error, that what is good in poetry must be equally good in painting, whereas the two sister arts come into the world under different conditions. Lastly, the theme having been suitably selected, it remains for the artist, by means of form, by effect of light and shade, and by all possible power of technique and ^clat of colour, to exalt its import to the uttermost. It may be added that Piloty's colour is, after the manner of the Germans, sobered down by tertiaries, and that his handling, though usually energetic and occasionally breaking into bravura, follows close upon the thought. Numerous have been the recipes — that, for example, of the Carracci for the making of pictures. Of these, some have become obsolete. It strikes me that Piloty has met the needs of the times. As distinguished from Overbeck, he does not go backwards but forwards. It is said of Nature, that, while working according to immutable laws she never repeats herself; and so with creative Art, she cannot do the. same thing twice, otherwise there is no longer life but certain death. Perhaps the example set by Piloty 32 The Schools of Modern Art in Gei'many. may bring terms of accommodation : the world has had about enough of the high and the dry. It is acknowledged that throughout Europe all schools are in transition. In Munich as in other capitals Art is seeking, through the knowledge and precision of Science, to approach closer to Nature. Among the chief pictures by Piloty may be named the following: the Death of Wallenstein, which, when placed in the new Pinakothek, where I wondered over it twenty THE DEATH OF WALLENSTEIN. years ago, at once decided the painter's position, not in Munich only, but throughout Europe. The painting might in some sense have been accepted as a prophecy; it fore- shadowed the coming future— that future which since has had its fulfilment. The work proclaimed the principles of the dawning school; the subject was historic, the situation dramatic, the technique so studiously realistic, that even to this day it remains a problem how the diamond in the finger-ring of the dead Wallenstein assaults the eye, not as painl^ but as a real -diamond. The startling result is gained by the laying on of white Aliinich. 2:3 bodily, not in basso-relievo, but in absolute alto-relievo. This is a realism which becomes verily appreciable to the sense of touch. Another great picture is Nero zvalking over the Ruins of Rome, which served as the programme of the Munich school in the London International Exhibition of 1862. Here, again, realism was rendered by absolute relief: 'the Ruins of Rome,' in their bricks, marble, and mortar, would have done credit to any stone- mason. The effect gained was astounding. Other great pictures are Rienzi, Columbus, Marie . Stuart, the Triumph of Germanicus, Galileo in Prison, and the Death of Ccesar. It might almost be said of Piloty, as was once stated as a stigma against Paul Delaroche, that he holds the post of painter extraordinary to the decapitated monarchs of the world. I have to MEKO AMOKG THE RUINS OF KOME. thank Director Piloty for permission to publish the chief illustration to the present chapter, Galileo in Prison, the engraving of which has met with his approval. The picture seems to me to manifest in a simple way the enunciated principles of the school. I have recently seen in the Duomo of Pisa the lamp which, suspended from the lofty roof, is said by its oscillations to have 'suggested the rotary motion of the earth. It will be remembered that Galileo, when recanting his heresy, said sotto voce, 'But still it moves.' Since those days Italy herself has moved a little onwards, and now in the Museum of the Capitol, among the multitude of busts which date back to the time of Socrates, appears not 'Galileo in Prison,' but Galileo as the representative of the free thought which came as the dawn of day into the midst of the darkness of night. And this I venture to say for the Munich school, that, firstly, with Cornelius came freedom ; it was with him Art always for art's sake, and above all, freedom. K . 34 The Schools of Modei'n Art in Germany. Then with- Kaulbach was asserted a/like, emancipation, of ithe' mind. And now,, lastly, -under filoty, 'it'.is shown ho'w: in- great epochs ofi history Humanity has battled for her rights.- ,. i -'-WheneVer; I ihave^had the. privilege -of ;meeting -Herr-Pitoty in ;Munich, or, Venice, it seeiYied to'me.thafhe was one of those rare characters, of whom'Raphaiel may be, taken '.as atypical'.exahiple, who draw- all men unto, them.' And I. should say, judging from, his nbearing, that li? i-ist not unduly oppressed witK the. -idea of a. mission, or of having; made; a ..figure in. Europe, .-but sim,ply that day .by, cjay he„ gdes- to work striving, ^according' to '; the strength given," to- do his best. A man of this' sort, stamped by. nature with a bodily structure and a ibi-aann ddS/eldfied'V for 4 command, is .formed.: to ;have: a ..following; and , th^t rail the niore, because he does not assert himself individually, but lives and labours for his art simply. I have seen • him in the midst of his , pupils, who, in a certain student and unassuming aspect, catch the spirit , of the master. Among disciples may' be named ■. Herren Makart, Max, Lietzen Meyer, Fliiggen, Miss Osborn, H err Wagner, Mr. Folingsby, and the younger Kaulbach. The last worked at the express desire of his father in the atelier of Herr Piloty. These disciples, together with their master, still live ; and thus the Munich school in its latest phase is still a power. In Munich^ almost more than in any other city with which I am acquainted, have. principles been manifest through living personalities. And it is rathei^ remarkable that each academic doctrine all but died out before the decease of the Director which had given it birth or pro- minence. Cornelius, who lived to 1867, survived the high art he had created. Kaulbach, who 'died nearly ten years later, lamented that painters and the public were passing by him and taking a divergent path. And, lastly, Piloty, having. ^me years since reached his meridian, iinds other stars rising to their zenith, and his latest and largest picture, now thrown open in the new Rathhaus,'. divides the critics into friendly and hostile camps. The subject imposed upon the, painter — the history of Munich as represented through the individual presence of her most illustrious citizens — certainly involves peculiar difficulties ; and the size of the canvas, some fifty feet long, occupying the great wall of a chief hall, exceeds the jnanual, to say nothing of the mental, capacities , of the greatest, painter. No "doubt the same objections might, have been taken to a somewhat analogous composition, Raphael's School of Athens, or to Delarpche's Hemicycle: And\ each, painter has in turn adopted the best expedient to bring scattered and intractable materials into continuity and union. Piloty takeg the obvious course of building up,- by means of a flight of steps, a crowning, centre, where ' Monachia,' a queen-like figure personi- fying Munich, and forming a commanding climax to the composition, di-stributes wreaths to assembled notabilities, dating from the earliest days down to recent times. In the fore-* ground, completing the central circle of arrangement, are grouped showy personations of agriculture, salt-mining, beer-making, and coinmerce. For the last . serves the river nymph Isar, represented by a bouncing, voluptuous lass, half nude, introduced as an attractive" foil to - heavily-draped and armour-clad heroes and dignitaries. Altogether it. is rather, a dreary business to make the acquaintance of celebrities known nowhere save in Bavaria. Yet aniong the crowd can be counted historians, professors, poets," meistersanger, concert -meister, ;musie^ans,-. architects,, even tapestry makers, gl.ass painters^and- a -beer, brewer ! ■ These ^person- .ages, numbering several hundreds, are all packed as closely as they can stand or sit together. ,The artist has naturally felt oppressed; he plods through his. task without enthusiasm — the scale is so_ inordinate that the brush has been often engaged with mere mapping out the surface ' wit^ paint ; and the colours are, as by necessity, used for perspicuity, and, like all the rest, -lack ardour. But such objections come from artists rather than from the multitude, for crowds of spectators collect each day before this latest wonder. After viewing the picture I walked to the studio in which it was painted, and found Piloty quietly at work, a model seated at his side ; his latest subject, limited to a comparatively srriall canvas, is the Girondists going to the Guillotine. It was pleasant to see the artist, humble and earnest as ever, intent only on doing the true and the noble. Carlo moty.pmx. Yr L ilever (^ A.l.,1 LEO. Munich. 35 The characteristics of the reigning school in Munich, which comes as a sequel to that of Piloty, are strongly pronounced and easy to be understood. Instead of the quiet contem- plation to which the art of modern Germany had been surrendered, intrude dramatic action, stirring situation, the surprise of plot, and the climax of catastrophe. In lieu of generic types, the men now in the ascendence seize on individualities ; instead of ideal beauty they prefer character in the concrete ; in place of humanity in the abstract they put trenchant reality ; hence, they stand at equal distance from the classic grace and Christian spiritualism of their forerunners. And while we cannot but admire a body healthy and robust, drapery glittering and actual, light dazzling as a sun-ray, texture true to substance and surface, we may be per- mitted to deplore the soul that has fled. OverBeck, Cornelius, Veit, and others of the elder school, had always greatness of intent, but the painters of the present day, with few honourable exceptions, have no largeness save, in extent of canvas. Cornelius rose, as we have seen, to the sublime argument of the Last Judgment ; the new school of romance and realism is content to depict a love-scene under a bower, life-size, enclosed in a flaunting frame twenty feet square. The period of the Munich revival is measured by the reigns of three successive sovereigns of the kingdom, and by three consecutive directors of the Academy. The directors, as already said, have been Cornelius, Kaulbach, and Piloty. Of the three jnonarchs, King Ludwig I., as we have seen, was identified with churches and museums. Next followed Maximilian II., who gives his name to the new quarter of the city, the Maximilian Strasse and the Maximilianeum Institution and Picture Gallery. Thirdly and lastly, comes Ludwig II., whose rule points a melancholy moral for all dilettanti dynasties. The usual historic sequence among the sister arts finds illustration in this family of regal amateurs. The earliest born is naturally architecture; next follows sculpture and painting, all severally fostered by Kings Ludwig I. and Maximilian 11. But, lastly, in the order of development comes music, which accordingly fitly falls as the heritage of the latest ruler in this art-loving household. The present king, who exonerates himself from the ordinary burdens of government, has given little more than a nominal sanction to the specific arts which his forerunners fostered. Following the old traditions, an International Exhibition was ordained for 1879, but Ludwig II. absented himself from the opening ceremony, and to my knowledge the Emperor of Austria, the King of Saxony, and the Empress of Germany, all visited the collection which the sovereign of the country had not even seen. The consequence of such apathy is necessarily calamitous ; this laudable enterprise lacks ardour, wants organization, and drags on a dead-alive endurance. Nearly a month after the day of opening the pictures are not in order, and the catalogue is the worst I ever had to use. -In the meanwhile, the King lives in sybarite seclusion, toying with the sister arts, and commanding special performances of Wagner operas in some inaccessible schloss or on the moonlight waters of a solitary lake. Music is the " sensuous art that lends seductive charms to the decline of nations and the fall of families. The present ruler in Bavaria cannot say with the statesman of old Greece, ' I have made a great kingdom, but have not learnt to play the fiddle;' rather he takes as his pattern the Emperor who amused himself with music while his capital was in flames. Hans Makart, though obtaining notice in the sequel as an Austrian subject, appears here among the illustrations as a pupil of Piloty. The Pet Page, etched by W. Unger, may be accepted as an epitome of the painter's manner, and as an example of the romance which now sways ardent minds. 'The picture was a study of colour more than of form ; it was sensuous rather than severe ; it was, in fact, more closely allied to the decorative style of Venice than to the scholastic manner of modern Germany. And here may be remarked, that in Venetian art, when colour passionately came, music responsively followed ; and in this picture, accordingly, the harmony of colour is echoed by notes upon the lyre. In the school of Piloty four colourists have arisen, and it may be observed that not one is Bavarian in blood. Faber du Faur is half French ; N. Gysis a Greek ; the other two are Hans Makart, an Austrian, and A. Liezen-Mayer, a Hungarian : the last is therefore a compatriot of the composer Liszt. 36 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. Again, music and colour are as twin sisters, ■ and yet, strange to say, Munich, though musical, has never been a school of colour. Present teachings ' in the Miinich Academy may be briefly indicated. The' study, from the antique -continues to be the preliminary groundwork.' . But more and more professors enforce, -with' the -cordial- assent of the pupils, thorough drawing": from the living nude "figure. I am informed that 'the present authorities in the Academy, at the instigation •' of Ludwig Loefftz and Herr Benczur, have reorganized the' schools, maifily with the aim of applying the utmost time and attention to the nude model. The studies are m6stly in- black and white, the Painting School being made more discretionary-than- imperative.' This change comes doubtless as a salutary check on the -formlessness into which the Munich school has latterly fallen. Effect has in fact usurped the 'place of 'Steadfastness, in form-. Thus -a-CDrresporid^ nt writes, — 'I have myself seen a picture pfoduced out of the scrapings of the palette, vi^hich when spread on a board happehed'-to take a shape and tone pleasing" to the eye.' Thus art has' been -in danger o'f degenerating into a meaningless arrangement of light, shade, and -colour, and into a- surface realism, relying on technical tricks and ' felicitous accidents. " Hence : the strife for ' originality and novelty, laudable when sustained by -an idea, has degenerated into nothing better than startling surprises. Piloty is sometimes chafged ".with the nxeretricious allurements incident to dexterous manipulation '^ and illusive realism ;' but it may be well -to know that his standard has been so high that stu'dents- who graduated in the' lower classes of- the -Academy found that to obtain his credentials as director -it' became, desirable to-und'ergo an intermediate "course in Paris. This says iit'tle for the teachihg-'-in; Munich.-'- Professor Loefffz, I am"told,' 'is considered the most scholarly. of the new- acade'rhic clique, and he is certainly the most popular and successful teacher.' : Complaint has been made that ateliers, antagonistic to one -another, lie scattered over -the whole city, and 'that 'thus • divergencies' and jealousies are' kept up.' I have certainly • found professors miles" apart, -and- union -becomes- physically impracticable. Biit the new Academy, now in; course of erection; will -be operi in .'two years. This' vast building, riot quite ^ the size of the 'Louvre, but four, times as^'-largfe As our National Gallery and Koyal Academy put together, • will afford • ample foorfi'-'fo'r all- the professor's. More acco'rd among teachers and- students' may then -be hoped "for. :" . '^ Everybody now speaks freely of the altered aspect of the Munich' school. My- friend,' Mr. Gbmpton, writes, '"When I first came to Munich,' -towards"' the -close of -the' exhibition in .1869, there was much more of the classicist school in the upper walks of art!' In the roll of history nowadays, -technical tricks and pictorial peculiarities exert a magical charm; ■ Yix' genre and land- scape -the aim is rather to copy 'Nature literally, than to 'subject her to an elevating treatment. Pictures of nianners and of society follow 'the style of the sniall Dutch masters, and seek -to enhance their charms by hijmour and sentiment,-as well^as -by the legitimate' alluremen-ts'-of delicacy of drawing and' harhidny of tone.- ' The younger generation -are captivated by a new' way of looking at things, or by some hovel trait in execution, regard' being paid almost- exclusively to the material side of the subject.' But though- the- signs of" the times- point to retrogression, yet still a party exists whose cry is pirbgress. ■ Nevertheless, extravagance" is- noiw cheered onwards,' while" the rriodesty of 'hatiire is 'left -behind as slow and unsensational. Mr.-Compton writes that formerly ' ' •■ ', ■-- ' • • - 'The sallies of the painter Thoma would "hardly go. down with any but the. very, yanguard of thejDarty of advance ;. but. now admirers are found in numbers for his wildest fancies, and a novel trick- of the brush, or a. strange scheme of. colouring,, however .forced, obtains, , while it preserves a consistent aim, ready disciples. I believe that the universal recourse to photography by landscape and genre artists, is at the bottom of a great deal of the heartless realism so much in vogue. We know that Meissonier hardly ever paints anything until he has had a photograph made of the whole of his subject as arranged in the studio ; and here in Germany the same may be said of the Poles and many of the Austrians — Passini for instance, though he knows how to subordinate his photographic chiaroscuro to worthy ends, so as to make his realism aid character and incident.' Munich. 57 But the expedients adopted in the present day are many and varied, and, at any rate, monotony cannot be laid to the charge of Munich. Thus we find that opposed to ' The use of photographs in the place of manual studies appears the practice among many earnest men of etching from nature. Five or six years ago Raab etched portraits from life ; and these plates, taken direct from nature, attracting notice, it is now not at all uncommon to find heads and nude studies as well as landscapes either etched or drawn with the pen.' My friend, Mr. Folingsby, trained in the school of Piloty, known by pictures which have obtained a place on the line of our Royal Academy, also present by two works in the Munich International Exhibition, and now Director of the Academy in Melbourne, has kindly prepared for my use the following account of the condition of affairs in the capital of Bavaria :— ' The Munich school has most undoubtedly not made progress during the last few years. Formerly was felt the influence which long acquaintance with large historic works gives to every branch of art; in former days prevailed a nobler and broader way of thinking and composing. The painter took trouble in selecting his subject, and then did his best to embody his intention. Now it is quite different : the painter requires no subject, and his only aim is to produce something that is decorative and shows off his dexterous technique. The causes which have brought about these changes have been, firstly, that the present king takes httle interest in painting, and that orders for large historic works have entirely ceased, and are only spoken of as things of the past. Next came the great rush of dealers and collectors, up to the year 1874, which made it almost impossible for the painters to supply the demand. This naturally led to hurrying the work, as there was quite a scramble to get a picture from a man of any name. After 1874 the buyers became rare; but the painters, having, acquired more expensive tastes and habits, were obliged to manufacture in order to live in the way they had become accustomed to. Another bad influence was the fancy the public took for small pictures in imitation of Meissonier. I don't know if you agree with me, but I think Master Meissonier has done a great deal of harm. Nearly all the young artists here paint very small pictures; and to make their work pay, as prices are very low, they generally steal the composition from some old engraving or modern photograph, trusting that it may pass without detection through the difference of handling and colour. A friend of mine, a gifted man and a very clever artist, who has produced large and good works, painted by way of sarcasm a picture exactly the size of a lucifer match-box, and had it very heavily framed ; it was then exhibited in the Kunstverein, and immediately sold, the happy purchaser, of course, being a picture-dealer. Another instance of the absurd direction this mania is taking may be mentioned. A rich man in Berlin has sent orders to nearly all the painters of name here in Munich to paint him a picture for the frame which he sends with his order. Would you believe it, the frame is an old filigree buckle, silver-gilt, once used for a hat-band formerly worn by the peasants in Bavaria I need make no comment : you can judge yourself what the influence on a school is when the art of painting descends to curiosities that must be looked at through a magnifying glass. In great works very little is doing here. I forget if I mentioned to you that I am painting a picture for the Melbourne National Gallery. The subject is the first meeting between Henry VIII. and Anne Boylene — Cardinal Wolsey in the background is making an exit. The composition is some- thing like the scene in Shakspeare, only freely rendered. For me it is a large picture, and those who have visited my studio say it is my best.' The Munich artists, following the example of their forerunners in Rome, have been making a great festa. The growing tendency to realise in pictures, in tableaux vivaiits, and otherwise, the romance and the poetry of the Middle Ages, culminated in Bavaria, in June 1879, by a forest festival. The artists at starting passed tumultuously through the ancient Sendlinger Gate to the scene of action, which was laid six miles south of Munich at the castle of Schwaneck, situated among woods on high cliffs overlooking the river Isar running rapidly. In former days this delightful spot, when tenanted by the sculptor Schwanthaler, witnessed many a wild revel. On the recent occasion a martial spirit inspired the movement ; the artists were divided into two hostile camps or factions — the one besieged the castle, the other held it. The military tactics were borrowed from the Peasant War, and the members and students of the Academy, taking the part of the people, vigorously stormed the stronghold. On the other side the lieges of the Emperor,, represented by the Society of Munich artists, defended themselves within the walls, and also formed outside a body for L 3 8 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. relief. The latter was headed by an imperial herald in the person of the distinguished actor' Herr Riithling. As may be supposed the conflict did not become sanguinary, and by way of prelude the herald, on behalf of the Emperor, read a proclamation, and, taking advantage of the occasion, turned adroitly from the manoeuvres of war to the arts of peace, and threw in reminiscences of the olden times blended with allusions to present art conditions in Munich. The peasants, it need scarcely be said, accepted the terms offered, and on laying down their arms received a free pardon. Naturally enough, both parties at once fraternised, and then in truth commenced the real business of the day. The woods re-echoed with games and revelry, and in an adjacent hostelry conviviality was kept up to a late hour. The day's proceedings were diversified by speeches which will, as it is said they deserve, be handed down to posterity ; and many were the animated scenes which might, with advantage, have been perpetuated by the sketcher. Wild country youths and laughing vivandi^res might be observed cooking viands at the camp-fires on the points of their halberds, while a mendicant friar enacted his sacred part by attempting, though in vain, to put bounds to the hilarity. The variety of character was endless, the costumes of the olden time were strictly adhered to, and realistic completeness in detail was enhanced by the use, not of modern imitations but of original arms, armour, and accoutrements lent for the occasion from the National Museum. Some of the figures were masterpieces; and the tents, waggons, and wooden cannon, together with the wayside inn transformed, by the aid of laths, canvas, and paint, into a veritable hostelry of the olden time, made many a genre, not to say historic picture. Hans Makart, who joined his former companions in the Academy, confessed that this Munich f^te was more artistic than the stately and magnificent procession of artists at the Vienna Wedding Festivities which had taken place some weeks before. Munich asserts herself as a city of ' processes :' fresco-painting- was there revived, or rather introduced into Germany for the first time. And the mural pictures executed by Cornelius Hess, Kaulbach, and others, though not absolute successes, compare favourably with the works to which they led in our own Houses of Parliament. The experiments in Munich prove, that for the most part frescoes under shelter stand well, while in the open air they do not bear the trials of the climate. Then came the time for other processes, such as the wax medium, a revival of the early method ; subsequently Kaulbach, Piloty, and others, adopted the ' wasser-glas', water- glass, or 'liquid flint,' medium, which, at the suggestion of the Prince Consort, was tried by Maclise at Westminster. Much has been and might still be said of these various processes ; however, now it is only needful to add what Director Piloty has done. He states that he has never painted in fresco, believing ' wasser-glas ' superior, especially in permanence ; he thinks it will resist all influences of climate, and further states that a water-glass pi.ture at the top of the Munich Academy remained exposed to the weather for more than six years without injury. The Director, who has kindly given me his experiences, says, that he finds the process easy and agreeable, that he likes working in it. He states that he does not use the silicate on the palette, but simply mixes his colours with distilled water : thus ' the process differs from tempera and encaustic, and allies itself to painting in water-colour. The picture when finished is rendered impervious and ' imperishable ' by the ' liquid flint ' squirted over the surface. The squirt, &c., is engraved in the Parliamentary Reports of our Royal Fine Arts Commission. The ' liquid flint ' when thus laid on gives a superincumbent and protective surface, which may be compared to a plate of glass : yet, as in the antiquated process of fixing pencil-drawings at school with gum, the surface should stop short of showing, polish or varnish. Director Piloty is of opinion, that the reason why the large wall-paintings by Maclise at Westminster have clouded or chilled is that too much of the preparation was thrown on : thus, instead of being absorbed into the cement it came out as a cloud, which did not reveal but obscured Nelson and Wellington. Piloty further states that there have been certain improvements in this discovery, which was first worked out with singular devotion and enthusiasm by Professors Fuchs and Schlotthauer. The amelio- ratipns, as might be naturally expected, were chiefly in the colours and in the ground. I have Munich. 39 seen the ground as laid down in Berlin for Kaulbach ; it was a complete triumph for the plasterer : no cartoon paper could have been more inviting to a painter. Herr Piloty urges that this surface of cement can be made more firm and smooth than the ' intonaco ' of frescOj so that greater permanence and a higher finish may be secured. Also, he names as an advantage over fresco the facility for correcting and repainting, and further states that he finds water-glass in no way inferior to fresco in transparency and luminosity ; the effect gained is so much alike in both processes that one might easily be mistaken for the other : in fact, as in pictures generally, more depends on the artist than on the instruments he uses. Director Piloty adds, that I am right to inquire into the matter, because he is convinced that a great future is opening for these new processes. 40 CHAPTER IV.— MUNICH {continued). IT has been before said, that Munich claims to be the only city in which the arts have been developed in logical sequence. This, though fine in theory, is disadvantageous in practice. I am reminded of certain political systems, built on the abstract, resting on the rights of man, drawn out in the evening and put into action next morning. These logical constitutions — such, for example, as the first and second French Republics^hough they look nice on paper seldom work well. And so it is with the theoretic structures set up in the interest of art by German professors and philosophers. In England our method, both in politics and art, has been not theoretic but practical. The growth of our much-admired Constitution has not been systematic but irregular, and it works well. And so with the constitution and the development of our national arts. In architecture take as an example such historic cities as Canterbury, Chester, and Bristol, with their old walls, old towers and churches ; with streets running hither and thither, up-hill and down ; with roofs, gables, dormer windows, and chimneys, all without symmetry, yet of utmost picturesqueness. But what do we find in Munich, and in scarcely a less degree in Berlin ? Cities laid out like American towns, on the square : the ground-plan geometric, the elevations mathematical, perpendicular lines crossed at ruled intervals by courses horizontal — all defined by strict law. Thus towns designed like Munich are wanting in accidents, incidents, surprises. Old cities have grown up in accord with nature : the ivy-mantled tower, the pointed spire, the zigzag street, the overhanging roof, are in keeping with the shadow of a rock, the slope of a hill, the sweep of a stream. But in towns built on a system, in place of the wildness of Nature is the regularity of a Dutch garden. Such infelicitous conformations exist in Munich under the^ development of the arts according to logical principles. In this theoretic sequence the beginning must of course be with architecture. Afterwards the bare skeleton has to be clothed, and so carving in the flat, sculpture ih the round, and painting in colour, are successively called into being. Ancient remains in Italy, and indeed almost throughout the world, illustrate this inherent law of progression ; and just as in Pompeii were discovered the sister arts in course of destruction, so in Munich has been witnessed the career of their creation. Also in the Bavarian capital has been seen a consistency in style which finds scarcely a parallel save in the scrupulously archaeological revival of Gothic architecture in England. Inevitable anachronisms occur between the several buildings in the same street. Centuries may intervene between one fa5ade and its neighbour, yet each building is consistent with itself ; the exterior does not belie the interior ; the sculpture, the subject pictures, and the coloured ornamentation, accord with the architecture in chronology and style : in short, the architect, the sculptor, and the painter, have worked hand in hand. This, it must be admitted, is a great gain. It is true that such • unity involves a corresponding loss in variety, hence such a historic conglomeration as the facade of Rouen Cathedral becomes, under the conditions, an impossibility. But in compensation is gained the oneness and the harmony which the Greeks tell us inhere to true art. The conception issues from the brain one and indivisible. The Classic, the Christian, the Romantic, and the Naturalistic, are the four fundamental styles which have contended for mastery over modern art. And the three great national schools of Modern Europe, the French, the English, and the German, each contains within itself these four phases or principles. The Classic, it has been said, seeks for physical perfection, the Christian strives for religious expression, the Romantic is surrendered to imagination and passion, while the Naturalistic is content to take things just as they are. Schools Classic, Christian, or Romantic, which sacrifice present life to the dead past, are in their very origin partial, one-sided, Munich. 41 and soon become extinct. That a living art must grow out from the living present constitutes the vital strength of Naturalism. These doctrines find confirmation in Munich ; here ' the Battle of the Styles' has been fought out, and in the end terms of peace and reconciliation seem practicable. Within and without the Academy Classic, Christian, Romantic and Naturalistic manners, mingle and intermingle, and so at length the conclusion is that these four constituent' elements, hitherto meeting for hostility, may combine for common ends. In Munich the actual manifestation has been fourfold : first, the Classic, as seen in mythological compositions by Cornelius on the ceiling of the Glyptothek ; second, the Christian, as found in the wall-paintings of All Saints and St. Boniface by Hess, and in the Last Judgment in the Church of St. Ludwig by Cornelius ; third, the Romantic, as manifest in the Niebelungen compositions in the palace by Schnorr ; and lastly, the Naturalistic, as dominant in the majority of the works of the present day. A rapid summary will indicate how modern Munich has grown up. Architecture being the parent art, a first word may be fitly bestowed on the master-builders. Leo de Klenze, born in 1784 at the foot of the Hartz mountains, had by nature and training that facility and fecundity which the time and the situation called for. He had received a liberal education, he was versed in literature, and acquainted with languages : he published works on architecture, and was even a painter of landscapes. His genius and career are akin to those of Schinkel : the one did for Munich what the other accomplished for Berlin. The principal works by Klenze are the Glyptothek, the Pinakothek, All Saints, the King's Palace, the Theatre, and the Walhalla on the Danube, also the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. It has been rightly objected that his style lacks purity: it is sometimes classic, sometimes Byzantine, often mongrel ; it evinces more ambition than knowledge ; the mouldings are weak and wanting in shadow, accordingly the aspect is that of card-board and veneering, rather than of solid structure and material. This is a fault common in Munich. Yet it cannot be doubted that the favoured architect of King Ludwig was endowed with imagination and invention, his conceptions were grandiose; thus he proved himself fitted to take the lead in a school of experiment and innovation. Another architect, to whom merit cannot be denied, is Gartner, born at Coblentz in 1792 : he designed the Ludwig Kirche, the University, and the Library — the latter, in the palatial style of Florence, is a most successful revival. Ziebland, born at Ratisbon in 1800, deserves to be remembered for the Basilica, true to the historic type and satisfactory. Neither can be forgotten Ohlmuller, born in Bamberg in 1791 ; his chief work is the pretty little Gothic church of Sta. Maria Hilf A young Austrian, Herr Haiiberisser, residing in Munich, has given a free reading of what may be termed the modern Gothic of Germany in the Rathhaus — a building which for import and true art-treatment has few equals in Europe within the last half century. Lastly, must not be overlooked Herr Frederick Biirklein, the architect of Munich's latest and most gigantic folly, the Maximilianeum. It may be asked, How comes it that so many geniuses have arisen at one period ? But to compare small things with great, analogous instances occur in the time of Pericles and of the Medici. Patrons, even such as King Ludwig, almost of necessity produce artists of some sort. But after all, can the architects, sculptors, and painters, who have been brought forth, be accounted real geniuses ? The term implies much. I should rather incline to think that, with one or two exceptions, these men of Munich, who are numbered by hundreds, were, and are, blessed with just respectable talents, which received every advantage from thorough training and patient study. A royal mandate was issued that national art should exist, and thus, under the pressure of command and the stimulus of reward, artists of moderate capacity found greatness thrust upon them. I will offer briefly some observations, made during successive visits, on a few principal works; full descriptions are not needed when the originals are so well known. First va. chronology of style comes the small chapel of All Saints. The painter Hess, in 1826, received from the King a commission to decorate the interior in the Byzantine style, accordant with the primitive spirit of Christianity. The picture grounds are of gold, and all the colours are M 42 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. forced up to correspondent pitch, and yet so well balanced as to seem subdued. The success as a piece of polychromy I have always felt as little short of absolute. Moreover, in the glory of the colour there is sanctity, and a sense consonant with religious reverence. Yet, as for the figures, they are painfully feeble — destitute of action, they seem on the point of falling to pieces. Whether the painter strove thus to be true to the old Byzantine art, or whether he could not do better, charity forbids me to determine. Hess found a vocation in designing for glass. He has been fitly compared with Luini: the two artists are alike in moderation, quietism, and religious sentiment. I may add that these frescoes are in perfect preservation. The Basilica of St. Boniface is the happiest imitation I know of the ancient Basilicas, churches formed in early Christian times from Roman courts of justice. I am writing in Rome after a visit to the Church of Sta. Maria Maggiore, which is usually accepted as the finest example of Christian Basilicas ; and in its long-drawn aisle, supported on either side by single classic columns taken from ancient temples, and in its array of picture mosaics on the walls supporting the roof, as well as in the vault of the glorious apse clothed with golden mosaic, I recognise the elder sister of the Basilica of St. Boniface in Munich. As to materials, it is to be observed that in the Bavarian capital, where the expenditure has been far indeed from niggardly, scagliola was substituted for marble and fresco for mosaic. It is a little remarkable that throughout Germany, as far as I remember, no attempt has been made to revive the art of ancient mosaic. In this Basilica the frescoes, which still remain well preserved, were intrusted to Hess; and, though poor individually, they are impressive collec- tively, and especially effective as parts of a decorative whole. Mrs. Jameson pronounces the .series as 'executed with great care in a large, chaste, and simple style;' and one of the number, on account of English associations, the Embarkation of St. Boniface from South- ampton, is engraved in her volumes. When last I visited the Munich , Basilica I was more especially struck with its ' poly- chromy.' The rest might be passed over as mediocre, but the harmony of many colours made strong appeal to the eye, and, through the eye, to the religious sense. The whole colour, as before said, is wrought up to the pitch of gold, and the climax is reached in the arch of triumph and the coved apse beyond, which shine as one sheet of burnished gold. Figures float over the triumphal arch, and on the apse appears Christ, larger than life, in a vesica, surrounded by the Madonna, saints, and angels, with intervening palm-trees, as in the old Basilicas of Rome and Ravenna. This blaze of colour has been carefully kept down by cool tones, especially in the floor of grey mosaic patterns copied from Roman churches. In England we have used gold, at least till recently, sparsely. Munich teaches how it can be employed lavishly ; how, as a background, it may fill the heavens ; and, above all, how it may be used to isolate and remove sacred and poetic figures and compositions out of the sphere of the natural and the mundane. Gold grounds favour the abstract, the absolute, and the ideal. The Church of St. Ludwig is chiefly remarkable for the Last fudgment by Cornelius, already passed under review. The fourth and last church calling for a word is that of Sta. Maria Hilf, a Gothic structure in brick, simple in style and in good taste. I shall limit my remarks t'o the windows, which are the best examples of Munich painted glass. It need not be said there are two opposing parties as to the merits or demerits of the style. Those who side with the medisevalists prize most highly a gem-like lustre in colour, and prefer subjects small enough in size to admit of a jewel or mosaic-like treatment : these, which are the qualities sought by our Gothic revivalists, certainly cannot be found in the Munich glass. But then the question may be fairly asked, whether other and distinctive qualities are not also good after their kind. In this church one thing is at any rate evident, that the painted windows serve as pictures : they are needed for decoration ; the interior has no colour besides. I think the objection is not quite fair that these windows look like painted blinds to screen the light. It is true, however, that this surface-painted glass has an opacity which does not belong to Munich. 43 what is technically termed ' the pot metal,' or to the translucent surface enamel of the older method. Still, opacity and transparency are comparative terms, and it cannot be denied that the glass in Sta. Maria Hilf transmits enough light to illumine the church. But throwing all preconceived theory aside, it would seem to me sufficient to say that the effect gained is pre-eminently agreeable. It may not be 'architectonic,' but, what is scarcely less to the purpose, it is pictorial. These windows correspond to the pictures of the religious schools of Munich and of Dusseldorf, with this difference, that glass is substituted for canvas, and that the light is transmitted and not reflected. They are designed wholly or in part by Hess, and thus in style they accord with the frescoes already mentioned in the chapel of All Saints. They are composed on the same system, and pitched in a like key — the colours are not positive or violent but intermediary and blended ; the light and shade too are graduated as in a highly-finished picture. The sentiment equally corresponds with the local pictorial school ; it is gentle and beauty-loving. I am here, as elsewhere in Munich, impressed with the fitness of the art for the exact spot in which it is found : even as to scale these windows are in just relation to the architectural surroundings, while, on the contrary, in Glasgow, and in St. Paul's, London, the Munich glass looks out of place. I incline to think, as already indicated, that the most satisfactory phase of the revival in Munich is in the painted interiors which recall the great originals in Italy: the Arena Chapel by Giotto at Padua, the Church of St. Francis at Assisi, the Cathedral at Orvietto, and many a chamber such as degli Spagnuoli, the chapel of the Riccardi Palace, and the sacristy of the Church of San Miniato in Florence. It has sometimes been objected, especially to the polychrome revivals in Munich, that just in proportion as colour is sought after form has been neglected. Thus, to mere surface-decoration is sacrificed the relief and contrast of light and shade, the harmony of lines and even the symmetry of proportion. The ready sweep of the painter's brush outruns the slow carving of the sculptor's chisel : architectural lines become mere framework to pictures, architectural spaces so much plaster thirsting for colour. The walls of a church losing their solidity and flatness of surface, their massive, sustaining strength, are converted into painted galleries, where the stability of structure and the reality of material are disguised by illusive semblances, and become phantom forms dying into indefinite distance. Yet, on the other hand, in favour of polychromy it may be pleaded, that colour rightly used really emphasises form and construction ; that, moreover, holy light is coloured light, and that white light and whitewash leave the mind unmoved and as a sheet of blank paper. The use of colour thus may be regarded less as a matter of abstract principle than as a question of detail and application — the right employment of means to an end. When the architecture is merely accessory, serving, as in La Sainte Chapelle in Paris, for a simple casket to hold the painted picture or the jewelled glass ; or when, again, the painting is kept duly subordinate to the general architectural design, or when the colour is made a fitting accompaniment to the form, each subserving one concerted harmony; in all such instances chromatic decoration, whether in painted windows, precious marbles, or pictorial frescoes, is laudable as enhancing the one paramount end, art effect and expression. I think that the ornate churches in Munich conform in good degree to these conditions. It may, perhaps, be objected that Christianity, the Gospel for the poor, should not, at least in her ordinary 4alks, be adorned so sumptuously. And I have felt sometimes that these gorgeous interiors were hardly a fitting refuge for the needy kneeling in rags, or the unlettered listening to teachings for ordinary daily life. Yet happily the ways of art, like the works of nature, are manifold in ministration. The grey of morning may point to the sober duties of the coming day, the golden sunset closes life's fitful fever, the tranquil twilight leads on to night, and sleep, perchance, to dreams or death. And, perhaps, it were not a futile fancy to suppose that a church roof may, in light, shade, and colour, hold some fitting relation to the canopy of the sky. Indeed, it is not unusual to decorate a chapel vault with the deep blue of night, spangled with patens of golden stars. Divines have discoursed on the place or province of 44 The Schools of Modem Art in Germany. enthusiasm and ecstasy in religion, and it has always seemed to me that highly ornate churches incite to these conditions of the imagination. Thus I confess that on entering that richest of modern interiors, the chapel of All Saints in Munich, the intensity of colour which meets the eye reflects itself inwardly on the mind — sacred light seems to illumine -the thoughts — a halo surrounds the mental images, and visions of beauty enter the chambers of the soul. There, possibly, may be realised certain glowing visions of prophecy — the new heaven and the new earth, the city of pure gold, the gates of pearl. I ' feel that such appliances and triumphs of art, such efforts to bring to the service of God all that is most beautifirl and costly on earth,' have given to Christianity a prestige with the multitude, and have endowed the ritual of Christendom among the religions of the world with fitting grandeur and supremacy. To the four churches may be added four or more museums — the Glyptothek, the old and the new Pinakothek, and that most interesting museum of Bavarian antiquities which corresponds to our Museum at South Kensington. Of the contents of the last, which is least known, an instructive account might be written. A word must be afforded to the sculptor Schwanthaler, who is identified with Munich as Rauch is with Berlin. I never enter the ill-kept garden encircled by 'the Arcades' without pausing before La Source, one of the most graceful and refined creations of the artist. Schwanthaler, like other of his contemporaries, was prolific to a fault, as can be seen from a visit to his crowded studio : indeed, the city may be said to be populous with his sculpture. He modelled the colossal Bavaria; he executed single figures and groups for the King's palace, for the old and new Pinakothek, and the Glyptothek. But his genius — if so exalted a term may be justified — wanted force ; his figures are inarticulate, 'his name is writ in water.' Schwanthaler's most elaborate compositions are the pediments of the Walhalla. This modern version of a Greek temple — worthy of a pilgrimage to Ratisboh — is as lovely in its situation as in its design ; from the crown of a wooded hill it looks down upon the Danube sweeping across a broad plain bounded by distant hills. The silence and the solitude of the spot aid the impressiveness of the scene. Munich has of late years obtained further extension for her specific arts in the projection of the Maximilian Strasse — a scheme which reaches a climax in the Maximilianeum, a huge government fabric something between a Manchester warehouse and a monster hotel — the crowning folly of a dilettante dynasty. Director Piloty has decorated the exterior with wall- pictures, which are barely discernible from the road and the bridge below. This new quarter, with its handsome array of shops, hotels, and public buildings, though a fair specimen of Munich magnificence, is barely equal to a Paris boulevard. The fagades are wanting in relief and shadow-casting mouldings ; they are thin, flat, and forceless. This, the final outcome in archi- tecture, is nothing less than disastrous. The best buildings in Munich are the earliest, those in which some old historic work was taken as a model : others, which aim at originality, verge on extravagance or inanity. And now, at last, it may almost be said that Munich is left destitute of any distinctive architecture to which she can attach her name. It is well-nigh wearisome to have to mention more wall-paintings ; yet the present King inherits that vaulting ambition which flies into so-called high art. The Bayerischer Museum, a comparatively recent project, comprises in its pictorial propaganda little short of one hundred and fifty wall-paintings, some no less than thirty feet long, and presenting a total area of sixteen thousand square feet. The compositions' chiefly chronicle the glories of war in the annals of Bavaria. Among the artists of the day, the most noteworthy are Andreas Miiller, Alexander Wagner, and Ferdinand Piloty ; the last is brother of the Director. These copious readings from history may be compared tp Macaulay's brilliant and lucid narratives, yet the realism of the school peeps out in trenchant touches which might have fallen from the caustic pen of Thomas Carlyle.' These blatant wall-paintings enforce with a vengeance all that can be spoken of the change now passing over the art of Munich. Nothing remains of the grandiose manner of Cornelius or of the subjective spirituality of Overbeck — little of the classic idealism of Kaulbach; but, instead, much of the force and even of the nobility of Delaroche, somewhat of the melo- • Munich. 45 drama of Gallait, and a great deal of the bravura and bombast of Horace Vernet. Thus, in the present day, does the school of Munich, in common with all others, tend to cosmopolitan phases. But through whatever vicissitudes it may pass, still, for the painting of history, it is likely to retain the recipe : just as experienced novel-writers know how to arrange characters in groups and to wind up narratives to a plot in the third volume, so have Munich painters learnt how, within a hundred square feet of wall-space, to marshal their forces. In August, 1879, I visited for' a third time the Maximilianeum, and found some changes to be noted. On approaching the building I was sorry to discover that the external wall- pictures are in rapid decay. They were, at their best, blunders ; on the immense fagade they appeared but as formless patches of colour, and now they have become utterly chaotic, separate figures are wholly lost, and even the general composition can be deciphered with difficulty ; and yet the process employed was at the time deemed imperishable. The pictures having been painted in fresco, or rather, I should suppose, in secco, were afterwards fixed or secured by being saturated with the water-glass solution. The failure is all the more discouraging because Piloty, who takes the lead in these decorations, had paid, as already said, much attention to processes, and believed that at last a really permanent method had been discovered. With this latest attempt I think that external, as distinguished from internal, pictorial decorations must be abandoned. Kaulbach's exterior frescoes on the new Pinakothek have for years been in decay, the painted pediment of the Opera House is blanched of its once-bright colours, and now no more than ten years have been needed for the ruin of the latest experiment, which was ventured on as something better than a forlorn hope. I am happy, however, to add, that the wall-paintings in Munich which are protected from the rude external elements have survived. The two picture-galleries of the Maximilianeum, with their full complement of contents, have been completed since my last visit. In size and show they are comparable to the galleries at Versailles. The compositions, which are 'all in oil, stretch to immense proportions, Kaulbach's Battle of Salamis being over thirty feet long. The greater number of the painters employed are seen elsewhere to more advantage. Julius Schnorr, when required to do justice to the Protestant theme of Luther at Worms, was stricken with age ; Kaulbach, too, had fallen into florid extravagance, and Carl Piloty never seems the free man when oppressed with authoritative mandate to do something grand. Among painters of importance not named elsewhere are A. Ramberg, formerly Professor in the Munich Academy, who here puts in practice the principles of historic art he once taught ; also Professor Kreling, formerly Director of the Nuremberg Academy, and favourably known by his designs for Faust. Here likewise distend themselves to the uttermost Hiltensperger, A. Miiller, Foltz, Conrader, Hauschild, and Peter Hess. On the whole, such ambitious efforts remind me of the fable of the unfortunate frog who swelled until it burst. Also, in 1879, I was glad to see the continued progress made in the Bayerischer Museum, the before-mentioned collection of local and national antiquities designed to emulate the H6tel de Cluny and the Museum of South Kensington. The treasures are distributed under three heads as follows : — (i) The German-Celtic and the Carlovingian periods. (2) The Gothic era. (3) The times of the Renaissance down to modern days. It may be interesting to know that ' the Bavarian Exchequer, not having at its disposal the large sums of money granted by the English Government for the enrichment of South Kensington, the King has bestowed on the National Museum such objects in his Royal Palaces as are not needed for the immediate use of the Court.' Among such loans is a. remarkable series of tapestries. The purpose of this praiseworthy project is to illustrate the history of Bavaria through its art ' products, to elucidate the close relation subsisting between civilisation and the arts of the people, and, lastly, to apply the best works of the past to the improvement of the industries of the present day. I am happy to state, that , on my recent visit I found the frescoes which cover the walls of the second story are in capital condition. The battle-pieces form not inappropriate backgrounds to the swords and armour now brought within the rooms ; yet, in N *«■* 46 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. point of decoration, these crudely-coloured frescoes cannot compare with the old tapestriestoned by time. MARGARET AT THE CONFESSIONAL. BY A. LIETZEN-MAYER. The chief illustration is from Herr Fluggen, an artist born and educated in Munich, and favourably known in Europe generally by paintings of romance and of historic genre.. Among 'his popular productions are, Elizabeth of Hungary taking Refuge with her Children in a Ruined Munich. 47 Hut ; Milton dictating Paradise Lost ; The Countess Margaret taking leave of her Children ; and The Landlady's Daughter. The composition Familien Gliick, here engraved from the collection THE JEWEL CASKET. BY A. LIETZEN-MAYER. of Mr. Henry Wallis, exemplifies the beauty, poetic feeling, and harmonious tone, for which tlie artist is esteemed. The two woodcuts are from' Herr Lietzen-Mayer, a Hungarian by birth, but trained in the school of Pilpty, and a resident in Munich. The pictures I have 48 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. seen .by this painter, of which the most famous is Maria Theresa of Austria nursing the Poor Woman's Child, tend to scenic and melo-dramatic styles. The situations are striking, .the contrasts strong : this is the decorative side of the Piloty school. The subjects here engraved are taken from two out of fifty cartoons illustrative of 'Faust.' These cartoons received high encomium when first exhibited in Munich, and a handsome volume issued by MM. Hachette has brought them to the favourable knowledge of the English public. ' Munich scarcely forms an exception to the rule that periods igiven to high art and to the study of the figure are negligent of landscape. Still, King Ludwig in his love for the human form did not overlook the beauties of nature. With the happy knack which belonged to him of putting the right man in the right place, Herr Rottmann received a commission to paint the sites of historic cities in Greece. The views taken,- twenty-three in number, are now shown to much advantage in a Salle of the New Pinakothek. I have always deemed it a happy thoiight thus to enable the modern Athens of Germany to realize the surrounding landscape, the sky, and the local habitation, pertaining to the ancient arts she sought to revive. The same idea has been carried out in the new Museum, Berlin, and might with advantage be tried, at least experimentally, in otir British Museum. Thus the walls would 'give pictorial representations- of the sites on which the classic marbles were found. Rottmann was an artist fitted for his mission — he had a broad scenic way of squaring out his subject, he caught inspiration on the spot, he entered into the spirit of Nature in her most sunny mood, in light and colour he reflected Oriental radiance. The late Mr. Bridell fell under the spell of Rottmann. The two artists were in response with the poetic spirit of Nature. A change has of late, almost of necessity, come over landscape art, as may be seen by comparison of large ambitious compositions in the New Pinakothek with the more modest canvases exhibited now-a-days by Lier, Braith, Voltz, Munthe, G. Schonleber, Her, and other living men. The transition from high art to genre is found to be accompanied, not only in Germany, but in Italy, France, and even in England, by a corresponding transmu- tation in landscape-painting. The noble figures and the stately modes of composition habitual to high and historic art induce a kindred treatment of outward nature. Under such conditions, as exemplified in the two Poussins, landscape-painting assumes symmetric forms and almost architectonic proportions ; trees and rocks placed at measured intervals almost perform the part of figures, while in the sky rise mountains as in heroic action. But when Munich descended from high art to genre, she forsook the mountains and the glaciers for the lowly valleys and the tranquil streams — not necessarily that high art became low art — for the .lowly have' ofttimes the birthright of the skies — rather it was that nature was no longer held afar off as something too great and grand for daily food, but was brought near to the human heart at cottage doors. The change which has come over landscape in Munich may be compared with the altered style in poetry between the time of Milton and of Wordsworth. A like mutation occurs in painting between the dramatised nature of De Loutherbourg and the simple sylvan scenes of Gainsborough. Since writing the above I have gone carefully through the landscapes in the International Exhibition of 1879, and the conclusion is that Nature has been transferred to canvas in almost every possible manner. Then as to the choice of subject there is the utmost variety. The proximity of the Tyrol and of Switzerland gives preponderance to mountains which are said to exemplify nature in action and to stand as it were as dramatic characters on nature's stage. But as might be expected in a city set on a plateau, a fair proportion of landscapes is occupied by more or less horizontal plains and valleys which, in contrast with mountains tending to lines perpendicular, are supposed to represent nature when in repose and assuming the aspect of pastorals or idyls. And following out this line of thought Munich landscape-painters first ask themselves what shall be the 'motive' of any given picture, what is the idea or intention which the scene suggests, whether grave or gay, whether grand and commanding, or humble Munich. 49 and unassuming. This once determined, then all else besides is made subordinate, or serves as means to the one single end. It is further to be observed that in Munich landscapes are composed on the same fundamental rules as figure-pictures — mountains, rocks, trees, stand in fact in the place of animate beings, and they are accordingly disposed in geometric spaces or lines, such as circles, undulating curves, or triangles, and pyramids. So accurately calculated are these relations and proportions that sometimes a preHminary cartoon of the composition, with its attendant light and shade, is studiously prepared. It may be objected that this is a ponderous, passionless way of plodding through a picture. The French certainly have the habit of playing more lightly and glancing more furtively over the surface, but the Germans prefer solidity, and they choose the largest canvases to give to. the earth its wide circumference, and to every object standing thereon its centre of gravity. Examples in the International Exhibition may be quoted without end. A. Ditscheiner, when among the mountains, is content with little short of the scale of nature ; F. L. Hofelich fills another tremendous canvas with amazing power ; J. G. Steffan builds up a constructed composition of rocks, hills, trees, ^ and waterfall ; L. Willroider creates, according to strict law, which, however, does not exclude accident and incident, a grand scene, wherein lines, masses, light, shade, and colour, all conduce to the predetermined effect ; H. Heinlein is very large in the way of rocks and precipices ; R. Schultze and E. T. Compton are among the best in mountain regions. Extremes meet in Munich as elsewhere, and so there are painters who prefer moderate and even miniature dimensions. Theodore Her has a manner wholly unpretending, he winds his way unobtrusivel}^ and yet with a will of his own, among dells, cottages, fields, and woodlands, all quietly reposing in a half light. He marks out his subject carefully in outline, and his picture, though delibe- rately thought over, seems to have come to pass by happy chance. Another painter of kindred mind, Herr Lier, who studied several years in Paris, differs from the majority of his brethren in dwelling tranquilly among level lines ; the eye of his composition is placed on a low and distant horizon, and sometimes, as in a scene of ' evening twilight,' attention is drawn skywards, where perchance a flock of fleecy clouds, white as sheep in fields, or silvery as bright breakers . on a shore, wait windlessly in the zenith watching the sunset die. Another poet, Herr Schonleber, speaks with deep feeling, and passes, according to changing mood, from joy to sadness. A sandy, shingly bank, with boats, a silvery expanse of water, a sward of green grass, fishermen's cottages, the spire of a distant towh, all seen under a subdued light and unobtrusive colours, remind the spectator of the inimitable landscapes of Andreas Achenbach. The details, while sufficient, are treated with the largeness which seldom forsakes the Munich school, they are suggested by a brush used broadly and not with a finikin point. These pages are fortunate in possessing a plate Canal, Rotterdam, drawn and etched by Schonleber himself. A like characteristic picture from Dieppe I have just stood before "admiringly in the Munich International Exhibition. It abounds with the most paintable materials, such as old houses, wood -constructed, steep-roofed, and gable -pointed, dim in the shade of antiquity, looking down on a moat-like stream, crossed by a shaky timber plank. Nothing can be more artistic than the tduch and treatment. I have had the advantage of visiting Schonleber's studio ; two pictures were on the easel, one of Venice, bright and sunny, the other, a coast scene, quiet and in deep tone. The artist showed me the composition here published ; he is a true student and watches nature with a loving eye. I am happy to be able to introduce, as favourable examples of the Munich method of treating landscape, the Engotkn Alp, and the Ruins ef the Castle of Misocco, two illustrations from ' Switzerland, its Scenery and People,' published by Messrs. Blackie and Son, Glasgow. The painter is Mr. E. T, Compton, an artist who, though English by birth, has become through long training thoroughly imbued with the spirit of German art. He has had the good fortune of building himself a house and studio in the pretty hamlet of Feldafing, in Upper Bavaria, where he lives in the midst of the hills, the lakes, and the forests he delights to depict. I have seen from the windows and balconies of his dwelling pictures by the hand of nature, mountain glory O 50 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. and mountain gloom, panoramas of cloudland shadowed by the gathering storm. Mr. Compton's aim is to realize the poetry of mountain regions; he studies harmony of line, balance in compo- sition ; he seeks to convey the idea of space and magnitude, and to give the effect of form and colour under atmospheric conditions. Landscape art has, I feel convinced, an unexplored future in these directions. The International Exhibition of the Fine Arts, 1879, has induced me to take not an un- favourable view of the present phase of the Munich school. It is true that Kaulbach and others of the first and second generation are gone, but still remain at the zenith of their powers Makart, Lietzen-Mayer, Lindenschmit, Max, Gysis, Fluggen, Faber du Faux, Brandt, F. Adam, Wagner,' Defregger, Baisch, Braith, and others. It is impossible to speak without respect of the works of THE ENGOTLEN ALP. BY E. T. COMPTON. these established masters. It is scarcely an objection that they have little in common, that some romance with history, that others pledge, themselves unreservedly to realistic nature, because in so doing each is true to his individual calling, each tries to paint his best in his own way. The differences between these men lie more in the divergent line of subjects chosen than in dis- similarity in system. And thus it is found possible that a battle and a sheep-fold, a murder and matrimony, can be severally painted on like principles. And I think that even the transition from high art to low does riot wholly break the continuity, for however humble the theme the treatment remains subject to immutable laws of composition, light, shade, and colour. Moreover in the Munich school 'motive- has been, and still is, the ruling power, and whether the occasion be a patriot dying for his country, or an old woman peeling a potato, still the idea, of whatever order holds supremacy, and all accessories or details, all modes ol technique and of colour, become sub- • ordinate, and are but as means to a common and concerted end. And thus it comes to pass that Munich. 51 high and low, the real and the ideal, can issue from the portals of one academy as outcomings from the teachings of the same professors. I will run rapidly over some chief pictures which indicate the present condition of the Munich school. The first place is due to A Battle with the Tartars, by J. F. Brandt ; a fierce conflict after the manner of Sal vator Rosa, wherein European troops struggle for the rescue of Christian prisoners. If I wished to collect evidence to rebut the popular prejudices entertained against the Munich school, I should quote this picture, so far is it removed from the high-flown anjJ the dreamy, and so resolute is it in firm and unflinching transcript of facts just as they are. This artist, whose studio I visited ten years ago, has long been without rival ; he is equal to the French but in a different way. Of the same position is Franz Adam, the greatest battle-painter RUINS OF THE CASTLE OF MISOCCO. BY E. T. COMPTON. in Germany, and naturally enough he and others have found full occupation in signalizing the victories gained in the late war by the Germans over the French. The painter, as the soldier, takes firm grip of the enemy, and, like a commanding officer, he gives a clear account of the plan and the manoeuvres of the battle. He has himself joined in camps and followed armies. Director Filoty is not present in the International confluence, his latest composition honours the new Rathhaus here, but several of his illustrious followers give fresh proofs of their consoli- dated powers. Hans Makart, for some time past removed to Vienna, has been able to spare nothing but a portrait, yet, like our own Mr. Millais, he might say, ' My portraits are more than portraits ; I make them pictures.' His figure of a lady, life-size, stands out from the canvas as a queen ; his line and touch are firm as Vander Heist, his colour' in costume is decorative as Rubens or Veronese. Gabriel Max, as a native of Prague, will receive notice in the sequel, but he still lives in Munich and has been made Professor in the Academy. His conceptions are thrilling and sensational, morbid and melancholy ; his composition in the International Galleries 52 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. of an unnatural mother clasping in her arms her murdered infant .is eminently characteristic. Blood is on the handkerchief which conceals the fatal wound in the head ; the picture is deep in tone and darkly shadowed, as befits the harrowing scene. I have recently visited the studio of Gabriel Max ; the painter must surely dwell in a chamber of horrors, he would appear to walk hospitals and narrowly watch, as in his picture of the Anatomist, which is still on his easel, the dead bodies brought into dissecting-rooms. His art hovers betwixt life and the grave; his heads, like the face of Guido's Cenci, are touched with the presentiment of approaching doom ; and the sculpturesque stillness and petrifaction of his forms, with the ghastly pallor of his colour, strike the spectator as with a Medusa spell. The studio seems possessed by nightmare : on canvases, with faces turned to the wall, are phantoms which float as persistently as malaria in dank solitudes. It must be confessed that such visions when once seen haunt the mind abidingly. Other living painters call for passing notice. Munich has become the centre of many nationalities: Hungarians, Bohemians, Tyrolese, Poles, and Greeks, all gather round her school. Among resident Greek artists, of whom I know three, N, Gysis holds first rank. When he came from Athens some years since he spoke no language but modern Greek ; he has since been trained into a skilled painter, and is known in London, Paris, and, indeed, throughout Europe. His studio is stored with Greek costumes and other useful properties to an artist, and on the walls are seen studies of children and grown-up men and women, made in Athens. Women and children there are endowed with rare beauty, and Gysis wisely adopts the type of his country people. He is himself dark, agile, and fiery ; and for his profession he shows that enthusiasm which I have observed alike among Hungarians, Bohemians, and Poles — a youthful ardour and enterprise, as if the arts' were wholly fresh territories, offering illimitable prospects and bright rewards. Gysis in coming to Europe brought with him as his inheritance an Oriental colour : his flesh tones, as seen in sketches irl his studio, and in two important compositions in the International Galleries, are sometimes golden, often coppery, but never pearly or silvery. A. Lietzen-Mayer, a Hungarian, is also Oriental in warmth of colour, and especially in fervour and f(^rtility of imagihation ; he himself niiglit almost have stepped from a canvas of Paul Veronese ; he reminds me of our Royal Academician Mr. Calderon ; southern or eastern blood inflames his imagination. The International Exhibition shows thirty- two cartoons illustrative of Schiller's ' Song of the Bell,' which Lietzen-Mayer has just completed in sequel to the Faust Series — the style may be judged from the two woodcuts from the latter in this chapter. The artist holds himself aloof from German severity, and plunges passionately into the romance which now sways the Munich school. W. Lindenschmit, who also is a leader in the party of romance, and a Professor in the Academy, has still in his studio, which bears signs of abundant work, the large compositions that failed to be in time for the Exhibition. He here succeeds in endowing the old story of Prometheus with renewed life and vigour. O. Faber du Faux is eminently creative, florid, -and romantic. His spacious studio tells of the masters who have formed his style. He has made studies of composition and of colour from Tintoret's Miracle of St. Mark, from Delacroix's Dante on the Lake, and from Gdricault's Shipwreck. Accordingly the pictures he sends to the International Exhibition — Wandering Arabs z.x\6l ih& Sale of Joseph — burn with colours that seem to burst into fire on the canvas. The artist is preparing himself for the subject of Mazeppa. He is one of the many who have penetrated the wild regions of the Lower Danube ; his studio is rife with sketches of untamed horses, and on the easel stands a careful study of Mazeppa bound to a fiery steed that has spent its strength and fallen on the ground. The inventive and creative faculty, which in Munich just now is in full swing, has gone far a-field into regions new to gather fresh materials, and thus old themes are brought out rehabilitated. A. Wagner always goes a-head at the top of his speed. As an artist he is as furious in painting as his namesake the musician is in the opera. The Spanish Post at Toledo, drawn by wild steeds, dashes headlong, and, like a screaming chorus, ends in climax and catastrophe. In Bavaria the painting of animals is practised persistently, but hitherto no artist has Munich. 53 proved so high in vocation as Landseer in England, or Rosa Bonheur in France. Yet if size were a measure of quality, none could compete with a German. On one wall of the International Exhibition is seen a dish of asparagus nearly double the length and thickness of the largest ever grown, and in another room is a flock of sheep and a herd of cattle of a bodily bulk that can scarcely obtain entrance through the doorway. But, as may be well imagined, the best pictures are of moderate size ; and there are not wanting competent artists, such as L. Voltz, A. Braith, and H. Baisch, who fear not to compete with Paul Potter and Carl du Jardin. Horses, in a kingdom that has taken a not inconspicuous part in European wars, have almost of necessity found a place on canvas, and accordingly renowned battle-painters, like. Peter Hess, Franz Adam, and J. .Brandt, have in cavalry regiments brought horses into action. Equestrian portraits, occasionally over life-size, also command a position in the Exhibition. An etching published in these pages evinces the study which Munich artists have long given to the most sagacious of animals. The White Horse, by L. Hartmann, is a gem in its way. It.has delicacy and brilliance in touch ; and the distribution of light and shade, and such accessories as the grassy bank, the overgrowth of trees, and the clouded sky, show a fitness and a relation of parts to the whole for which the artist has obtained much credit. L. Hartmann gains honours for this sort of work ; and in the International Exhibition, 1879, he takes a place on the line as a painter in oil. In this pleasing composition, horses, a waggon with attendant figures, are gathered round the door of a village inn. The picture is not strong, but it is careful, and the incidents are strung together with a skill worthy of Wouvermanns and his White Horse. The frontispiece to this volume, ' The Visit,' is engraved from a picture by Franz Defregger, an artist born in the Tyrol, and now a Professor in the Munich Academy. Some biographical notices have associated Defregger with Botzen, a picturesque town, wherein, at the weekly markets and annual fairs, gather into groups peasants in costumes most inviting to the amateur sketcher and the painter of gejtre. The past and the present condition of the arts in the Tyrol presents some interesting and curious aspects on which it might be instructive to dwell did space permit. On the walls of an old castle near Botzen are frescoes probably of the fifteenth century, taken from the romance of the ' Niebelungen Lied ' and the story of ' Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.' And in the districts about Amergau the pilgrims to the ' Passion Play ' are greeted by sacred compositions emblazoned on the fronts of the houses, taken from the Life of Christ and the Legends of Saints. This wayfaring art, displayed often in painted chapels by the roadside, doubtless comes across the borders from Italy. And it has been thought that in the Tyrol, as in Italy, these 'rude efforts among the peasantry lead to something better, and induce the successful painter of the village to improve his talents in the nearest academy. In some such manner may the numerous works which, from time to time, find their way from the Tyrol to the walls of exhibitions be accounted for. During the middle of last century a Tyrolese artist came to Munich and painted an imposing composition on a church vault after a manner not wholly unworthy of Guido or of the Carracci. And yet I have found the works by native artists in the Gallery of Innspruck for the most part poor in character. Among two or three favourable exceptions, Franz Defregger stands conspicuous. I recall in the collection a very creditable composition, the subject taken from a familiar local incident — a prize gained by a boy in a shooting-match. The treatment is broad, the manipulation vigorous. Defregger is a product of the Munich School on its naturalistic side :' he ranks among the followers of Piloty. Had it not been for this training, he might never ha,ve risen out of the uncultured modes into which he was born. Mountain-lands such as the Tyrol and Scandinavia, where the battle of life is often hard, and where the straits of poverty are pressing, and territories otherwise cut off from close contact with the centres of civilisation, are usually late to throw aside forms of utility ; and art, when it comes at last, is wholly simple and elementary. Defregger, who has made the best of his surroundings, owes much to common sense : he does not ambitiously aim at a goal beyond his reach, but lays firm P 54 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany, hold on what is near to hand and within ready grasp. Some of his countrymen have made shipwreck among the wild ravings of high art; but Defregger ever remains safe and sound in preserving the even tenour of his way in the midst of peasants and honest citizens, whose daily duties lie within the circuit of home and country. The Visit here chosen as an illustration will convey to the reader an idea of the painter's range. A neat cottage interior, a buxom mother, a well-to-do father, a bonny baby in arms, a cradle on the floor, a couple of peasants in picturesque costume, come to ofi"er congratulations and gifts, constitute pictorial properties served up oft and again. I have found the painter holding honourable position in successive international exhibitions. In Munich, in 1869, he was represented by a boar-hunt: in Vienna, in 1873, were several characteristic subjects — Peasants Dancing, Horses Racing, and Mendicants Singing. These several compositions shared much in common with the works of the Swedish Fagerlin, and of the Scottish Faed and Nicol. Again, it is interesting to see how the products of mountain- lands, though divided by distance, are allied, in kind. The pictorial art of the cottage and of the peasant is akin, whether the painter be Scotch, Scandinavian, or Tyrolese. The Munich International Exhibition, 1879, has defined more clearly Defregger's limits. Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese patriot, taking the last farewell of his comrades before execution, proves that historic art lies above the painter's reach. The picture is essentially genre only on the scale of life; But Defregger regains his native element when he depicts a village hero welcomed home by ■ comrades and countrymen. The scene is laid in a rural town lying among hills : snowy mountains look down upon the street, in which is collected a concourse of men, women, and children, come with enthusiastic greetings. The hero of the day is a typical study. He is beaten by weather and worn- by hard service : he bears a sword and pistol in the cause of law and liberty. Fortune made him a soldier, yet chance might have found him a chamois hunter, a mountain guide, or possibly a bandit. The ■handling of the picture is in keeping with the subject : a finesse suited to a carpet-knight would have been wholly out of place. The brush and the pallet have here played the part of instruments that do direct and downright work ; indeed, a more honest, sober, and thorough- going painter, who tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth, I do not know anywhere. Defregger's studio in Munich is as a summer-house set in the midst of trees and gardens. It . is a quiet retreat, removed from the noise of city life. The walls are furnished with tapestries, cabinets, and sketches for pictures ; and a separate room is set apart for Tyrolese hats, of which there are at least fifty specimens ; also there are large supplies of coats, waistcoats, leggings, petticoats, girdles, together with a family cradle. Another illustration to these pages, a woodcut of an Alpine subject, the Edelweiss Gatherers, comes from the Tyrol. However the painter, Mathias Schmid, is like Franz Defregger, by birth an Austrian subject, but by art-training he has transferred his allegiance to Bavaria. Here in Munich may be seen worn in hats and in button-holes the much-prized flower of the Edelweiss, which the Tyrolese gather from perilous heights, and offer for sale to travellers at inns and railway stations. The painter has out of such simple materials evoked a picture which, as habitual with Munich genre, owes much of its charm to the free flow of the lines and the balance of the constituent parts. Mathias Schmid is pleasingly present in the International Exhibition of 1879 by picturesque peasants just after betrothal. The picture, by its realism, texture, and colour, exemplifies the prevailing phase of the Munich school. Like his countryman, Defregger, he has built himself a delightful studio ; from the balconies and windows he looks upon his own bowery . garden and towards the mountains of his native land, and though his surroundings preserve a simplicity which best accords with his tastes, yet almost within reach of his easel he is provided with an electric bell, and even with a telephone ! German painters make strenuous efforts to exhaust creation ; art in Munich has long striven to take possession of the entire domain of nature, and yet in certain departments Munich. 55 the International Exhibition of 1879 shows, as might be anticipated, all but total vacuity. For example, religious art is nearly extinct, the probable cause being that the people have had too much of it. Then, again, there is scarcely a marine picture upon the walls ; but the reason of such negation is obvious : Germany is all but denied a sea-coast ; she was 'i:fik f-^7r If ,*- Af .— '-»^ I i .-^^ THE EDELWEISS GATHERERS. BY M. SCHMID. long without a navy ; and here, in Munich, no salt-water fish is served at table save such as comes all the way from Trieste. That England has possessed before and after Stanfield able marine painters is due to the fact that the untoward conditions of Germany are reversed in her favour. Then another disability, or disinclination, under which Germans labour, is in the painting of the nude figure ; of their art it may be said that, like that of the old 56 The Schools of Modenn Art in Germany. ■ Teutonic-painters, : it ,is .draped,- dark, 'decent ,tln 'the*Internatidflar,Galleries," the' French, th£fRassians,.and;.even,;EngJ\sh'iAQadgmicians,^a^e/foUnd'tb,^paint the undraped, 'female:. figure Iife-size,-:but; the, Germans "prefer. textile-fabrics to :theLwarm tissues, 'of .flesh. ;' Draperies! are thpir delight, ,and; sometimes, iri. the ;.way of . historic :genre , they.; give, to - old^. costumes., pleasing and instructive ^^significance. In this deparment, J. Fluggen, an artist of persuasive charm, as may be 'judged by" the composition selected s for this- chapter, deserves further notice by a well-studied picture in the International Collection, ten feet long, and with nurrierous figures half life-size. The subject chosen, the Baptism of Maximilian /., enables the painter to carry the mind back to a famed historic epoch," and the noble church interior, and the stately " personages assembled,. bespea,k' a cerernony of national ^import.,- ; Some of the groups have great beauty, and the sombre, shadowy colour recalls that of mediseval^loving Leys. Munich artists do wefr to-, turn aside' from the Italian decadence, and the. German modernism and to betake theniselyes to the earlier and more earnest manner of Wohlgeniuth ' and Diirer. It is pleasant to see the congenial surroundings that Fl^iiggen has brought > together in his painting-room ; it is jalways a good J^ sign, when a master can make his studio responsive to his art. The visitor enters a museum 'of antiquities ; one cabinet is stored'. with curiosities, among which to be remembered are a leather purse two hundred and a pair of shoes three hundred years old. A wardrobe- is, hung with mediaeval costumes, and a handsome old ceramic stove, with sacred subjects and a multitude of figures in relief, . bears the date' of the seventeenth century. Another ^artist, A. Seifert, under the suggestive title the Minnesdnger, pleasingly transports the imagination into , regions of romance. M. Gaisser, ; too, in' the Improyisatore, takes the mind away from the every-day walks' of life and warms into passion- and fires, into colour. Neither must be forgotten" an imposing composition, rising to the rank of historic ■ romance, Alaric, as Conqueror, reposingin Athens, by Thiersch, Professor in . the Academy. W. Diez, also.a Professor, turns his canvases, in which horses take a leading part, -to^. the display of technique. L.LofTtz, already mentioned as a favourite master in the Academy, shows in the International Galleries' a solid, well - matured manner, in an attjactive' .composition,- a miser money-changer, which in texture and type recall Denner and Quintin Matsys. Here are three . Professors .who; if not of distinguished genius, give guarantees that the teaching in the Academy remains'^ in drawing, composition, and technique. sound and efficient. A few more names deserve to be held in remembrance. Edward KurZbauer, who died in Mumch,' January 1879, worked unnoticed till \A% Story Tellerjgam.e6. him admission to Piloty's school. * Three years later Overtaken Elopers founded a wider fame, and then followed a number ol genre pictures, ^mong which may be mentioned a .touching scene, the House of Grief. These works.gavejhim a fpremost rank in subjects of .chara,cter, humour, and pathos ; and his natural and una'ffecjted manner placed him by the side of his friend, Franz Defregger. To enumerate all the^ paintings oi genre were a hopeless task ; of the making of such' pictures there is no end, and ^ ?|^^". wonder where, they can find a' final • resting-place ; the competitors are so numerous as to standin one another's. way. Christ, in the Temple, hy K Zimmermann, notwithstanding its subject and^size, is but, naturalistic, ^ot^^. Oliver Cromwell^ Dissolving the Long Parliament is little more than, historic costume. The Giving ^ofAlms to the Poor, however, by A; BodenmuUer, makes 'an impression , by its pathos ; also ' sympathy is moved by Pestalozzi in. the midst of School-children;-sivMng\y depicted by C. Grob ;' likewise one' of the'be^t.of 'its kind is the Cloister School, by R. S. Zimmermann.,^ The artist is, not far behind our.own Webster and Wilkie. Amazinglytrenchanl is a winter snow-scene by.H. Schlitt, with a murdefed man on the ground, and^the.handcuffed murderer struck. niqtiptiless when brDuglit. to-, witness his own deed. Much ^tt.^ntip? ■has.also,been,attracted;towards,:a:'pleasm^^ scene by A. Eberle: an ^^"ItmgTOVth-is. greeted warmly as ,he -brings .^lome the; fir.sf.roebivqkc he has shot. Such incidents are^frequent in, country districts^aboundiiig with' dee.r. /in Munich, where the law of reaction has, in^more ways than; one, -been: in^ violent operation ■_within..the_1ast-.ten years, a class of artists o p Munich. ^ 7 revolting against largest dimensions have rushed into the opposite extreme. C. Seiler and A. Seitz are among those who rival the small Dutchmen. A chief dealer the other day was in great glee at havmg acquired one of these little gems: he exclaimed, 'It is equal to Meissonier!' but he did not add that the price was comparatively insignificant. In the International Exhibition the long list of the painters of respectable ^^r^ was swelled by the following names, few, if any, of which. It is to be feared, are known in England :— P. W. Keller, Schulze, Spitzer, Vollmar, Gabl, Meisel, and Laupheimer. A first place rather than the last is due to the renowned portrait-painter, F. Lenbach : his heads of Bismarck and Moltke have been looked upon with admiration and amazement ; such concentrated intellect and will as here depicted with singular simplicity and power may well govern the world. A visit to studios is always of interest, from the insight obtained into the personality of contemporary art. In Munich painters and sculptors for the most part give themselves ample territory, space being superabounding in this rambling and widely-distended city. The doors of painting-rooms often open pleasantly from a garden— somewhat of a wilderness of tangled creepers and crowded weeds, flowers, and vegetables. A vine supports the lintel of the door or looks in at the window, and the sun glancing across the floor reveals an interior which might have attracted the eye of De Hooghe or of Teniers. The studio is often in negligent disorder ; on tables, walls, and even on the ground, lie scattered sketches, scraps, jottings, and half-finished pictures ; while pedestals and niches are occupied by plaster casts, terra-cottas, or bronzes. A lay figure with distended arms, as of a windmill, raises its gaunt anatomy in the corner, and a dog and a cat are comfortably reposing near the stove. The artist receives his guests with a ponderous politeness truly German. Simplicity used to preside over the conception and growth of the painter's compositions : the studios of Kaulbach and of Piloty, though ample in size, were in decoration plain ; they served more for utility and hard work than for ostentation or indulgence. But with the increasing luxury which is creeping into German homes, studios are becoming more ornate. A local phase of Orientalism reflected from Venice has of late years come over the Munich school, and accordingly studios are clothed in colour, and otherwise made consonant with a life of aesthetic enjoyment. Also recent affinities to morbid sensibility and sensationalism find response within the painting-room. The mental conditions may not be wholly healthy, accordingly the study of anatomy and of vital functions is made from the side of pathology rather than of physiology, from a subject under disease rather than in health. It has even been surmised that ' Burkites ' or ' Resurrectionists,' once in the service of schools of anatomy in England, bring from death-beds and sepulchres subjects suited to spasmodic and sensational art. The public display made in the Munich cemetery of bodies after death and before burial is likely to harden the finer sensibilities. I remember seeing placed on view a heart-rending group — a mother and her infant : — the mother, in the full flush, of youth and beauty, had died suddenly in childbirth. In England the super-sensuous art of Fuseli and of Blake was fed chiefly from the imagination, but in Germany, under dominant realism, the subject must be laid out bodily. Of late years the products of the Munich school have been pretty widely diffused throughout Europe. It is obvious that, so long as her artists painted on walls, their works must have remained fixed to the freehold just wherever it happened to stand, and the inquiring public were compelled to come to the pictures, inasmuch as the pictures could not travel to them. But with the renunciation of monumental art all is changed ; easel-paintings as distinguished from wall-paintings are itinerant, and, accordingly, not an international, and scarc^y even a private exhibition, is held in Paris, London, or Vienna, in which Bavarian art does not take a part worthy of the position of the kingdom in the political history and the geographic map of Europe. The pictures produced in Munich at the present moment, when brought into competition with those of other countries, show a fault to which the antecedents do but naturally lead. The magnitude of scale is apt to be out of all proportion to the subject. A school which measures itself with Michael Angelo has a difficulty in Q 58 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. dwarfing itself to the limits of Meissonier. It has been said that Michael Angelo could carve a figure on a cherry-stone, but this is just what a Munich artist cannot do. The objection I venture to raise as to scale might apply to general treatment — to the lighting of a picture, for example. Munich men like to usher in their subjects with a dazzling flash, as if portentous of a miracle, but on approach to the canvas the spectator may find nothing more than an old woman mending a stocking. If a hackneyed proverb can be pardoned, ' Le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle.' These genre painters might find the lesson they need before Sir David Wilkie's composition, the Reading of the Will, which undoubtedly is the best picture of its kind in the New Pinakothek. Notwithstanding these strictures, I incline to think favourably of the future of genre painting in Munich ; it is sound in its technique, and it is even superabounding in knowledge. That it descends from a higher sphere ought not to be wholly to its disadvantage. And if I may be allowed to put the matter in a merely commercial point of view, I should say that by no people can good work be turned out of hand at a more moderate cost than by simple-living Germans. The number of artists resident in the Bavarian capital is, in round figures, said to be one thousand, and I found in an International Exhibition held in the city, that as many as seventy might be deemed worthy of notice in our English journals. Count Razynski, writing forty years ago, is more liberal in his percentage of celebrities, for in his lists he names sixty-two historic painters, eight battle-painters, eighteen painters of interiors and architecture, seventy-four landscape-painters, forty-five painters of genre, and twenty-seven sculptors. Present tendencies have, of course, altered these relative proportions ; genre painters now out- number all others, while historic artists are gradually dying out from want of the means of earning a living. The Munich school under Cornelius commenced with unity, it has now reached variety. With utmost impartiality it depicts a pothouse as well as a palace, a village festival as willingly as a f^te to the Madonna. The dream — call it the delirium — of former years has passed into the light of common day. But all is not gone : a great example has been set — the good done lasts, the ill may readily be forgiven. Something more remains than memories and vain regrets : walls of palaces and of churches tell to coming time that in an age avowedly material art could live for an idea. 59 CHAPTER v.— DiJSSELDORF. DUSSELDORF is well situated geographically as a centre of art. It is placed on the Rhine, a river which from earliest times has been for Germany the great artery for commerce and civilisation. It is within easy reach of such olden cities as Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, and Hildesheim, and its northern position has in recent days made it the training- school for the kingdoms of Scandinavia. Now more than ever it is made of easy access from all sides by a network of railways, and accordingly the Dusseldorf school, in the midst of the Rhenish provinces of Prussia, has assumed a cosmopolitan character. All nationalities con- gregate and work together. I have there met, not only pupils from adjacent and distant provinces in Germany, but also students from Copenhagen, Christiania, and Stockholm, as well as from England and America. In the sequel it will be seen that the art products are, as the component personalities, many-sided. The natural scenery in the midst of which Dusseldorf has been planted is not inspiring to high or sacred art. A few years ago I made notes on the road with the purpose of seeing whether the outward landscape could have led up to the imaginative height, the spiritual exaltation, which have been identified with the school. The banks of the Rhine about Cologne become so uninteresting that travellers mostly leave the boat at Bonn, and the river in passing onwards to the sea traverses a broad alluvial deposit as level as the pasture-lands of Holland. On leaving Cologne by rail for Dusseldorf I found the country flat, yet fertile. It was the middle of June ; crops lay heavy on the ground, and the corn was already golden. The hay was being gathered in, and the carts were attended by highly coloured figures ; the women in red petticoats and white sleeves — not uncongenial subjects, it must be confessed, for the naturalistic art of present days. The whole plain was highly tinted and richly carpeted : for the most part it lay in pasturage, yet among alluvial crops I reckoned up potatoes, beans, flax, lupins in golden yellow flower, and wide tracts of corn intermingled with red poppies. The sweep of the country had the wide circuit of a continent, broken here and there by a hedge or a clump of trees, a hamlet, a village spire, or low distant hills. The prevailing and somewhat monotonous • horizontal line was relieved by rows of monumental poplars, with the feathery acacias decorating the plebeian landscape. Then the scene would change into pretty pastorals, willows of grey green leaves shadowing the streams, green tracts grazed by sheep, and ponds of water wherein cattle cooled their feet in the heat of day. Evidently the land of Paul Potter lies near on the other side of the frontier. The signs of habitation are not enticing to the sketcher, and yet the artist's eye may be attracted by a windmill on a common or a brick-kiln in the midst of clay. Stone is scarce, and courses of ornamental bricks, which in these districts assume the importance of terra-cottas, ornament the houses in country and in town. The steep red roofs tell in fine contrast with the bright greens of midsummer ; but the trees are stunted and insig- nificant — nowhere do they rise to forest growth. The whole land, in fact, is for industry, and not for art : such a territory few sketchers would choose for a summer holiday, and yet, strangely enough, here the school of Diisseldorf has grown and flourished long. But, perhaps, no people have keener longing for the mountains than the dwellers in the plains. Certainly the landscape- painters of Dusseldorf rush away in summer time to the grandest scenery in Germany and Scandinavia, while the spiritual side of the school may trust to the inward light, and to occasional communion in distant cities with Era Angelico and Perugino. The Christian phase of modern German art, finding its chief seat in Dusseldorf, claims more 6o The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. consideration than space will allow. It may be well to remember that this spiritual school took its rise in Rome between the years 1810 and 1820, under the inspiration of Overbeck, and that it sprang into the world as a revival or new bifth of early Christian art as represented by Fra Angelico, Gentile da Fabriano, Perugino, and Pinturicchio. This great movement became specially patent in Diisseldorf when Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow, one of the sacred brotherhood, was chosen Director of the Academy. It may be interesting for a moment to glance at the philosophy which at this time underlaid the teaching of art professors. Referring to German writ'ersfj- find that the pictorial style stands in close relation to ' the-subjective philosophy,' the 'idet 'of i'Plato serving as' the gerrnTwhence spHng'the local metaphysics and.thfelcpntemporary art alike.* The' mystic philosophy, too, of the Port Royalists'; .'a ''body known "for ardour and devotion, rriadte. itself' felt- in the' new school. I ailsp, see reciprocity qf- feeling 'betWiCen spiritual painters ofthe^periyd and- tliat spiritual yet rationalisti(5 mystic' Jacob Bohm. / : Tf will be''' easily ■ {jnderstobd ■' how ■ the religious 'and '^ quiescent school of Diisseldorf corresponds ' to .sp'iritual quietism' iri religion. By the .preponderarfce of v faculties specially concerned' in' the 'spiritual life, bvan abstraction ''from,, thfe-^otitfer-. world and -an- introversion of the ►thoughts 'upon -'consciousness,' a hufehed' quietism, is- -iifduced '.which-'allays the wilder tumult of body and mind.- The '' gros's'er senses^'-and. functions =are deem^^diJ^an-, impediment to the soul's free* a'ctiori ■: matter is despised ''as unwOiithy' .of 'allegiance with ^spirit ; and hence man's physical form, no' longer rev'erea as • a temple, is"- reviled 'a-s a prison-h6,use wherein the grating "of. the iro'n doors is heard; ' -Emancipation'' has been • accordingly -sdught in the mortifica'tion of the fleshi.'' The body subjecteH to cas^igation, attenuated by;fasti.ng, is brought down'as it -were' to'a shado-w, through wlaich the mind's 'eye may.more clearly gaze. It kneels in prayer, it waits in vigirs,-it waits' even in life: dh. death. ;The' bodily functions thu| suspended, the turmo^il of passion thus laid to -rest, the rnind reduced' toa state->of repose andjexpectancy, communes 'inwardly on' self^- looks into 'the spirir-'wo'rld, 'and 'already seeEns;tp dwell in heaven its Korne. Of this reclusive state were -the solitary hermits ■dwelling ,in dens', and-, caves of the earth,'seeking"in'th'e'desert a refuge ffoimf the' world.- ,- Of' this rapt-.abstractedness was many a medrseval monk 'walking-' in cloister" shelter or ' singing in choral-* sanctity. ^ Drawing nearer to our own times'come' as before said; the holy- and mystic inmates'.of 'Port Royal jfand scarcely of less'- significance* stand these- Gernia'n artists, with'-Overbetk' at^- their head, duelling apart and" ifi' their hushed ''minds'*seeking the heavenly .voice — striyiiifg.-to ; translate .'Jftto pictorial forms ■the' steadfastness of- their faith and the ardoin- of their- worship.. .-•■» r -. > It -will be easily conceived that 'an art of 'so. reclusive an origin adrnits of tub Jittle variety, that its 'character is 'found to be 'alrriost identical, whether .we enter the. studio of .©verbeck in Rom'e, the churches of Hess in 'Munich, the churches a.nA> ateliers of Diisseldorf,^ 'dr the Rhine chape'l'a't'Reinagen.'- For general descriptionitius 'of little moment. 'whether -we take Overbeck's New Testarfient or the "Diisseldorf religious 'publications. 'They are alike in purity of design, in well-balinced -symifietry, and in unbroken '^unison of motive.' * In -all .such compositions the Apo'stles "and the Saints are'in'-as'pect'gentle, steadfast, and, enduring ; and it may be accounted a merit that- they' contemplate' hea-venly beatitudes 'so fixedly- as to becoriie lost to .the realities of a'/lo-wer sphere. Th-eir -^ faith, -irldeed, rnay"rdmoYe. mountains, but they ,them;selves stand motionless and powerless'; as if. the world had. ne'ed nbt^ of their energy but only, of -their tranquil meditation. 'Hands which once toiled on the stormy.Galilean sea are no-w plasped., in worship. From h-iirhari' nafiire as thus depicted la\vless j5assi6ns' are- already exorcised : the; wide world is tranquil' aS the narrow cloister ;' the .drarrra'bf ;life.,-the intenSify^ran.d tragedy^'of its action, with.^tKe' flaws" and -thie frailt-ie's of. individual;rcharacter, ;are ■oniitted--br'-misc.bnreived. It is the passive not the active virtues that the Christian art of Modern Germany illustrates. The figures are expectant, as if looking for a revelation : nature herself waits in suspense, as if. in the presence of the supernatural. All has undergone the new birth, the taint of original sin is cast out, and the bodily form becomes instinct with heavenly harmonies. Even the' very drapery, no longer tossed by the tempest of the rude world, lies in well-ordered folds, the Dusseldorf. 6 1 emblem of peace. This transcendent art culminates in two personalities ; Christ as the divine manhood, and the Madonna as the divine womanhood. But no German painter has yet reached the pure types of Leonardo da Vinci in the Last Supper, or of Raphael in the Madonna de San Sisto. Yet these purist artists have clothed woman in surpassing gentleness and beauty. Look at Overbeck's Wise Virgins going forth to meet the Bridegroom : fleeting are they in form as their flickering lamps, shadowy as the silvery moonlight. Look, likewise, at the holy women who follow Christ to Calvary : they are too sensitive for so great a sorrow ; they swoon to the earth, and dissolve in tears : they tremble as a reed and fade as a flower, while the coming storm bends their heads. This school of Christian art has also a vocation in the way of angels. The Holy Family, throughout its earthly pilgrimage, is depicted as resting under the guardianship of Heaven. Angels watch over the Nativity ; angels kneeling on the river's brink attend the Baptism; an angel brings comfort in the Agony of the Garden ; an angel with flaming sword guards the tomb of the risen Christ, and angels among clouds of heaven hail the entrance into glory.. In short, the doctrine of angels obtains exhaustive illustration through modern German masters. But it can scarcely be too often repeated that these supersensuous artists pay the necessary penalty of wandering from the paths of nature. It is laid, as before said, to the charge of Overbeck and his disciples, that, complacently content with their own conceptions, they have ceased to employ in their studios the living model. It is told even of Cornelius that he taught that high monumental painting need not be subservient to individual nature. The idea seems to be that the grand style when once formed proves self-sustaining. But the truth is, that every manner, when uncorrected by appeal to nature, degenerates into mannerism, and the schools of Cornelius and Overbeck paid the penalty accordingly and died out. This fatal issue is specially felt in Dusseldorf, the birthplace of Cornelius and the seat of the religious school. On the other hand, it is here found that artists who have laid a firm hold on nature, such as Lessing and Bendemann, bid fair to transmit their principles and practices to future generations. Peter Janssen and Friederich Geselschap, pupils of Bendemann, justify this hope. The creations of the non-naturalists, on the contrary, contain from their very birth the germs of decay. Pictorial saints are disfigured by bodily infirmities which studied draperies barely disguise ; the limbs are loosely held together, and life seems ebbing from the extremities, leaving palsied hands devoid of action, and trembling feet incapable of motion. Can it be wondered, then, that every individual figure looks as if it were the dying-out of the species? Let us, however, not forget that the artist above most men has a claim to inspiration ; only it should come not second-hand, or by old and choked-up channels, but through the floodgates of the soul. The language of such inspiration ever accords with the voice of nature. And these voices still speak in Germany, and year by year, as one generation follows another, fresh tongues and dialects are heard echoing the common and universal language. The voices vary with the times, and as to pictorial spiritualism, it is to be observed that this peculiar phase prevailed at a period when Germany was denied practical and political action ; but now, when the Fatherland is aroused to liberty and life, art exchanges repose and contemplation, with attendant stagnation and debility, for vitality and vigour. The causes which have preyed upon the physical structure of this cloistered art pervert its intellectual state. The thoughts, instead of ranging healthfully through the wide circuit of mental phenomena, are narrowly centred on morbid phases of eccentricity. The moody hauntings of some cherished idea, prowl through the solitary avenues of the mind, till darkness comes in nightmare ravings or day -dawns On outwatched .intellect. Thus, , distorted visions of a distempered imagination, which waking hours might fitly dispel, are nurtured in the brooding consciousness, till at length the artist searches for pictures less in the outer world than among the discoloured phantoms of fancy. Painters of this ultra school seek not so much what nature has physically fashioned as what the intellect may abstractedly • conceive. The task to be worked out is not how best to inform the visible realities of life with soul-like R 62 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. expression, but, commencing — as the origin and essence of all art — with the immaterial ideas of the mind itself, the bodily structure and the pictorial form come but as secondary and subordinate considerations. Hence in this modern school the shadowy frailty of the outer garb, the loosely putting on for the occasion of the mortal coil, as if it were just as carelessly to be cast off when the passing purpose was accomplished. Humanity, indeed, is sometimes presented in so emaciated a fashion that the ribs of death show through the mask of life, the anatomy of mind is pronounced in the skeleton of the body, and hectic passion rapks the tortured tenement of clay. Hence the study of such pictorial characters is as a course of morbid metaphysics, answering in the sphere of mind to the walking of a hospital, wherein may be noted the inroad of disease, the pallor or the agony of dissolution. These pictorial characters stand in need of invigorating regime; they want healthful exercise; the stricken limbs were all the better for a morning walk ; the drooping wings might with advantage take a constitutional flight among the stars. The angels at Overbeck's Nativity require change of scene and a bracing atmosphere ; while the spirits that haunt Klein's designs are as pillars of salt or hard figures in pasteboard, too far gone to come within the reach of treatment or recovery. Many, indeed, of the biblical or legendary illustrations issued at Diisseldorf, for the consolation of the faithful, are replete with saints ready for an asylum. Each character' is, indeed, so one-sided and partial as to overstep the boundaries of nature. The Virgin is so humble and meek that little remains to sustain the attributes of womanhood ; St. Joseph at disconsolate distance stands, an old, forsaken man, scarcely worthy to look on while the Magi present their gifts. Some biblical illustrations, in fact, intended for the higher phases of faith, in striving for utmost reverence scarcely escape absurdity. Such excesses are the more to be deplored because they bring disrepute on a good cause. The spirit of the age leads in an opposite direction, and at all events the modern artist cannot, without prejudice, throw himself back to the dark centuries, cannot violate natural laws under the plea of revealing truths supernatural. In the present state of science he is bound to educe man's highest spiritual good and beauty from the most perfect physical conditions, to balance in just relation laws organic and mental, to show the sane mind as an issue from the healthful body, and to establish the truth that to observe the physical is to advance the spiritual. Such I conceive to be the only basis on which a Christian art in this day can stand secure or accomplish a good work. I am tempted to say a word on the relation which I conceive exists between the spiritual phases of German art and the teachings of Swedenborg. The doctrine of ' Correspondence,' when cleared of cloudy circumlocution, serves as a clue to the act of art creation. So • far as it relates to man, it may be stated in the following terms : — Man as to his lower estate is a body, as to his higher a soul ; by the one he belongs to the natural world, by the other to the spiritual world, and the relations between the two constitute what is aptly called 'Correspondence.' Conditions internal belong to the invisible spirit, states external inhere to the outward senses ; thus each man as to his body is a portion of the natural world while as to his spirit he belongs to the supersensuous or supernatural world, and the inherent relations between the two constitute their ' Correspondence.' On this basis may be supposed to rest the spiritual manifestations of art, whether Christian or otherwise. Goethe has traversed the same line of thought when speaking of the ' Macrocosm,' or the World of Nature, and of the ' Microcosm,' or the World of Man ; the idea being that the little world of Man is an epitome of the great world of Nature. The inward spirit projecting itself to the outward circumference of the body avowedly finds the most direct and explicit expression in the human countenance ; ' in the face,' says Swedenborg, ' all the affections of the mind present themselves visibly in a natural form as in their type; hence the face is called the index of the mind.' In like manner the whole frame-work shadows forth the indwelling being. Sir Charles Bell, in his treatise on the Hand and in the Anatomy of Expression, reduces this ' Correspondence ' to something like scientific exactitude. And German artists, to their praise be it said, concentrate utmost expression in the face and in the hands. But, in fact, every Dusseldorf. 63 form and every gesture throughout the body bespeaks the mind within ; and the highest art in Germany, as elsewhere, is that which translates noblest thought into noblest form. Swedenborg states his theory of ' Correspondence ' as follows : — 'The whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world, not only in general but in every par- ticular; wherefore whatever exists in the natural world comes from the spiritual and is said to be correspondent It is to be known that the natural world exists from the spiritual world altogether as an effect from its efficient cause. The spiritual world is heaven and to that world belong all the things which are in the heavens.' It is curious to observe how across northern Europe there swept a wave of spiritual philosophy synchronous with sympathetic movements in art. Hans Christian Oersted, born 1777, in Denmark, has, in a volume which bears the significant title 'The Soul in Nature,' given utterance to thoughts akin to the ideas promulgated by Schiller in the ' .Esthetic Letters.' The line taken may be indicated by the subjects of the essays. The following titles almost speak for themselves : ' The Spiritual in the Material,' ' The Comprehension of Nature by Thought and Imagination,' ' All Existence the Dominion of Reason,' ' The Relation between Natural Science and Poetry,' ' The Natural Philosophy of the Beautiful,' 'The Unbeautiful in Nature.' It is erroneously supposed that spiritual art can spring alone from the Roman Catholic faith. But the doctrine of spiritualism as enunciated by Swedenborg and others has a wider significance, and opens to art the possibility of manifestations more multiform than any as yet extant ; and Germany seems the country most ripe for these new developments, and perhaps of all towns Dusseldorf, from her antecedents, is best prepared for the propaganda of what may be termed, notwithstanding the apparent paradox, a rational and natural spiritualism. Extremes in this direction meet, and it might not be difficult to show that Overbeck, Swedenborg, Oersted, and the American transcendentalist Emerson, have points not of divergence only but of union. The transatlantic philosopher looks at creation in nature and in art by the light and the fire of the ' Over Soul.' A few short sentences may indicate that for once rationalism and revelation run in parallel lines, and that each alike may find in spiritual art a fruition. Mr. Emerson writes: — ' We distinguish the announcements of the soul by the term revelation.' ' Revelation is the disclosure of the soul.' ' The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth.' ' The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world always before her, and leaving worlds always behind her.' 'We have come from our remote station on the circumference to the centre of the world, where, as in the closet of God, we see causes and anticipate the universe, which is but a slow effect.' Returning to these German devotees, the faith promulgated was that all painting should be ' soul painting ;' that, as of all created things, the spirit of man is the noblest and the most enduring, so in true art soul and spirit ought to animate the body and dominate over flesh. Outward form, sinew and muscle, rich draperies with pomp of colour, pertain but to things perishable, and leave the thirst of the soul for the infinite and the absolute unquenched. Accordingly, the religious painters of Dusseldorf sought to animate the body, to inspire it by spirit, and thus to render outward form sensitive to inward emotion. They wished to be the chroniclers of indwelling thought, and long before a picture became a thing visible and tangible it had dwelt, unencumbered by gross bodily form, as a shadowy concep- tion in the chambers of secluded meditation. When a devotee such as Overbeck knelt in church or chamber, as did II Beato di Fiesole, when he walked in solitude along the silent cloister, these ' tKought pictures ' dwelt within his mind ; and as with the prophet of old, so with the prophet-painter of our day, the supplication would arise, ' Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth.' Thus was born a ' soul picture.' Vision-seeing artists, such as Blake for example, live in close communion with the world of spirits : thin are the partitions which lie between the seen and the unseen, and moments come when the heavenly portals seem to be thrown open, and rays of light and truth are poured down abundantly on him who waits and 64 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. watches for the divine conception. Pictures thus fashioned in the inward chambers of the mind before they are present to the bodily eye in studios, necessarily frail in physical structure, are, perhaps, the nearest approach to disembodied thoughts possible to pictorial forms. Frederick Schlegel was in literature the apologist for this school, for which I confess some sympathy. Yet, in conclusion, I am tempted to quote Heine's satire : ' Schlegel takes his survey from a lofty point of view, but the high position he assumes is invariably within the belfry of a Catholic church, where his speech clashes with the jingling of the bells, and mingles with the croaking of the ravens that haunt the old weathercock.' A brief explanation may, with advantage, be given once for all of the treatment of draperies by German painters generally. Reverting to the past, three distinctive styles can be distinguished. Earliest comes the Byzantine, seen in attenuated lines, long drawn out, upon the figures of Meister Wilhelm of Cologne in the fourteenth century. Nearly con- temporaneous are the Byzantine churches on the Rhine. About a century later, at the time of Martin Schon, the manner becomes what may be called expressly Teutonic : the draperies are cut up and puckered, they are twisted and contorted into angles and abrupt corners, they are, like the faces, severe and deeply serrated with furrows. Lastly, a little later, intruded the Italian conformation of draperies, more or less derived from prior classic styles. This change was naturally synchronous with the transformation of the national German art into the Italian ; figures of a new type needed fresh clothing, and, accordingly, the later works of Diirer and Mabuse both in body and raiment are allied to schools south of the Alps. The whole question is of some interest and importance ; drapery, it is well known, constitutes a chief criterion in determining between conflicting chronologies and styles in art. Modern 'German painters have reasonably adopted such casts of costume as best correspond with their several manners. The artists who migrated at the beginning of this century from Germany to Italy — Overbeck and his co-religionists, taking as their models the Pre-Raphaelites, — naturally adopted the early Italian cast of draperies. The saints are clad in semi-classic robes falling from the neck, shoulders and arms, in delicate folds, symmetric in the lines, balanced in the proportions, almost musical in their composition, as if symbolic of the concord reigning in saintly natures. The apportionment of the broad masses with the details is almost geometric, the curves are struck according to law, they radiate from a point till they reach the outer confines or circumference. The circling lines following the fall of a stone in still water are not more predetermined by law than are the curves which the force of gravity induces in garments cast over the anatomies of body and of limb. Thus, the study of draperies has well-nigh reached the exactitude of a science ; it has become learned and scholastic- Robes hanging in this fashion symmetrically are often, as in early Christian painting and sculpture, eminently simple ; they fall more or less vertically from the points of attachment, undisturbed by accident, save perhaps by the gentle movement of the figure. In spiritual phases of art, as before said, all tends to rest ; even the hem of a garment remains unruffled. Painters of the Diisseldorf school love quietude. On the other hand, it is a curious fact that Protestantism drapes itself in widely different guise. Its raiments are militant, suited to action, to conflict with the world, and to the battle of life. The garments themselves are more mundane ; they are not solely meet for the kingdom of heaven, but are designed purposely for the practical duties of this everyday world. And thus soon we come down to mere naturalistic draperies, to common clothes — to hats, coats, trousers — and so a state of things ensues in which the tailor makes the man. A coat of fine broadcloth bespeaks the gentleman, a jacket of rough fustian pronounces the artisan, and, to go one step further, rags reveal the beggar. When draperies thus depart from ideal standards, the •differences between Germany and other parts of the civilised world can scarcely touch essential principles. Unfortunately for art — at least in any high sense — Paris rules the fashions, and the utmost that can now be hoped for is a picturesqueness in costume which is found usually not in the ranks of civilisation, but in the haunts of semi-barbarism. Germany Dusseldorf. 65 is fortunate in the possession of graphic, costumes among the peasants of the Tyrol, of Bohemia, and of the territories around the Danube. Ethnologic studies, the peculiarities of race, and the picturesqueness of costume, often go together. In the art of the present day the contrasts in draperies have become violent ; nothing can be further apart than the robes in Overbeck's composition, "das: Influence of Christianity on tlie Arts, in the Frankfort Institute, and Munkacsy's naturalistic night scene, Street Prowlers, in the Pesth Museum. The purest and fullest manifestation of the Dusseldorf school, on its spiritual side, is found in ; the small chapel dedicated to St. ApoUinaris on the Rhine. The present Gothic edifice,. designed at the request of Count Furstenberg by Herr Zwirner, the architect employed in the; c«mpietion of Cologne Cathedral, is, like the Giotto chapel in Padua, expressly, fitted to receive the frescoes with which its walls are clothed. In the year 1837 the Count commissioned Herr Schadow, the Director of the Dusseldorf Academy, to select from among his pupils those most competent to carry out the proposed mural decorations. The choice fell upon Ernst Deger,- Franz Ittenbach, Karl Muller, and Andreas Miiller, young and ardent painters who recently returned from a prolonged pilgrimage to Rome, and being imbued with the spirit of the early Italian masters, were ready to enter on the work heart and soul. It has been my privilege on successive visits, after the lapse of years, to walk somewhat in the spirit of a pilgrim up the hill on which the chapel of St. ApoUinaris stands. The path lies circuitously around vine- clothed hills, rising above the swift river, in one sweeping panorama towards the Drachenfels and the neighbouring Rhine scenery. On entering the chapel I could well understand the fervour aroused throughout Germany when these frescoes were displayed as the consummate issue of the Dusseldorf school on its spiritual side. My first visit to Remagen was made in 1856, my last in 1 867 ; in the former year, in course of execution was Deger's grand fresco of Christ seated in judgment, surrounded by prophets, apostles, and martyrs, all above life-size, and painted on gold ground. I mounted the scaffolding to examine the manipulation, which I found so smooth and so studiously blended that the joinings in the plaster were barely discernible. Thus was accounted for a unison in the general effect which belongs more to oil-painting than to fresco ; hence also the lack of severity complained of by some critics. German frescoes as a rule are harsh and hard, as if pertaining to ancient centuries ; these, on the contrary, are mellow, as if belonging to modem periods. The scheme for the pictorial decoration of the Remagen chapel is as follows : the north walls are given to scenes from the history of Christ, the south to events from the life of the Madonna, while the transepts in part are devoted to passages from the legend of St. ApoUinaris, to whom the church is dedicated. The style, as might be anticipated from the antecedents of the four painters employed, is eclectic : five centuries have evidently elapsed since Giotto painted the Arena chapel, yet the first impression is that Carlo Dolce and Sasso Ferrato may have had a hand in the work. A further impression made is a prevailing sense of beauty — a beauty the apt clothing of goodness and purity — manifest supremely in Karl Miiller's lovely group (size, 21 feet long by 12 feet high) representing the typical women from the Old Testament. Such beauty has been held to be akin to holiness, the outcoming of a balanced life wherein no angry passions mar the "serenity of body or of mind, the soul possessing itself in peace. Sometimes it must be confessed that the placidity passes into feebleness — a want of positivism which amounts to inertness and negation. But the general feeling induced is that of a dream — a trance — the situation being removed from earth and yet somewhere within the glimpses of the moon. The Dusseldorf school is most learned — I may say, that it is almost scientific in draperies : the folds are cast after the classic type, yet a gentle flow- of line, undisturbed by accident or action, responds with the peace reigning in the figures beneath. This chapel, judged from the Dusseldorf and Munich point of view, leaves little to be desired. The colours are wrought up to the high pitch of gold ; the glories round the heads of saints are gold in relief, an expedient which, though employed by Crivelli and other old masters, is almost too non-natural for our times. The system of polychromy excludes S 66 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. primary colours, and trusts to the pervading and not unpleasirig general effects gained by the quiet, hazy, and atmospheric blending of secondary and tertiary tones. On revisiting this shrine of the Diisseldorf spiritual . school after an interval of eleven years I was glad to find my first impressions confirmed, if not strengthened. It seems generally acknowledged that the emotions aroused are religious and conducive to worship. It gave me special pleasure to find that these frescoes, though subject every winter to the assaults of cold and ice, remain untouched by decay. I have since visited the most northerly of frescoes in Europe, those in the apse of the Cathedral of Upsala, painted, like the frescoes at Remagen, by a pupil or pupils trained in Diisseldorf These works, though much tried by winter, are in perfect preservation. The Diisseldorf school has obviously the secret of completing frescoes for permanence. Such examples enhance the regret that fresco-painting was in England so ill understood, at least as to materials and manipulation. I may add that two of the artists engaged on the chapel on the Rhine,' Ittenbach and Karl Miiller, have within recent years been favourably seen on the line of our Royal Academy ; but for this phcise of Diisseldorf art to be fully appreciated, a pilgrimage must be made to Remagen. The pictorial products of the Diisseldorf school in the town and the outlying country are not so numerous or important as might be desired or expected. Thus Diisseldorf has nothing to show in the way of mural paintings comparable to the frescoes in Munich. Yet one or two churches witness to the fervour of the school. I was one Sunday morning, on entering the Franciscan Church, much struck with the general artistic effect. An eminently pictorial composition, partly made up of living figures, met the eye. The priest was preaching in a lofty pulpit, and the congregation, pleasingly varied in costume, grouped themselves reverently among* the columns. The collective composition became all the more impressive by reason of the frescoes on the walls ; and the figures being life-size, they seemed to mingle with the people and form part of the living company assembled for public worship. The preacher pointed to Christ hanging on the Cross, and then directed his auditors to the Saviour risen into the heavens. These frescoes, while thus useful in aiding the functions of religion, are admirable in point of art. The painter Settegast is honoured as a Christian artist ; he stands in the same category as Karl Miiller, Ittenbach, and Deger. As far as I know, this grand composition — Christ on the Cross between the two thieves, with the holy women grouped below — ranks as the painter's greatest achievement. The design of the whole, the drawing of the figures and draperies, and the general treatment of colour, light and shade, evince the deliberate study and the patient care which characterise the school of Diisseldorf. Leading from the choir, an extended surface of wall some fifty feet high receives from the hands of Molitor, another Christian painter of renown, a pictorial vision of Christ in glory attended by angels. The conception and the technique leave nothing to be desired, and what specially impressed me was the reality of the scene upon which I was looking. The spectator is brought into the presence of the supernatural, and so persuasive is the art that he simply believes what he sees. This is a great victory ; and it has ever been deemed an appointed mission in Christian art to revive and keep . alive the memory of events which the lapse of centuries may render somewhat dim. Christian art, even when it becomes legendary, has the power of carrying the mind captive. In a companion ftesco, for example, Molitor represents the Madonna rising from a sepulchre filled with flowers, surrounded by attendant angels, and hailed by God the Father on her entrance into' heaven. It matters little whether there be any reliable authority in favour of the transaction, for, judging by the bearing of the worshippers present, it is evident that the people of Diisseldorf are prepared to accept the event on the evidence of this over- powering picture. The tribute thus insensibly paid to art is boundless as it is blind. A visit to neighbouring churches will prove that pictures of like piety have permeated among the religious classes extensively. The Garrison Church possesses for its altar-piece the Baptism of Christ ' — a carefully-studied composition by Professor Ittenbach. The Jesuits' Church shows an Assumption of the Virgin — a widely diffused composition by Professor Deger, a painter Diisseldorf. 67 who habitually dwells in devotional moods. Also in the same church is a Pieta, by the late Director Schadow, an altogether studious and serious-minded artist, who has left behind him but too little to attest his sway in the school of Dusseldorf. But after making the most of all such praiseworthy products, it cannot be pretended that this revived Christian art takes possession of Northern Germany like its old precursor in Italy. Neither in towns nor in rural districts does the traveller come upon such painted churches or wayside chapels as those in Italy, rising multitudinously from the ground as spontaneous offerings of praise and thanks- giving. The soil in Northern Germany is more sterile, and often instead of the rose springs up the thistle. Schloss Heltorf, a few miles out of Dusseldorf, contains seven frescoes of special interest, as illustrating successive phases of the local school. The castle itself nestles under the'shelter of a grove of trees ; it is surrounded by a broad deep moat amply supplied with water, and the entrance to the courtyard is gained by means of a drawbridge. Fifty years ago Cornelius proposed to Count Spec, the father of the present proprietor, that a large hall should be covered with frescoes illustrative of the familiar story of Frederick Barbarossa. Assent being granted, the painter began his work with the meeting of the Emperor and Pope Alexander III. in front of St. Mark's, Venice — the figures life-size. Cornelius evidently mitigated' the austerity of his style, and for once strove to be festive and decorative. The colours are almost gay, and remain without a blur or a blemish. The artist gives proof of how thoroughly he had mastered in Rome the Italian method of fresco-painting. His own portrait finds an unobtrusive place in the composition. Cornelius being prevented from further prosecuting his labours, three of the subsequent compositions fell into the hands of Miicke, an able scholar of Director Schadow, and the master's portrait appropriately appears in the first fresco. The change in style from Cornelius is obvious at a glance. The lucent quality of fresco assumes the sombre semblance of oil-painting, not unattended however with the compen- sating advantage of deep-toned harmony. The technique is sound and good, and specially to be commended for symmetry in composition and dignity in form is the scene setting forth the Humiliation of the Milanese before the Emperor Barbarossa. Klenze, the favourite architect of King Ludwig, when he saw this fresco, said they had nothing better in Munich. But yet another change came over these works when a pupil of Professor Lessing took the place of the scholar of Director Schadow. Lessing was in religious faith, as in pictorial art, the antagonist of Schadow. I will pass from the pupil comparatively unknown, who made here a fairly good beginning, to the masterly Karl Lessing. At once the spectator feels himself in the presence of a man of no ordinary power. The scene itself — Barbarossa, on a fiery steed seizing with his own hand a standard from the Saracens — is stirring and inspiriting. The movement is rapid, the action fierce, yet extravagance has been escaped through a well-ordered composition. This is the only instance, as far as my observation extends, in which Lessing has essayed fresco ; and that the art is less difficult than usually supposed, or that the master possesses more than accustomed power, is shown by the perfect manipulation of the work. The hand apparently is as facile in movement as if it held a mere crayon and the surface were cartoon paper. Nowhere in Germany do I see substantiated the charge made by Daniel Maclise, that fresco, while it is a triumph for the plasterer, is a painful perplexity for the painter. Lessing, at all events, rejoices in his work. The date upon the wall is 1840: thus ten or more years were devoted to these decorations, and the hall, in its entirety, represents the period when mural-painting culminated in Dusseldorf The neighbouring chapel is adorned with an altar-picture by Deger, and the mansion itself contains family portraits by Karl Sohn and Theodor Hildebrandt ; thus in this delectable spot the local school is represented by the chief masters. It may be added that Count Spec, who politely accompanies visitors through the Schloss, takes a praiseworthy pride in his possessions, specially in the frescoes. As failure is supposed to attend fresco-painting applied to domestic decoration, it may be well to record this example of success confirmed by the entire satisfaction of the owner. 68 The School's of Modern Art in Germany. The art of Wall-painting has obtained from the masters and pUpils of Diisseldorf little short of universal application. As already seen, it has been used in the decoration of churches; it has also, with advantage, as just shown, played a secular part within private dwellings. It furthermore performs a worthy educational office within the ' Realschule ' of Diisseldorf. A large schoolroom, some forty feet long, provided with the usual appliances of benches, master's desk, and black-board, has been decorated by Director Bendemarin with a frieze which runs round the walls immediately beneath ^ the ceiling. The leadirig compositions, consisting of children at work and at play, six in number and about ten feet long, are divided and sustained by standing figures in monochrome of great men who may be held up as patterns for: the rising generation. Among these ilfustrious personages are Copernicus, Leibnitz, Albert Diirer, Peter Vischer, Goethe, Schiller, A. and W. Humboldt, Niebuhr, Guttenberg, Cornelius, 'Mozart, and Beethoven. Between these ; historic characters are seated allegorical figures, the most symmetric and commanding of which ' furnishes an FROM A FRIEZE BY BENDEMANN. illustration to these pages. The story, however, is in the main carried out by frieze-like compositions of children, after the manner common in Germany among sculptors and painters equally. Bendemann has himself adopted the same narrative method in a series of friezes within the Palace of Dresden. The idea is, that ' the child as the father of the man ' shall, in the sportive labours of the day, represent human life in its more mature and onerous avocations. Accordingly, in these mural decorations, the age of schooling is personified by children at a writing-table ; commerce is depicted under the guise of children in a fishing- boat ; trade and industry are typified by children at work at a furnace ; while the arts are readily represented by the usual symbols and signs of singing and painting. The general effect is pleasing, the several themes are not dealt with ponderously but playfully, and the ideas, though mostly so obvious as to imply no great amount of creative thought, show just the fertility of fancy suited to the occasion. The figures are life-size, the treatment is broad and simple, the handling carries out the intention to absolute completion without effort or striving for effect : the works after the lapse of many years remain in perfect preservation. Dilsseldorf. 69 We have here, it seems to me, a good example of the practical uses to which wall-painting can be put by public bodies and municipalities. The process is simple and easy, rapid and inexpensive, and the works when complete prove appropriate to the place and in keeping with the daily avbcations of a school. The antipodes to the spiritual school is reached when Ludwig Knaus comes upon the scene. The artist was born at Wiesbaden in 1829, and entered the Dusseldorf Academy in 1846 ; about ten years later he went to Paris, where he exhibited in the Salon, among other successful pictures, the Consecration of a Village Church, the Gipsy, the Golden Wedding, and Baptism. About the year 1861 he made Berlin "his head-quarters. I first was enabled to form an estimate of this sans-culotte genius when I came in contact in Dusseldorf with the Thief in the Market, under hot pursuit by a rabble crowd. The world had never seen on canvas such an agglomeration of ragged, dirty rascals, gamins of the street, the pests of society. Even the trees were rugged, jagged, and ill-to-do ; the painter stood out as an exceptional phenomenon, even in a naturalistic period. But a change came over the spirit of the dream ; the artist's wild oats had been sown, and then, in the International Exhibitions of Paris and of Vienna, appeared a rich and varied harvest of better seed. Knaus, with the free charter of a naturalist — a true and intelligent student of nature — passed from a grotesque, never vulgar, to pastorals and idyls never weak in over-sentimentality. Known in every shop-window in Europe is Springtime, a little girl up to her waist in the exuberant growth of the fields, gathering an apron full of flowers. In this most popular of pictures — ;as in others — one secret of success is that the eye becomes immovably set on the little girl as the central object : she, though a dot, is magnified into a heroine — and the flowers and the landscape, though lovely in extreme, fall into due subordination. The logical mind of the Germans leads to such rationalistic relations. But there are other compositions by the master more complex, such, for example, as the Juggler in the Barn. Here, again, the secret lies mainly in focussing the principal character, the necromancer, around whom gathers a motley crew, kept in subordination, yet speaking out in a by-play which carries the eye to the extremest corners of the composition. I will not venture to compare this greatest of German genre painters with Hogarth, mainly because the two stand so wide asunder, and yet they are similar in satire, in shrewd insight into individual character, as well as in their sympathy with Nature in her unsophisticated forms. German critics, who, it is said, never trouble to look at the pictures they write about, because they can evolve absolute truth from their inward consciousness, have discovered a whole cosmos in Knaus. But willingly I accept all they say in praise of the painter's colour, light, and shade ; in his broken outlines, in his darkness visible, and in his sudden apparitions of light, I should think he had given intelligent study to Rembrandt. Among his recent phases is the illustration to this chapter, the Madonna and Child, executed by the chief of German etchers, Herr linger. Also a characteristic figure is a Peasant of the Black Forest, introduced next page as a woodcut. Eduard Bendemann, who furnishes two subjects to this chapter, is supposed to have been of Jewish extraction, yet as with Disraeli, his faith is not quite pronounced in his works. He was born at Berlin in 181 1, and left for Dussddorf in 1828, in company with Th. Hildebrandt, C. Sohn, Lessing, and his brother-in-law, J. Hubner. The history of a mind evidently planned by nature for command, deserves to be traced in brief Leaving out minor details, it may be said that the first mission of Bendemann was to indite the history of his countrymen — the children of Israel — in their sorrows and their joys. The Captive Israelites mourning by the waters of Babylon, {vide page 71), has been deservedly known throughout the world. Of like direful character is Jeremiah lamenting over Jerusalem. The town of Dusseldorf has among its chief mural paintings a frieze, whence one of the illustrations to this chapter is taken. It would seem to me that Bendemann, placed by birth beyond the polemics of Dusseldorf creeds, asserted for art the universality of human nature and' of religion. I have had the privilege of conversing with Professor Bendemann in his studio, and in the house of his sister, Madame Hubner ; the painter's brain is very large, the character one to be revered. T "O The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. Dusseldorf has been long known as the chief centre for the publication of Romanist prints issued at small cost and disseminated widely over the Christian world. I have several hundreds of these compositions, following the usual course from the Nativity to the Resurrection ; and I remember to have seen in the studio of Overbeck, thirty years ago, lovely designs in charcoal executed expressly for engraving in Dusseldorf, The chief Society for the publication of these cheap but delicately executed engravings from leading pictures of the ' Christian School ' is the Verein zur Verbreitung religioser Bilder, in Dusseldorf Identified with the Dusseldorf Academy is the praiseworthy Kunstverein fur die Rheinlander und Westphalien, an Association which has worked in the interests of art somewhat after the schemes of the British Institution, .-f i(^*S^A^i't"-';.,r'^;-.,?Sii',.'.;'v:s, PEASANT OF THE BLACK FOREST. AFTER KNAUS. of the Dilettante Society, and of the London Art Union. The good work done is indicated by . the statement that more than nine hundred pictures have been distributed by lottery, and that nearly forty paintings, altar-pictures and others, have been secured for museums and for Protestant and Romanist churches. Among the monumental works thus fostered were Rethel's frescoes of the history of Charlemagne, at Aix-la-Chapelle ; also Overbeck's. impressive oil picture in the Cathedral of Cologne ; likewise the largest line engraving ever executed, that by Professor Keller from Raphael's Disputa. The London Art Union has done good service for art, but the specialty of the Rheinlander Kunstverein is that it selects for publication pictures from the Old Masters. Dusseldorf religious prints, of which it has been my pleasure qver a number of years to Diisseldorf. 71 make a large collection, serve as an epitome of the Christian art of modern Germany. These small plates may be used as texts whereon to hang discourses on the nature of angels, children, or flowers. Flowers are special favourites in Germany : they mingle in social life ; they join in festivals and funerals ; they are present at the birthday, the marriage, and the death. They are supposed to have a language and a symbolism, and they enter lavishly into the world of pictures. Numberless examples might be quoted. Take a Holy Family, by Overbeck, wherein, after the manner of the early Italians, flowers blossom at the feet of the infant Jesus. Again, in the Mystery of the Rosary and in the Crucifixion, both by Andreas Miiller, roses and passion-flowers assist in the composition. In another design, lilies float on the water where Christ is baptized, and the white lily officiates again and again ; it is borne by the Angel of the Annunciation, and it stands in the chamber where the Virgin reads and prays. And then, on the other hand, such painters as Klein make use of the plants and flowers which are emblematic of evil, such as prickly pears, thorny trees, and thistles, all or any of which are deemed fitting shelter for serpents and other noxious reptiles. Thus in the £jlO£JI~4.STUrrOAR1. BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON. AFTER BENDEMANN. vegetative creation there are things evil as well as good, for it is to be remembered that an enemy came and sowed tares among the good grain. The following passage from Swedenborg,^ notwithstanding its taint of sentimentality, may throw clearing light on the hidden symbolism which pervades the spiritual art of Germany. The passage bears as its prefix the title,— 'Beautiful Flowers representative of the Lord's Kingdom. ' In the vegetable kingdom on earth there is nothing but what represents in some measure the Kingdom of the Lord. Everything in the vegetable kingdom, which is beautiful and ornamental, has its origin through heaven from the Lord; and when the celestial and spiritual things of the Lord flow into Nature, such objects become beautiful; and from the same source is derived the vegetative soul or life. Hence, also, these things are representative.' And passing from sacred themes to the pages of poetry, the whole of Nature is read as an open book whence German painters have culled thoughts and forms of imaginative beauty. The faith prevails that. every living creature is endowed with a soul, and that even inanimate objects are sensitive. Flowers, as before said, become almost spiritual emanations ; they are emblems of the soul and of the heavenly life ; in sympathy they spring up at angels' feet. *j2 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. and clothe with beauty the paths of Paradise. They are sent as revelations ; they are patterns of graces dwelling in heavenly places ; they glow with light and colour as from the radiance of the upper spheres ; they speak to earth of peace. And birds, as in Pre-Raphaelite pictures, nestle in trees and sing among the branches, and appear to give to Nature a voice which brings her into harmony with Holy Families and Saints. Again, the Waters of the Rhine have given birth to legends, and crystal wells bubble with sprites, and woods are haunted by sportive fairies. I have now before me a picture of a woody glen, watered by a stream and carpeted with flowers : a gnome dwells in its hollow depth, and when the moon shines with shimmering lustre sprites come thinly draped in gossamer, floating on translucent wings, with lights as tongues of fire burning above their brows. In a diverse scene, portending mischief, weird imps bearing lamps enter by night to ruffle the dreams of a child asleep. Painters, in common with fairy-story writers, have chosen children as the recipients of messages from the unseen world, for, as Wordsworth says, ' Heaven lies about us in our infancy,' and with 'trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, Who is our home:' 'Then sing, ye birds ; sing, sing a joyous song,' and speak, ' ye fountains, meadows, hills, and groves,' unto ' the children as they sport upon the shore, and hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.' Many are the German painters of the present and the past generation — Ludwig Richter, Konewka, Schwind, Kaulbach, Bendemann, Mintrop, and others — who have clothed infancy in innocence and beauty, and have endowed childhood with ' the play impulse ' of humanity. I have before me a design by the late T. Mintrop, of a Christmas-tree thronged with cherub and angel children crowded as hawthorn and holly - trees with Christmas berries. Some are passing to and fro on wings, others are singing, others again are bringing from the skies gifts to children dwelling on the earth. Also may be quoted one of the best of Overbeck's Biblical illustrations, Christ Blessing Little Children. The doctrine of Guardian Angels, who, we are told, do always in heaven behold the face of the Father, has by the whole pictorial school of Dusseldorf been received as a fundamental article of faith. More angels' wings, indeed, have been painted in Germany than in any other land in Christendom, Italy scarcely excepted. The belief, too, that there exist and hover round about daily life child-angels, who watch and guard mundane affairs, obtains confirmation through this art. Wilhelm Sohn introduces the pretty incident of a little angel coming furtively on the wing to trim a lamp borne by St. Gudula. P. Molitor environs the infant Christ with ministrants of diminutive growth, who on bended knees watch over the cradled sleep. Also deserving of remembrance is an imaginative paraphrase of the text, ' When He bringeth again the first-begotten into the world He saith. Let all the angels of God worship Him.' In mid-heaven an angel bears the infant in' her arms, and by her side swoops a child-angel with clasped hands, in act of adoration. Thick clouds roll beneath, and in the clear air above a fierce wind tosses the draperies : the figures are impelled onwards almost at preternatural speed. Upon the spiritual 'art of Dusseldorf comes an occasional outpouring as of Pentecost ; we seem to be living in the early ages of the Church, when the barriers which now divide the invisible from the visible were thrown aside, when light from the higher life shone within the mind and illumined the dark places of the earth. Dusseldorf since the removal of the Boisserie collection to Munich has not possessed museums or other collections worthy of its repute as an art centre. Yet still may be seen works of renown by Cornelius, Overbeck, Sohn, Karl Miiller, Ittenbach, Deger, Molitor, Leutze, Kohler, R5ting, Hasenclever, Th. Hildebrandt, Lessing, Knaus, C. Hiibner, Vautier, Salentin, Andreas and Oswald Achenbach, A. Weber, &c. &c. To these may be added Scandinavian, painters, such as the Norwegian Tidemand, in whose studio I had the privilege of seeing his most ambitious picture, the Baptism of Christ. A few years after I found the same composition in its resting-place, in the apse of a Protestant church in Christiania. The opinion on the spot was that the painter, in departing from his appointed sphere of naturalism and of genre, had failed to reach to high art and spiritualism. It is impossible, within brief limits, to give the notice DUsscldorf. y^ deserved by the above painters ; but it may be mentioned that Vautier and Salentin, and many others, represent the now dominant party in Dusseldorf, — a company of artists who, having thrown aside spirituaHsm, asceticism, and the like, cast themselves sympathetically into the sorrows and the joys of life, especially among the poor, where, according to Crabbe and Wordsworth, is found indwelling, though obscured, that true spirit of humanity which God first breathed into man. These German pictures, however, come out as rather heavy and opaque renderings of great and essential truths. Dusseldorf sustains several literary, artistic, and social associations ; such, for example, as the Pen and Pencil Club, wherein, as in other countries, are produced and criticised poetic effusions and pictorial impromptus. I have never had the privilege of partaking of the true German '.Esthetic Teas,' but if they are anything like the social gatherings elsewhere, all wise men who have work to do in the world will do well to stay away from them, and leave the teapot in the hands of the ladies. Yet it is stated that in Dusseldorf aesthetics of the true transcendental sort find entrance into select coteries. Therein it is conjectured inspiring thought takes pictorial form, and hence the School of Dusseldorf is supposed to be animated by leading minds, such as that of Humboldt, a writer whose discursive intellect passed from science into art, and gave, especially in the ' Cosmos,' to landscape-painting the assurance of unlimited progression in the future. Among charitable associations, I hear good tidings of the Unterstutzen Verein, a benevolent society that extends timely aid to artists in distress. And specially suited to the locality is the Kunst Genossenshaft, or art confederacy, for the advance of historic painting, or, as some might say, for encouraging the painting of big pictures. Accordingly, when a work of high purport is brought forth, the purchase-money is ready to hand, and the picture thus selected for honours is sent round Germany for exhibition in the chief cities. Thus tentative and aspiring products which otherwise might hardly, pay their way are fostered and sustained, and artists become fortified in a line of study which, however agreeable, is proverbially slow in gaining recognition and just reward. The Diisseldorf school cannot die. It represents territories no less than principles; territories touching the northern confines of the great German empire, and extending still northward into the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Russia. When travelling in those countries I have observed that the chief painters were trained in Dusseldorf. And it seems to me that the Diisseldorf school may be likened to the German empire, a monarchy consolidated out of dissevered states and divers peoples, a sphere wherein genius and art life can obtain free development. Goethe has truly said, the artist is always free. 74 CHAPTER VI.— DUSSELDORF (^^^/2>2?^^rt^). 'Tl.^HE term VSphopl' . often- oecurs in ;these' pages.- .What constitutes, a School? .The ' X, answer is found in Diisseldorf. In .that town Q.xists a well-organized Academy, with a- Difector and:. P^of^^^^^^^Pr^ssly appointed: for the teaching of ; art. Also, are drawn together a large nmnber- of scholars, who not pnly pass, through a definite; course of study/ but who 'form among, thenjselves a kind' of bpdy corppratej, and cpnatitute.a public opinion. Ger/nany, where the f^i,th is stropg »that;an artist^- like, any other, producjl*, may ^.be made -to orc^er, naturally aboupds in schools,.; and ; of .these .none i^s greater or more influential than that of 'D.usseldorf . . • • - . ^ ■ : r ,' .," ," -. .- ,■ ,t - ■ ■-■. ... ■ , The. Academy of.Diisseldorf dates., over, a,; period ofone hundred years, and. is therefore synchronous with our .Royal Acaderny ' in London. At.first it slumbered, ingloripusly. under dogmas, high,;. dry, ,.anjd, conventional,.,, and -not till • the directorate of Cornelius, whose father had\ been . keeper : of ■ the Town Gallery,, did' the Diisseldorf ^ Academy emerge from obscurity into notoriety.- There ns nothing very distinctive in the curriculum of study, drawing from the antique and. from. the life belongs to a,ll. schools alike. However, under the leadership of -> Cornelius . was , domiciled in .the Rhine Provinces high and monumental , art,, and specially frescpfpainting, .after, the example of-Michae;l Angelo and Raphael in the Vatican. Hence-; forth the small town on the . Rhine ,. became identified with a great revival, -and among ;nany., works thence proceeding, may be mentioned the Cartoons by CorneUus fpr ■ the frescoes in the Glyptothek, Munich ; also .from the same art-creating centre radiated the. mural paintings in-Coblentz, :Bonn,..Aix-la-Chapelle, and the. Castle of.Heltorf. Thesej.with many other frescoes, especially those , at the St. Apollinarisberg, seemed- tp transplant the. art , learnt by Oyerbeck, -Cprnelius, Veit, and Schadow, in Rome, to the banks of the Rhine, where, it survives and, flourishes even to the present day. /,-, Cornelius,,, as Director in Diisseldorf, took a decisive part in the war raging between the - Classicists and, the Mediaevalists — between. ■ the disciples of Winkelm^ann, led by Goethe at Weimar, on the one side ; and the followers of Tieck, Novalis, .and of the two Schlegels, on the other. Cornelius was too wide in his range over art and nature to make himself the tool' of .any 'exclusive party. He wisely gave -freedom to art, and in the main threw the Diisseldorf .Academy into the new direction which responded tp the national (aspirations. Among his adherents were Kaulbach, Gotzenberger, Stilke, Sturmer, Eberle, Hermann, and Forster. In fact, the whole Academy is a comm.unity for study and work^ a guild- vigilant f6r the welfare of the |3ainter arid his art. It has made.itsplf ■ a powerful , producing force, and that in some degree by the close fellowship which subsists between a master and his scholars. A professor may have around him. pupils of all ages, sometimes tlie stripling in his teens, at others the married man with children. , A change came over the spirit of the Diisseldorf school on the appointment of F. W." Schadov\gas Director. Power then passed into the hands of the Spiritualists and Purists. Yet the fame of the Dusseldorf Acaderny 'was so far established that pupils flocked in from all jparts. The secret had been discovered whei-eby high art could be manufactured, but the supply became in excess of the demand, so that little grist' was brought to the mill. The strength of the new Director, as his pictures indicate, proved unequal to the situation : he was accused of being the partizan of a narrow and priestly clique. A severe struggle ensued, the outcome of which was that Schadow had to surrender ' his directorate into the hands of the opposing party, who, in accordance with the spirit of the age, demanded for o < < Dusseldorf. /D art literal study of nature, the actual light and colour of the visible world, with a vigour of execution which should strike vehemently the bodily senses. The sequel has been, and will further be, exemplified. Karl Friedrich Lessing, born at Wurtemberg in 1808, came at the age of nineteen to Dusseldorf, and found the Academy, under the direction of Schadow, in the hands of the Spiritualists. The day had arrived when modern modes of thought stood in revolt against medisevalism, and Lessing, the man for the time, rose into power. Opposition met him at the outset : he and his friends were charged as Infidels and Socialists. The answer came, ' By their fruits ye shall know them ;' and endowed with energy and a sense of a mission, Lessing did for art what Luther achieved for religion. Such pictures as Huss before the Council of Constance, Huss Preaching, Huss at the Funeral Pyre, and the Death of Friedrich //., are exponents of a faith no less Christian than that exemplified in Holy Families and Assumptions of the olden time. I had the advantage of seeing in Dusseldorf in 1856 the sketch for the picture of Hiss Preaching. The composition, as might be supposed, had strong purpose throughout ; in the attitudes were energy and action, in the countenances thought and emotion. However, the arrangement of the figures is wanting in harmony, and the lines are abrupt. It seemed to me that the reaction against conventionalism had. been pushed too far, and that the danger arose that the study of nature might exclude art. The two historic works in Frankfort, Huss before the Council of Constance and Huss in Prison, are too well known to need description, but it may be said of them that they manifest an almost unparalleled power of mise en schie, and of telling a story so as to take the spectator captive at the first glance. In fine, it may be said that Lessing, in these pictures, did not hurl defiance against the Church : he is the artist of no Church, because he is the champion merely of the free intellect. The contiguous illustration from Lessing represents Eccelino III. in prison, after the battle of Cassano, fn 1259. The tyrant had been dangerously wounded in the head by a club, and monks came to persuade him to repentance. The only answer they could get was, ' I have no sins to repent of, save that I did not take sufficient vengeance on my enemies, that I led my army badly, and allowed myself to be deceived and betrayed.' Speechless and gloomy he sat eleven days without food, but dissatisfied that death came so slowly he tore the bandages from his wounds, and was found lying dead upon the floor, of his prison. Lessing's naturalism led him, almost of necessity, into landscape. Some critics indeed, of whom I am not one, consider him greater as a painter of landscape than of history. I think, however, as is usual, that his practice of high art gave him a' broad and intelligent comprehension of the scene before him, so that his landscapes, at a glance, take strong hold of the mind. One composition in the Dusseldorf Gallery I recall, which evinces the master's power of subordination and concentration. The foreground is a churchyard occupied by troops ; the sky is black and lowering, for a tempest gathers in the heavens as well as on the earth. An invading army has already set into flames a distant hamlet, and soldiers have entered a golden cornfield. The landscape with its incidents is, in fact, a history, and therefore comes well from a painter of history. In the artist's studio I have seen hung on the walls studies of rocks and foregrounds; a painter of such strength plants his foot firmly on the solid ground. On an easel stood a canvas, whereon, in outline, were mapped hills, valleys, torrents. The painter, with decisive touch, emphasizes the large and emotional elements of nature : he moulds his masses with a sense of weight and substance, he metes out his materials with a feeling that mountains must rest on the earth's strong foundations, while his skies roll grandly under the strife of restless atmospheric forces. These land- scapes, though much regarded in Germany, can never become popular in France or in England, a chief reason being a certain repellent quality in the colour inherent to the German school. The position held by Lessing may be compared somewhat with that of Locke, the author" 76 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. of the 'Discourse on thfe Human Understanding,' or with the attitude of Comte, the exponent of the Positive Philosophy. Lessing proclaims a propaganda : he embodies a faith ; he is a Protestant in the original meaning of the term ; he protests against dogmas which he holds to be in antagonism with truth and reason ; he stands as a reformer, and chooses his subjects mostly from the Reformation of Huss and from the conilicts between Popes and Emperors. Lessing reads character shrewdly : he depicts it as a physiognomist ; he delineates humanity with a breadth that belongs to the species and with a detail that distinguishes the individual. Yet keenly observant, and with the wisdom of the world, he scarcely attains to the wisdom charlkmagne's entry into pavia. after rethel. from above: he may be wise, indeed, as the serpent, and yet not quite as innocent as the dove. He views the drama of history from the side of the intellect rather than from that of the imagination, and his works may be said to illustrate the distinction drawn by German metaphysicians between "the understanding' and 'the pure intellect.' It has been his privilege to extend the frontiers of the once narrow and exclusive school of Dusseldorf : he found it Romish, he made it, in the wide sense of the word. Catholic. Alfred Rethel, who furnishes three illustrations to this chapter, was born at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1816, and the spirit of the mighty Charlemagne, who lies buried in the Cathedral of the city, inspired his greatest works. At the age of thirteen he executed a design which obtained him admission into the Academy of Dusseldorf, then shared between the northern Germany of Prussia with its Rhineland, and southern Germany, having its centre at Munich. Dussddorf. -jy Rethel allowed himself a short episode in Italy, but at the age of twenty he took up his residence at Frankfort, and fell under thb spell of Philip Veit, no higher inspiration then being possible. The artist entered on his professional career with unaccustomed impetuosity, and in accordance with the prevailing spirit of the times he threw himself into romantic themes and Rhineland legends. Yet he was a conscientious student of history; he de- lineated not so much the creations of his fancy as the hard facts of his intellect. But Rethel was a child of the north, 'weird and wild: a whirlwind passed through his brain, and nightmare was the companion of his thoughts. And in his well-known compositions, Death CORONATION OF CHARLEMAGNE BY LEO IIL AFTER RETHEL. ike Avenger, symbolising the demon Cholera in Paris at a masked ball, and Death as a Friend (see woodcut, page 79), I recognise points of contact with the late Mr. Beddoes, the author of ' Death's Jest-book ; ' also with various ' Dances of Death,' about the time of Diirer and Holbein. And Rethel found the shadows of death gathering around him ; he was worried in his work and complained of want of sympathy, and yet he managed to execute in the Town Hall at Aix-la-Chapelle a series of large frescoes, woodcuts from two of which illustrate these pages. The style is unlike that of any other artist ; it is not German and yet it is not Italian, but still may be felt the presence of Albert Diirer. The execution is energetic almost to excess, and the colour bespeaks abnormal vision. Also highly esteemed are compositions illustrative of the passage of the Alps by Hannibal, and of the life of Alfred the Great, with many other works which fill a short yet full life. But X 78 The Schools of Modern AH in Germany. poor Rethel felt that his power had departed : the man who had walked with elastic step in the acacia avenues of Dusseldorf sank into the confirmed misanthrope ; the sanity of his mind was surrendered to diseased imagination.. It is the same old story: the sword had cut into the scabbard, a meteor had blazed into the sky wildly, which, not being a fixed star of defined orbit, went into speedy darkness. Rethel was simply broken down on completing the last picture at Aix-la-Chapelle. He mournfully said, ' My power is extinguished, my labour must be relinquished ; when I have worked I have won but a pittance, and now I must cease wholly because no further strength is left in me.' On the Sth of December, 1859, when snow lay thick upon the ground and ice hung from roof and window, the body of Alfred Rethel, followed by the chief artists of Dusseldorf, was carried to its last resting- place. The stage had long been darkened ere the curtain fell; the mind in excess of light had fallen under eclipse. Have pity! have pity! at least ye who may be his friends. On his grave was' placed a laurel crown. ' Vex not his ghost : oh let him pass ! He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world . Stretch him out longer.' Overbeck is not expressly connected with Dusseldorf, except as being the centre whence have issued numerous religious compositions engraved from his designs. The name of Overbeck is here, at present, associated with a business firm which makes for artists and the public excellent photographs from pictures, by Dusseldorf painters produced on the spot. This local and collateral branch of the family, having stuck to their Protestant faith, did not obtain much sympathy from the great painter, who, as a convert, gave himself over in an exclusive spirit to Roman Catholicism. The head of Overbeck impressed on the covers of this volume is taken from a faithful engraving, executed forty years ago. In Dusseldorf I have obtained, at the d^p6t of Messrs. Overbeck, a photograph from a portrait painted thirty years later, near the close of life, showing like austere facial angles, pendent pose of head, and rapt expression. Dusseldorf is not so much a centre where art products remain, as a focus from which they are distributed. The prosperous town of Crefeld, manufacturing in its looms silks and velvets of the worth of one million and a half pounds sterling a-year, having built itself a handsome Rathhaus, commissioned J. Janssen, a pupil of Bendemann, and himself a professor in the Dusseldorf Academy, to decorate the walls of the chief chamber. The hall is about 50 ft. long, 25 ft. broad, and 25 ft. high. The long wall opposite the window is occupied by two large compositions 18 ft. long, and 12 ft. high. And each of the two end walls is decorated by an upright picture, 12 ft. high and 7 ft. wide. The figures are above life-size. Over the doors are five smaller compositions, and thus this handsome hall receives complete, harmonious, and pleasing decoration. The theme chosen for illustration is directly national and German; the series opens with fierce conflicts between the trained and well-equipped armies of Rome and the rude Teutonic people who defend heroically their native soil. The second compo- sition is supremely grand : the centre is crowned by a Roman warrior on horseback, who recoils before a stalwart throng of native heroes, having for protecting armour naught besides muscle and sinew worthy of Hercules, and hurling in assault huge rocks from the hills. Some of the figures, in firm, well-rounded modelling, consolidate into the statuesque ; the Fighting Gladiator and various classic Discoboli, and the dying Children of Niobe, may have suggested to the artist the forms and movements. Other personages again, casting off the plastic, become directly pictorial ; as, for example, a group of women, who, in horror at the slaughter before them, hold up their arms wildly and clasp their hands passionately, after the manner of that most intensely tragic of compositions, Guido's Massacre of' the Innocents. Such is the good purpose fpr which the Academy of Dusseldorf generally, and the school of Bendemann more particularly, attains to the knowledge of historic precedents. Still more tragic is the scene wherein Thusnelda with her infant child in arms, surrounded by German Diisseldorf. 79 prisoners in chains, adorns the public triumph of the conqueror on his return to Rome. Also, in a strain rising to sublime pathos, is the closing composition, depicting the funeral pyre of the dead Teutonic warrior, with helmet on head and sword in hand, lying as on a sarcophagus ; beneath is stretched the slain war - horse, and while a venerable Druid throws holy water on the corpse, and a priestess puts a torch to the wood, a company of women devoutly kneel in prayer, and minstrels with harps make mournful melody. Since the DEATH AS A FRIEND. AFTER RETHEL. death of Rethel I do not know anything so impressive. High art is said to be extinct, but these compositions prove the contrary; the greatest subjects are supposed to be worn out, but here are new themes, noble as any in the olden times, treated with originality and freshness. Professor Janssen is accepted as a genius, in sign of which he infuses the ideal into the real, and makes the spirit of a shadowy past live and move in actual form. The same painter is giving further proof of his exceptional power in a series of large historic wall paintings in the town of Erfurt. The artist's manner is what is known as the monu- mental and architectonic ; the compositions are symmetric and duly apportioned to the 8o The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. structural spaces : the lines tend to geometric curves : details are used with reticence, so as not to Ijreak up the breadth of the masses : t^he execution is direct and pronounced in character. It was with regret that I found. the works at Crefeld not on the wall, but upon canvas, yet the simple and noble style which inheres to fresco is preserved, and the surface has the advantage of Jaeing free from distracting glaze or varnish. The medium is wax with turpentine or spirit, a technique which induces a blending and fusion of contours foreign to modern German fresco-paintirtg. I am glad to receive the assurance that the cartoons which are now in. the artist's studio in Diisseldorf will be executed at Erfurt, not on canvas, but on the very walls. The wars of Germany within the last decade have gone far to form in Dusseldorf a well-traiqed school of battle painters. As long as France was the ruling military state in Europe she took the lead in military manoeuvres on canvas, but now that Germany stands as conqueror, the war -loving artists of Munich and Dusseldorf are, naturally, taking up a prominent position in the van. Professor Camphausen, whose spacious studio, in the midst of a garden and overgrown with creepers, I have just visited, is always full of work. No one knows better how to seat an Emperor or a General on horseback, as witness the equestrian portrait' above life-size of the Emperor William in the Munich International Exhibition. The same Galleries shov/ E. Hiinten, also of Dusseldorf, to be a straightforward and strenuous chronicler of the victories won at the expense of the French. Both artists have mastered the tactics of war, their infantry stand firm as a rock and their cavalry in movement are rapid and brilliant. Neither in the fierce action of the limbs is the . intensity of expression in the face overlooked, and hence is realised the never-to-be-forgotten fact that the German armies were not composed of common and ignorant men, but of citizens and patriots, who bore in their physiognomies the traits of ennobling conviction and endurance. Hence these painters pass without effort from the military battle-field to Covenanters reading the Bible in camp, and thus, according to the old saying, these characters, while praying to God, do not forget to keep their powder dry. Of the three hundred or more artists and students in' Dusseldorf, mention can be made of only the most prominent. Attention has of late been deservedly turned to Professor Baur, seen at his best in the Christian Martyr, a deeply pathetic picture, which rightly finds a conspicuous place among the contemporary art of Dusseldorf in the Town Gallery. The artist is almost as a matter of course a well-trained draftsman, but, as often happens, he is better in drawing than in painting. Clemens Bewer, who, like so many of his countrymen, has also had wide experience, educes a modern manner out of styles of the past, and depicts Semiramis and the Daughter of Herodias as if he had lived in historic times, when the characters dwelt in the memory of imme- diate survivors. Such art escapes the realism which impresses actual spectators, while it is more defined than the far-off dreamland of the imagination. A more unaccustomed manifest- ation is found in the historic yet natura'istic and almost ethnographic art of Professor G^bhardt. In the International Exhibition, Munich, appears a Crucifixion, Christ between the two thieves with figures at the foot of the Cross. The style with the types are taken directly from the early German masters ; the anguish of the holy women is pushed to grotesqueness, yet many of the heads are in form and expression worthy of Van Eyck : the art is far removed from that of the modern religious painters of Germany. The life-size picture in the Berlin National Gallery of the Last Supper, also an altar painting of Christ with raised hand in the act of benediction, give §igns of the painter's northern parentage in Estland on the Baltic. The story of the artist's life diverges from the beaten paths. After three years' training in the Academy of St. Petersburg, Carl Gebhardt entered the school of Carlsruhe and then came to Diisseldorf, where he now exercises the function of professor of painting. His masterpiece, the Last Supper, is re- markable chiefly for the northern and naturalistic types of heads^^holly removed from the forms of Da Vinci and of the old Italians. The faces and attitu&'es in fact are devoid of Christian graces, and assume an aspect almost repellant. The handling is robust, the colour Diisseldorf. 8 1 like all the rest becomes abnormal, the whole picture is thoroughly independent and cannot be said to belong to any school. Of all the Sclavonic and Scandinavian painters colonized in Diisseldorf, Gebhardt is the most phenomenal. The late Theodor Mintrop, sometimes called the Raphael of Diisseldorf, has been already mentioned ; his mind teemed with poetic imagery, his hand lent itself joyously to designs of romantic beauty, and altogether pleasure-giving are the compositions of the Four Seasons wherewith he decorated the ceiling of a merchant's house in Diisseldorf. 'Genre painting,' ' naturalistic schools,' and 'realistic styles' being here frequently referred to, a few remarks may be offered on manifestations which have become general throughout Germany. In the region of art, more perhaps than in any other domain of the mind, the law of action and reaction rules ; the pleasure-seeking impulses which find fruition in art are peculiarly subject to satiety, and the aesthetic appetite when satisfied craves a change in diet. Thus simples soothe as sequents to stimulants, and genre comes as a relief to high art. Another analogy is found in the law of mechanics, where action and reaction are equal and in contrary directions : this law has equal force in the world of mind as of matter; thus the severe tension of tragedy relents into the comparative ease of comedy, and, in like manner, high art rebelliously rebounds into low art. The schools of Germany, both old and new, have passed through successive changes in accordance with these laws. One marked transition has been and is from subjects sacred to subjects secular, and another and analogous mutation is from styles spiritual to styles natural, These several phases have been, and are, extant in Dusseldorf And yet the distinction between the separate classes is not quite so dogmatic as might at first sight appear ; for in art nothing can be really sacred save that which is true, while all that is true is so far sacred ; and, further- more, what is true must accord with nature, and therefore be naturalistic. In Diisseldorf, not- withstanding antagonisms past and present, the reciprocity and interchange between styles religious, ideal, and realistic, are close and continuous. But at the present moment beyond doubt the large majority of painters are devoted to genre, a word used to designate a 'kind' or 'sort' of art otherwise without a name. And there are reasons why this manner should be deeply rooted in Germany. As far back as the times of Meister Wilhelm of Cologne, in the fourteenth century, and of Albert Diirer in the sixteenth century, Teutonic types have been pronounced with strong individual character ; and accessories to the figures, such as draperies and jewelry, with the sur- roundings of architecture, have been for the most part elaborated with untiring care and abounding detail. Such is the time-honoured foundation on which the naturalism and the realism of modern art in Germany rests .solidly and surely. And when we look at pictorial panels more than three hundred years old still fresh in pigments lustrous as jewels, it is more easy to under- stand how the sound technique of German art descended on modern painters as an inheritance. Modern genre is the issue of the sacred art of old Germany ; Nativities and Holy Families had long been depicted with mundane surroundings, and when the sacred element was left out, the Shepherds, the three Kings with their retinue, furnished materials readily worked into genre pictures. Germany favours ^^;«r^-painting, and Dusseldorf is the great centre of the school. The people are domestic ; their affections circle around the homestead ; they are home-loving as distinguished from the cosmopolitan and sometimes homeless French. Nearly forty years ago, William Howitt, in writing his book on the ' Rural and Domestic Life of Germany,' threw open a wide and varied treasury, which native painters have since worked out but not exhausted. The mere titles of the chapters are indicative of pictures. Take the following :— ' German Villages;' 'People in the Woods and Valleys;' 'Out-of-door Life;' 'The Wandering Handi- craftsman ;' 'The Student's Funeral ;' 'Celebration of Christmas Eve' and of ' New-year's Eve ;' ■Sledging';' and 'Singular Characteristics and Social Habits.' 'The Germans,' Mr. Howitt observes, ''retain more of the picturesque and poetical in their festivals, both public and domestic, than we do.' 'The birthdays of their princes, or the anniversaries of great days in their own lives, are celebrated often in picturesque situations. Sometimes within the court g2 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. of a fine old ruin of a castle on one of their mountain heights, such as those above the Rhine, the Danube, the Elbe, or the Neckar, and the walls and approaches are richly decorated with garlands and wreaths.' The pictures produced from year to year in Dusseldorf, Munich, Berlin, and Vienna, seize saliently on local manners, customs, and costumes ; they portray the daily Hfe of the people in fields and forests, in the public street and market-place, and in the private circle around the domestic hearth. Ludwig Knaus, in his characteristic composition, the Children's Out-doors Feast or Festival — Kinderfest : wie die Alien sungen, so switsctiem die Jungen — a picture which fitly finds a place in the National Gallery, Berlin, depicts a company of merry-making children ; some sporting beneath the shadow of a tree, others seated at a table devouring the good things provided by their elders — all going on to the sound of a rural band of musicians. The whole scene is thoroughly German. Another social, festive subject, is a picnic in the woods in sunny summer days. A kettle is boiled over blazing sticks gathered from the forest;- the ladies gleam as objects of light among the sylvan shades; students are jovial over the cups, and a Rhine castle high in the sky looks down gravely and grimly on the convivial proceedings. The picture is put together on the strictest principles of composition, and yet the figures move easily, and seem to meet for mutual greeting as if by happy accident. The painter is Friedrich Hiddemann, born in Dusseldorf, and there educated under Theodor Hildebrandt and Wilhelm Schadow, professors in the local Academy, who seldom, if ever, descended, like their pupils, from historic and sacred art into genre. But such is the change, for better or for worse, which has come over the arts in Dusseldorf To enumerate all the painters of genre who hold a fairly good position in Dusseldorf would far exceed the present limits. However, it is impossible to omit artists so deservedly distinguished as Professor Vautier, Professor Jordan, and Hubert Salentin. After their kind the world has no greater living painters, save, perhaps, Ludwig Knaus. Vautier is a humorist : in the ' Bilderbogen ' for Young and Old he indites a 'Sunday Idyl' The morning opens with a girl's toilette and a barber's shop, including among the customers politicians and a priest ; next follows going to church ; and the day ends with a walk in the country and playing at bowls. A well-known picture by the same artist depicts an awkward squad of country lasses, one of whom persistently turns in her toes. The girls are drawn up in rank and file before a rustic dancing-master, who apparently has exchanged the plough for the fiddle. The character is trenchant, the drawing firm, the execution masterly. Professor Jordan is broader, sometimes coarser : he passes from humour into satire, and from sentiment into pathos, and thence into tragedy. He delights in shipwrecks : in the middle distance a boat sinks in a raging sea, while in the foreground, on the shore, mothers and children on their knees cla,sp their hands and tear their hair distractedly. The artist on another occasion, taking Nemesis as an ironical title, depicts an old virago mounting a ladder leading to a loft, intent on the birching of a naughty boy who in terror hides behind a tub. It may be said that in all this there is nothing very remarkable ; and perhaps the utmost that can be expected in this class of subject is that the story shall be told clearly, tersely, and pointedly. Hubert Salentin, the third but not the least of the before-named painters, is more sedate in sentiment and smooth in touch than his companions. In a picture conspicuous by its rare merit in the Town Gallery, the painter, inside a plain church, takes the Protestant view of religious worship. The pastor in the pulpit with quiet earnestness appeals to the reason, not to the superstition, of his intelligent hearers. The congregation are a practical, hard-headed people, to whom reason is a guide and conscience a law. I have annotated this picture in the catalogue, ' Perfect in its way ; great character ; capital execution ; not far behind David Wilkie.' A like Protestant service, the scene laid in the organ-loft, with a company of boy-choristers in full voice, is devoutly depicted by the Norwegian artist Nordenberg. Fagerlin, the Swede who has more than once gained the line in our Royal Academy, is in subject and style Dusseldorf. ' 83 wondrously akin to other dwellers in northern latitudes, such as the Scotch David Wilkie and Thomas Faed. These and other Scandinavian artists, making Dusseldorf their head-quarters, were for years under the leadership of the late Professor Tidemand, whose impressive picture, a young preacher standing up in exhortation to a small but devout gathering in Norway, still remains a much-prized treasure in the Town Gallery. This ever-to-be-respected painter, though he transferred his studio to Germany, remained in his art faithful to the land of his birth. I have before me an expressly national subject, the exit from one of the wooden churches in Norway of a newly-married couple. The bridegroom clasping the lady with one hand and holding his prayer-book and hat in the other, is dressed in olden fashion, his lower extremities terminating with scant breeches, stout stockings and buckled shoes. The bride, who carries herself with true maiden modesty, is decked with a wardrobe which descended to her as a dowry : her bodice, girdle, skirt, and apron, are embroidered after the manner of the country; on her head she wears one of the much-prized wedding-crowns. The pilasters of the church porch are elaborately carved with a floral and half-runic ornament. Tidemand cherished in his Dusseldorf studio such specimens of old Scandinavian woodwork, now seldom left in situ. The scene is laid among high mountains, and the marriage festivities open with the firing of a gun and the playing of a flageolet and a fiddle. Nordenberg, already named, depicted, while in Diisseldorf, a like scene. A marriage procession from a village church in Norway : the bride, the bridegroom, and their friends — the bride crowned and distributing gifts as she passes along — leisurely proceed on horseback, in carriages, and in carts. Musicians, also on horseback, and one strumming vigorously a fiddle, lead the way. Dusseldorf is obviously the most fitting spot, geographically and otherwise, for this Scandinavian colony of painters, and the art here begotten bespeaks its joint parentage. The subjects are almost exclusively ^^«r^, and the style combines the vigorous stamina inherent to northern nations with the scholastic training belonging to German Academies. The types of the heads and figures are deliberately Scandinavian, indeed the faces have the value of ethnographic studies, and the entire product presents an art phenomenon of unusual interest and significance. The pictorial progeny is not hybrid as when Germans and Italians meet and intermingle, but altogether legitimate and healthful ; indicating, as ethnologists teach, that Teutons and Scandinavians are in blood more of brothers than aliens. A few more painters of getire, several of whom have done sufficiently good work to win a place in biographical dictionaries, call for brief notice. I have been delighted with compo- sitions by Hornemann, Julius Geertz, Franz Wieschebrink, Lerche, Carl Mucke, H. Sondermann, Oehmichen, Ludwig Rossler, Christian Sell, E. Stammel, Friedrichsen, and Tiishaus. These several painters in divers ways play upon human nature, finger her stops, and sound her notes, and call forth melodies now cheerful and anon mournful. The subjects are chequered as the changeful incidents in daily life. The painter passes from a birth to a christening, thence to a marriage, and so on through man's seven ages to a death-bed and a funeral. These and other like domestic incidents create a class of pictures which are more or less akin all the world over. But this German genre is distinguished by thoroughness. The French are more sketchy and light-handed and hearted, but remain comparatively superficial ; the Germans dive deeper, and probe the human heart more searchingly, dissecting as it were nerve and muscle, as if to touch the pulse of life and lay bare underlying motives, the springs of outward movements. A favourable example of the Diisseldorf'school on its naturalistic side is given in the contiguous illustration to this chapter. Domestic Devotion, engraved by Herr Biirkner from a characteristic picture by Professor Lasch. This artist has been more than usually varied in his experiences. Born at Leipsig in 1821, he came as a youth to Dusseldorf and entered the Academy; he then joined the private school of Professor Bendemann ; afterwards he went to Munich, and thence to Italy. Later on he was occupied as a portrait-painter in Moscow, and received honours from the Academy of St. Petersburg. Finally he settled as a family man in Dusseldorf, but when I called at his house a few days since I found him away in England with commissions, especially 84 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. in Liverpool, for portraits. Lasch's studio in Diisseldorf, pleasantly secluded among trees, is well stored with figure studies and landscape sketches, sunny in atmosphere and radiant in sentiment. This is a happy-minded art, and sometimes while looking at such genre pictures in Diisseldorf, generally cheerful but seldom absolutely mirthful, I am reminded of the opening sentences to a favourite essay by Addison : — 'I have always preferred,' writes this sensitive critic, 'cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I considea: as an act, the- former as a habit of the .mind:' Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent, , Mirth is : like a flash of lightning- that breaks , through a. gloom of clouds and glitters for a moment, cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.' With one more, remark I close' the subject. Of genre paLinting Ludwig Knaus is the leading master in Germany, if not, indeed, throughout the world ; and it is a significant fact, indicative of the whole, school; that Knaus has been long a devoted worshipper of David Wilkie. While residing, in Diisseldorf he hung the walls of his room with all the engravings from Wilkie he could lay.hold of. There is, indeed, much that is Scotch in the naturalistic schools of northern Germany. . I have. recently been observing the remarkable phenomena presented by landscape-painting in Germany, The manifestations are varied and complex, and cannot all be classified- under one head or treated as the products of any one principle. There is a great deal of landscape art that is in no .way local or national, but of a sort which pertains to the world generally, and might have been painted almost • anywhere. . And there are some pictures ' which undoubtedly pertain in what may be termed their geographic or ethnologic traits or styles to' France rather thari to Germany. Take, for example, the great landscape-painter of' Bavaria, Adolf Lier ; his' eminently truth-seeking and- peace-loving studies of nature in the Iriterriatiohal Exhibition, Munich; and in the National Gallery, Berlin, give signs of the tuition he receWed'in the aielier of Jules Dupr^ in Paris. But on the other hand, as already pointed" out, there is a manner dis- tinctively. German, and therefore national, differing from the types dominant in France, England, or Italy. Two painters, -Wilhelm Schirmer and Friedrich Preller, are particularly identified with the rise of the national school which has its chief centre, if not its cradle, in Diisseldorf Judged historically, the landscapes of these renowned artists will be found to be. allied to the' grandand imaginative compositions of Nicolas and GasparPoussin. The' pictures are built up of rocks, mountains, massive trees,' and storm-inflated clouds, vs/hile the figures, kept in due sub-^ prdination, carry, out- the surrounding cohiposition, and often in their grouping and action lead on to a dramatic story, or move the mind by lyric or epic' suggestiveness. Johann Wilhelm' Schirmer and 'Friedrich Preller- were alike born in the first decadre of the present' century, and the aim of each has so much in common with the' other, and the works of the two are so closely akin,' that it sometimes becomes a question which_ought to take precedence. Schirmer is seen in the' Gallery:of Diisseldorf by ^(4 Landscape in the Italian Character, ■anA by a series of twenty-six compositipns illustrative of the Old Testament ; also he is represented in the Academy by broad yet detailed. sketches frdm .nature. animated by poetic promptings^: In the. National Gallery, Berlin/he is . recognised by. equally individual efforts, A -Woodland Lake, The Cloister of Sia. Scholastica in the Sabine Hills, and six Biblical landscapes. The brother^ Friedrich ■ Schirmer of Berlin, is accounted, inferior to Johann of Diisseldorf, yet the manner of the two appears cognate.' And here may, obtain mention, as indicative of the tendings of the time, the historic wall-pictures in the New 'Museum, Berlin, constituting 'the famous Cy'clus of Egyptian ^ and Grecian Land- scapes which stand as examples of the , ideal-illustrative expositions' which find' favour in Germany. The brother, Friedrich, who here- surpassed' himself, had the advantage of painting under the inspiration of that infatuated genius, Karl Schinkel, architect and pictorial draftsman combined in one person, and hence these wall decorations, like a series of frescoes by Gaspar and Nicholas. Poussin within a church in Rome, assume a symmetry and proportion which entitle them to the designation of architectonic landscapes. This ' Cyclus' runs over the same circuit as DUsseldorf. 85 the wall-pictures of Karl Rottmann in Munich, depicting historic sites in Greece. Rottmann, in fact, by the poetry and the ideal beauty of his conceptions, deserves to be placed in the same category as the brothers Schirmer and Friedrich Preller. It can scarcely be too often repeated that landscapes of 'this school are ever animated and governed by a motive. One of the most mature and impressive of Johann Schirmer's compositions is an Italian woodland in the Diissel- dorf Gallery, of umbrageous chestnuts and evergreen oaks, with a basin of still water lying in the midst ; half the scene rests in shadow, with an outlook upon fields and hills reposing in serene sunshine: the whole picture in the equable balance of the lines is a perfect piece of scientific composition, and the entire work, complex in its parts and abounding in exquisite detail half veiled in shade, is brought into absolute unity. And in this oneness 'lies the pervading motive ; the scene speaks of tranquillity, and invites as a resting-place for reading and meditation. The artist has built up his Biblical series on like fundamental principles ; these designs, which are far removed from Schnorr's Bible, Dora's Bible, from Martin's Deluge, and Danby's Passage of the Red Sea, have received from the artist himself explanatory but not very lucid comments to the following effect : — ' Courage is needed inso difficult a subject — the representation of God's positive revelation in the old dispensation, the preaching of the Divine word — and all the more hesitating courage is required, because I do not dare to go beyond the limits of my subjectivity in these landscape illustrations. ' The landscape is the preparatory and sympathetic element through which God has made known by chosen men, as instruments, His will and judgment. ' And I, in my personality, standing in the place of these recipient instruments, hold myself in sympathetic relation with the situation, and try to contemplate and feel the revelation of God in the whole of creation ; yet the abounding materials of my art over-master me, and I put limits to my enjoyment, until is reached a certain unity in the whole composition. ' Now the land wherein I have placed this wonderful history of the archetypes of human existence, is, for me. Nature ; of which I have industriously gathered my studio materials in Germany, Italy, and Southern France. In these days there is no lack of geographic pictures of the East, and I renounce most unwillingly all my preconceived views ; as for the figures, it has been impossible for me to ignore the deep expressiveness of Schnorr's Bible pictures, from which I have taken many hints. And while I thank this worthy artist for the willingness with which hfe has given me the use of his works to this end, I humbly admit the limits of my capacity in the representation of the human figure.' Accordingly the figures are borrowed from Schnorr in the following Biblical compositions : the Expulsion from Paradise, Cain and Abel's Sacrifice, the First Murder, and Abraham's Entry into tfie Promised Land. In many of the scenes the execution is not equal to the conception ; the painter seems to have been content when he had conveyed the intended idea broadly and clearly. Some of the compositions are extremely felicitous : Paradise on a Spring Morning is a sunny vision of a blessed land — the earth before the fall ; Adam and Eve, nude, look out upon the Claude-like prospect. Cain and Abel's Sacrifice is placed in a landscape imaginative and poetic. Another grand composition is the Invention of the Arts by the Descendants of Cain : through fubal came Music ; through fabal. Architecture ; through Tubal Cain, Sculpture. The whole scene of evergreen groves and of all things beautiful constitutes a fitting birth-place for the arts. Very grand is Noah's Sacrifice; and lovely as a vision is the promised land on which Abraham is entering. Other pictures are equally imposing: thus, Abraham and Isaac going to the Sacrifice is awe-moving as the massive compositions of Poussin. These landscapes, though often im- perfectly carried out, gain on the imagination the more they are dwelt on ; the natural meets the supernatural half-way ; the pictures reveal a land suited to miracle — a land in which God made known His ways. The special manifestation of landscape-art in DUsseldorf — on the whole the most signal in Germany — is inseparably identified with the great historic painter often named in these pages, Karl Friedrich Lessing. As before said, the practice of high art has given to the landscapes of this master intelligent purpose. There are critics in England whb deem the study of the human figure to be the best training for an architect who is about to design z 86 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. a column and a capital, or for a landscape-painter who has to draw the trunk, limbs, and other anatomies of a tree. Lessing is a case in point; with him landscape grows out of figures, and, again, figures pass into and combine with landscape. Moreover, there is something plastic in the mode in which he moulds nature ; rocks may be said to stand almost as statues, and mountains are carved as if they might be marble pediments. In the' same way other component members of a composition are balanced symmetrically, as in the sister arts of architecture and sculpture. Thus a landscape may be said to be literally built up as a .structure or edifice. Lessing, as a realist, worked out such results in a comparatively matter-of-fact way, but Schirmer, of whom I have spoken, and Preller, of whom I proceed to treat briefly, fashioned their works under the creative spell and power of the imagination. Friedrich Preller, who died less than two years ago at the age of seventy-four, fell in early life under the influence of Goethe in Weimar, hence, in part, the classic, yet romantic and imaginative bent given to his genius. He is, as before indicated, one of those landscape- painters who, from the- outset, became well grounded in the study of the human figure, and while in Rome, under the guidance of Joseph Koch, he gathered in the Campagna and among the Sabine hills materials which, after the example of the Poussins, he embodied into historic landscapes. Subsequently he made sketching tours in northern latitudes, and became for a time imbued with the melancholy spirit of shadowy mountains and stormy fiords ; but his affections ever drew him to the sunny south, and his most esteemed compositions are replete with memories of Amalfi, Salerno, and Capri. In the land of poetry and of song his art assumed a responsive tone, and reached an ideal elevation which, naturally, sought companionship with the master poets of Greece and of the Fatherland. His fame, which in Germany is regarded as imperishable, rests chiefly on the cyclus af landscape compositions, combined with figures illustrative of the Odyssey. An oil-painting taken from this theme was in 1864 purchased from the artist by Count Raczynski for his choice picture-gallery in Berlin. It is a most lovely landscape, thoroughly characteristic of the pre-eminently poetic painter. It combines the forms most beautiful in nature. The eye is led on to a vista of sky, sea, castle-crowned headlands, hills, and blue mountains. Advancing towards the foreground comes a Roman chariot, and classic-draped figures stand by a well and the waters of the sea. Claude - like trees, delicate in tracery of stems and foliage, stand against the liquid, tranquil sky. The study of the composing lines is exquisite in its harmony. Preller dedicated a considerable portion of his life to maturing the Odyssey cyclus. In 1836 he completed in tempera the series for the Roman House of Dr. Hartel in Leipzig, and the museum of the same town contains eighteen cartoons illustrative of the poem. Furthermore, the National Gallery, Berlin, conserves sixteen charcoal drawings, the mature result of prolonged study in Italy. Lastly, in 1863 and 1864, these cartoons were carried out as wall-paintings in the wax hiedium within a hall of the Weimar Museum. These compositions will for ever remain a triumph of the creative imagination: they manifest the element of the supernatural: they depict an earth, a landscape, fitted for the habitation of giants, heroes, gods. The rocks are grandly designed and distributed, as in Turner's boldest conceptions. The trees are equable in proportion, graceful and subtle in flowing curves and in a network letting through the light of day into slumbrous shadows and quiet places. Foreground plants — cactuses and flowers — are treated sensitively, as if possessing life and individual being. The figures are in strictest symmetry, both in themselves and in relation to their surroundings; they are possessed of an ideal form in keeping with the beauty of the hills, and seas, and skies. In like .manner Grecian temples and other edifices conform to the daily life and faith of a poetic age. The whole landscape with its human tenantry constitutes one vital creation, issuing as a vivid conception from the artist's brain. This year, in accordance with a goodly practice, was held, in the rooms of the National Gallery, Berlin, a special exhibition of the works of Friedrich Preller. The catalogues prepared on these occasions by the Director, Dr. Jordan, are of critical value, and I gladly Dusseldorf. 87 avail myself, though at the risk of repetition, of the estimate given of the genius of Preller, to the following effect : — ' As the appearances in human life become pictorial when imbued with sentiment, and when they assume completeness in physiognomy, so, according to Preller and his associates, it is with silent nature. Therefore Preller strove after the expression of inherent organic correspondences ; and in the seemingly accidental details of landscape he sought simplicity of motive and intensity of individual character. And full of passionate joy in realities as they exist, he threw himself with restless industry into the study of the actual existence of material things, and obtained an insight which gave him the right to dispose of accidents according to higher laws. While dwelling in Weimar, or tarrying or travelling in Italy and northern Europe, his aim ever remained the same. The foundation-theme of his creative art was the union of landscape and figure into an indissoluble whole. The cyclus of the Odyssey stands as the consummated exponent of his purpose. The pictorial representation of the Epic, as Preller comprehended it, recognises three principal elements : the cyclus, or scenes in consecutive and connected series ; the art style, or the pictorial language expressing material objects'; lastly, the arrangement of compositions architectonically or according to the proportions of the structural spaces. Preller's treatment was something more than simply illustrative : he ignored episode and held fast to the kernel or root of the story. His art unfolds the inevitable sequence of events. The destiny of the poet he elaborates in pictorial succession. Preller, as already stated, set himself, as a specific task, or artistic problem, the manifestation of the inherent and abiding harmony subsisting between human nature and landscape nature. The various and tentative steps and phases by which his aim became accomplished give occasion to admire the ardour with which the artist brought his work to perfection. In his monumental arrangements he completed the landscape cyclus by a figure cyclus, and in his predella pictures he treated the figure after the manner of the designs on antique vases. Thus has arisen an art which in all senses belongs to the greatest efforts of our time, in which the sum total of earnest striving, mature conception, and mastery of execution, make the name of Preller immortal.' It has been already pointed out that historic figure-painting is usually accompanied by historic landscape, while on the other hand genre and realistic figure-painting begets a corresponding genre or picturesque landscape. And this has been the case in Diisseldorf. Since the time of Schirmer and his associates landscape has lost ■ its idealism and relies on the strength and the truth of its naturalism. Not, however, that grandeur has forsaken this northern school, for the painters of Dusseldorf find congenial sketching-ground among the wild fiords of Norway, and are accustomed to bring back from their autumn excursions among mountains, scenes heroic and effects phenomenal. Such landscapes are usually ponderous and tempestuous : dark precipices frown over perilous depths and stormy clouds threaten what John Constable used to call great-coat weather. Among the painters given to this sort of thing are H. Herzog, J. Rasmussen, and C. Oesterley, the latter for his Norwegian pictures was rewarded in 'the International Exhibition, Munich, by a First Class Gold Medal. Sometimes the artist rises from a mere transcript to a creation ; the scene before him he does not copy literally, but uses the materials as motives, and thus works out the suggestion or idea to its logical consequences. And so the composing of a picture becomes analogous to the solving of a problem. It is understood that Mr. Peter Graham treats his native Highlands after this fashion, though he must be held guiltless of borrowing the method from Germany. The American, A. Bierstadt, stands as an offshoot of the Diisseldorf school : his Rocky Mountains give favourable proof of the training he underwent in Germany. The brothers Andreas and Oswald Achenbach take the lead among the living landscape painters of Diisseldorf. They have been loaded with medals and decorations, and the houses, or rather palaces, in which they dwell bespeak more than common prosperity. I have just had the pleasure' of visiting their roomy and decorative studios. Professor Andreas had on his easel a characteristic scene — a stormy coast on the northern seas, grey, almost leaden, in tone, lashed by wild waves, and half lost to sight in weltering foam. The b other Oswald, as usual, was environed by canvasses glowing with bright visions of the sultry south. The eye greets as old acquaintances pictures of the Bay of Naples, the Piazza of Amalfi, with festas in the gardens of Italian villas, and processions with banners floating along the public streets. The Galleries in Diisseldorf and Berlin, and almost every Exhibition in Germany abound in the products 38 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. of these most prolific and prosperous of artists. A rapid enumeration of other noted landscape painters must suffice. The National Gallery, Berlin, — a kind of Pantheon of gods in the realm of art— has chosen as worthy of prominent position master-works by Eugen Diicker, Karl Ludwig, and Gregor Bochmann, all of Dusseldorf. The manner of these artists is weighty, they lay on the shoulders of mother earth a heavy load. Karl Jungheim, Fritz Ebel, L. Munthe, and August Kessler have, by the verisimilitude of their mountains, rocks, forests, lakes, and torrents, won a place in the biographical dictionaries of contemporary artists. For architecture, Adolph Seel has gained a name ; in marines, Theodor Eckenbrecher shows mastery over waves and sea-craft ; and Christian Kroner holds foremost position for animals, especially deer, in the midst of woodlands. Diisseldorf still mourns the loss of the late Hugo Becker, a pupil of Schirmer and Gude, of rare poetic gifts. Bright in shining light are his bowery trees, glittering the leaves as they dance in the breeze, joyous as summer the peasant-girls and children playing at the cottage-door. Germany as thus depicted is a happy land. The choicest and best products in Germany are due not only to academic culture, but to the sympathetic fellowship established between master and scholar. This correspondence between mind and labour has led to a copartnership, so that, after the practice of the olden times, the scholar has asked for the privilege of joining hands with the professor in his work as an act of worship. The relation of brotherhood in Dusseldorf between professors and pupils has been compared with the equality of republics, while the constitution of other academies resembles that of monarchies or oligarchies. It has been elsewhere customary that a director should stand as an infallible power, but in Dusseldorf no one dictator extinguishes other professors. Each in his sphere has liberty of action. Thus, during three quarters of a century, Dusseldorf, though torn asunder by turmoils and dissensions, has ever given equal rights to all styles, including the latest — the naturalistic ; which last, by reason of its ponderosity, is less favoured than the French in fantastic fancy. Art products in our days, as especially in the golden time of the Venetians, I have ever found, whether in Rome, Paris, Munich, or Dusseldorf, to be the best outcome of the com- munistic life of artists and literary students. All work under a common enthusiasm. And one thing a little peculiar is, that while a stranger may hear the most savage charges of plagiarism, yet the men themselves dwell and club and sketch together as brothers of the same brush. One point of -. community in artist circles is music. In Diisseldorf, Mendelssohn lived two years, and, conducting the ' St. Paul,' his influence has all the more survived to the present day. In Dusseldorf, as in the time of Giorgione in Venice, music is the painter's passion. And in the pleasant retreat of the Jacobi Garden, formerly a tranquil resort for poets, painters, and philosophers, now is located the ' Kiinstler-Verein ' of nearly four hundred members ; and, between tobacco and beer, the distinction of spiritualistic and naturalistic schools is nearly obliterated. In this secluded spot the summer programme is to sketch, to drink coffee, or to imbibe wine, beneath cool and shadowy trees. In the winter a retreat is naturally made to the ' Malkasten,' as the club-house is comically named, the walls of which are effectively decorated with off-hand landscapes and subject-pictures. The principles of the Diisseldorf school, though supposed to be immutably established, may be played upon at will. Here also are performed amateur theatricals, after a custom long established in Rome. It is certainly a phenomenon that Dusseldorf, though identified with sacred art, should surrender herself to practical joking, fun and frolic, of all sorts-. But life in Dusseldorf, as in Rome, lends itself willingly to the free fling of the 'artistic impulse — what Schiller has designated 'the play' of the imagination. And Continental manners, free and easy in their way, lead artists into feasts and holidays, so that daily life mingles with the common life of nature, and becomes scenic and picturesque. Artist Festivals, Commemorations, and Processions, the figures personifying characters in costume, accompanied with banners, trophies, and music, may be almost said to have, in Germany, Dusseldorf. 89 grown into established institutions. Dusseldorf in such scenic displays naturally takes the lead, and the artists, holding as their freehold the famous Jacobi Gardens with a Club- House annexed, possess unusual facilities and appliances. Nature in these grounds meets art half-way. This sylvan retreat, though disposed as with the skilled hand of a landscape-gardener, has been left free and almost negligent in exuberant growth. Silent paths wind along shadowy avenues, green swards open into broad arenas, the river Diissel spanned by rustic bridges runs rapidly through the midst, and breaks into waterfalls and gathers into ponds or lakes surrounded by high and bowery trees. Some of the trees rare in kind have found here for many years congenial habitat, and though venerable in age they have lost none of the graces of youth, but from the days of Schirmer have freely offered their beauty to the sketcher's pencil. With such tempting sur- roundings, Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream' has been put upon the stage which Nature herself prepared, — the green turf with waters round about and trees on all sides. The grass and water-plants are of luxuriant growth, and lighted lamps were hid among the leaves, and illumined flowers made of coloured fabrics shone gaily from the branches, and sprites and girls modelled in papier-m^ch^, semi-draped and fully-winged, floated in the upper air as flying. The artists are naturally clever in such contrivances, they make and put together all things needed ; they, of course, are adepts in scene-painting, and the ladies aid in the way of flower-making, in weaving garlands, and so forth. At the entrance to Jacobi's dining-room, now converted into a life-drawing class, lies as lumber a canvas-constructed shell capacious enough to float living figures across the lake. This fairy boat drawn by swans enacted a triumphant part in the f^te given to the Emperor and Empress. On this ' Kaiserf est' the ' paint-box' club expended an amazing amount of colours and canvas, and ' all the talents' assisted in a gala so overpowering as to draw from the Emperor tears ! 'I have seen,' said he, 'many festas, but this surpasses all.' The success was not secured without a considerable degree of trouble : a committee had to- be constituted, and the varied work apportioned among the artists ; a theatre needed to be built, a play to be written, two drop-curtains and six scenes were wanted ; together with decora,tions, banners, and transparencies. Andreas Achenbach, besides giving sketches, worked and painted heartily, his facility with the brush coming into play oft and again. When the performance took place. Professor Camphausen, in character of ' The Wild Man,' opened the proceedings with a few genial verses ; the illumined arms of the club appeared supported by a two-headed eagle ; and after the overture the curtain rose on a landscape with six white-bearded men seated in the foreground, the characters being none other than the committee. At this moment a young artist rushed forward, and introduced Germania on horseback, wearing a purple mantle and clad in golden armour, accompanied by six pages. Next came the Nine Muses with a rainbow behind rising above the horizon ; afterwards entered History, Tradition, and Poetry, whereupon Art presented herself and claimed the right to lead the revel. A cloud which served as a drop-curtain, painted by Andreas Achenbach, descended and veiled the scene; on its rising was revealed a level land on which waves broke, and the graves of old heroes were seen upon the shore. This effective scene, painted by Professor Baur, represented ancient German warriors watching the approach of hostile Romans. The tableau vani.shed, and thereupon appeared a forest with soldiers, chariots, and Roman prisoners ; among the groups stood conspicuous Arminius, Thusnelda, with Sagas ; then ensued wrestling, sword-dancing, and the incensing of dead heroes, together with other German rites of the olden time. The curtain fell over the patriots in lusty vociferation at the expense of their fallen foes, to rise in contrast on a rural landscape with children, a hunting-castle in the distance, and a foreground occupied by a company of gaily- dressed ladies and cavaliers, who in their merrymaking fraternised with the simple villagers. Next came a hawking and hunting party which in turn vanished behind the aforesaid cloud. And so proceeding onwards and passing through mediaeval times, the spectator came down to modern days, when the French were ignominiously driven back by the Prussians beyond the Rhine. The triumph of Blucher was depicted by Professor Hiinten, the great battle-painter of Northern Germany. The ensuing years of peace gave Professors Vautier and Bosch occasion for A A 90 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. pretty g'gnre tableaux, when all joined in singing the "^ Wacht am Rhine,' and the children cried out^ ' Long live the Emperor!' An after-piece followed, whereupon the theatre was quitted for the open garden. Trees twined into gothic arches held pictorial transparencies of Rhine legends : Lorely was painted by Director Wislicenus, Siegfried by Professor Janssen, Genoveva by Director Bendemann, the Swan-Knight by Roeting, the Dragon-Maiden by Professor Janssen, and the Wounded Roland by Professor Lasch. A vista led on to a fairy extravaganza or transformation scene, with coloured lights playing over water-lilies, with swans drawing a silvery shell bearing Rhine maidens, who, amid a chorus of voices, presented the Emperor with a wreath. The cere- mony was closed by an imposing procession in which all the characters took part. Fortunately the night was fair and calm, 2500 persons were present, and the good-natured -old Emperor the same evening gave expression to his feelings in a long letter full of thanks and congratulations. The idea had naturally been long cherished that a public monument was due to Cornelius, as a native of Diisseldorf and as the founder of the local school. It cannot but strike the stranger as singular that little remains to record the presence and the influence of so great an artist. The frescoes painted in the neighbouring cathedral at Neuss are swept away, and nothing is left but the wall-painting in the Castle of Heltorf, and a small and early oil-picture in the Town Gallery. It was determined, then, to make amends for the neglect ; a committee was formed, a verein, or art-union, constituted, and a competition opened for designs suited to the proposed memorial. Twenty sketches were sent in and exhibited at the Malkasten ; preference was given to Professor Donndorf, whose design has been carried out in bronze. The composition does not call for special remark. Cornelius, robed in an academic gown, holds in his hand a crayon as if engaged on a cartoon ; his well-known and strongly-pronounced head, weighty with thought, looks intently, as the custom is when genius has to be immortalised, into space, as if in search of a great idea. The figure stands firmly on a granite pedestal, and on either side sit, in due symmetry, the personifications of Religion and Poetry. At the time of the opening festivities in the present year was appropriately held an exhibition of the painter's works. Also a procession was formed, passing from the old Academy on the banks of the Rhine through the town to the house wherein Cornelius was born, and thence to the pretty spot surrounded by trees in the Konigs Allee, where the memorial stands. The banquet, at which ministers of state delivered usual speeches, was followed by a f^te in the gardens of the Malkasten, at which the artists displayed even more than their habitual fertility of fancy. Recourse, as usual on such occasions, was had to transparencies, fairy scenes, and a dramatic performance accompanied by music. A Venetian bridge, after the fashion of the Bridge of Sighs, had been thrown across the lake: a figure of Cornelfus was set thereon, and the artists and their friends passed over to the sound of a band, and illumined by coloured lights. Specially appropriate to the occasion shone a transparency from the fresco by Cornelius in the Glyptothek, depicting the Wasserweld, or the Wonders of the Sea ; also in expressly artistic guise moved a procession of leading characters taken from the painter's chief compositions. I am indebted to Mr. Lewis, artist and American Consul, and to Mr. J. A. Crowe, the art-critic and English Consul-General, for having called my attention to points of interest which might easily escape a stranger. I learn that the long-pending suit by Dusseldorf against Bavaria for the recovery of the Boisserie pictures, taken away seventy years ago to Munich and never returned, has been compromised. At the time of the German and French war, Bavaria stipulated as one of the conditions of her support, that she should not be further troubled by this teazing litigation. And then, in turn, Dusseldorf pleaded that her rights ought not to be bartered away without compensation. Accordingly, Prussia agreed to devote a considerable sum of money to the erection of a Gallery in the Allee Strasse for the adequate display of the Town Collection of pictures, and also for the continuous exhibition and sale of the current works of the Dusseldorf artists. The new building, which is much ,jieeded, will shortly be ready for use. A matter of even more moment ' is the Dussddorf. g i completion of a large handsome Academy in place of the old building destroyed by fire. It rises above the Haven adjacent to the Rhine, and beyond its fagade lie the gardens which are the delight of Diisseldorf. This commanding edifice is three stories high, the style is the Renaissance, and more than the usual allowance of windows affords abundant light to the class-rooms and studios. It is early days to speak of the advantages which may follow when the new Academy shall be in the full enjoyment of the professors and students. For the present suffice it to say, that ample provision is made for thorough instruction in all the branches of art, that there are separate rooms presided over by well-esteemed professors, for the antique, the living model, for architecture, sculpture, painting,' and engraving, for historic painting, church painting, and landscape. The Directorate of the Academy has been recently changed, and while all regret to lose the valued services of Director Bendemann, the majority rejoice that the duties henceforward devolve on Hermann Wislicenus, an artist who, having been trained in the schools of Schnorr and Bendemann, will abide by and perpetuate the old and honoured traditions. The new Academy devotes its large gallery to the keeping of the collection of old pictures, few of which, however, since the spoliation of the Boisserie Collection are, of much repute, save a true masterpiece by Rubens, the Assumption of the Madonna. Furthermore remains to be mentioned a Palace of Industry and Art, now in course of erection for the great exhibition which will open in 1880. It may thus be judged that Diisseldorf, though reputed a quiet town, has of late been strenuous in action. The. artist's portfolio is assuredly furnished with engaging material from territories acces- sible to Diisseldorf, whether in type of peasantry, character in costume, or picturesque accessories for backgrounds. The vineyard-clad Rhine, the hills of Bavaria, the mountains of the Tyrol, together with Scandinavian fiords and pine-covered heights, have drawn the minds of Leu, Lessing, Achenbach, and many others, to depict vast tracts of land and illimitable regions of atmospheric space. The landscape art of Diisseldorf must be judged after its kind ; but, whatever be its merits or defects, it is distinguished by space, scale, immensity, systematic and complex composition, and by the relation of individual parts to the collective whole. A simple flat Dutch landscape may represent one afternoon in the world's making, but these Diisseldorf landscapes might seem to need the whole six days of creation. Diisseldorf is almost less an academy than a conglomeration of studios. A comparatively small town of seventy thousand inhabitants, prettily situated on the lower banks of the Rhine, its ancient ramparts thrown down and encircled by pleasant promenades, joyous with bright villas, naturally forms a centre towards which artists congregate. I have visited the studios of Achen- bach, Lessing, Tidemand, Hiibner, and many others. Among these painters was one who, while burdened with at least half-a-dozen children, still devoted his easel to honeymoons or domestic scenes, with the first-born on the knee. But such conditions are so universal that they belong to no school in particular, because the themes are popular, and pay. I have never quite known why the greatest school in Germany should have been fixed at Diisseldorf; but at least the facility of communication is great. And when I look to the studios of Kensington and of St. John's Wood— studios which over many months of winter scarcely see the light of day — I understand why painters, loving acacia-gardens, oleander-groves, and running streams, migrate to the banks of the Rhine. Studios there placed stand pleasantly in the morning light, above the grey yet shining river, with green banks foliage-clad. Others have out-looks on gardens or wild country barely redeemed from the savagery of nature, with views sweeping from the rising to the setting sun, and interludes of green fields and groves, the river reflecting the changing sky, with blue hills for the distance. On the whole, Diisseldorf is favourably situated for art work ; it has been truly said that poetry and lyric music animate the wine-growing districts of the Rhine. 92 CHAPTER VII.— BERLIN. PRUSSIA in arts, as in arms, was late to acquire an acknowledged position among the first-class powers, but never wanting in ambition, she has made Berlin the great centre of art in Northern Europe. Diisseldorf is an academy and an atelier: Berlin is something more ; she is the residence of a Court, the legislative and administrative focus of the collective Germanic Empire ; she is possessed of ornate and well-stored galleries. But Diisseldorf and Berlin at least have this in common, that each in its surrounding country is singularly destitute of the beauty and picturesqueness in which a painter delights. The intention for long has been to make Berlin a show capital. Much has been done in the way of fagading ; the arts are put on public parade in the streets, and are drawn up with military dignity and precision in the open squares. Rauch's equestrian statue of Frederick the Great is one of the most successful monuments of modern times. Perhaps in no other city can the systematic study of painting and the history of art generally through its monuments be prosecuted with more completeness and chronologic sequence than in Berlin. The Academy of Berlin dates from 1699. The city, when visited by Count Raczynski in 1806, was as to Art a desert, and yet he enumerates twenty landscape painters, twenty- four painters of genre, nine portrait painters, six marine painters, six painters of city views, four flower painters, seventeen engravers, fifteen architects, and other departments in the same proportion. With the increase of population and of luxury of course these numbers are vastly augmented. The Academy has undergone usual changes in Directorship and mode of teaching. The revolution wrought among the artists in Rome between the years 1 8 14 and 1820 passed to the northern capital on the . Prussian students' return. The Academy has since again been reorganized, and is now supposed to do its duties fairly well. The idea is that Art shall form an integral portion of human life, that it shall not only penetrate picture-galleries but permeate private dwellings. A practice much to be com- mended is that of surrounding national art treasures with the* scenery and accessories among which they first existed, or were subsequently discovered. Thus, in the Salle Grecque of the New Museum the mural decorations serve as consonant historic backgrounds. Among the subjects depicted by Schirmer, Biermann, Schmidt, Graeb, and Pape, are scenes from Lycia, Syracuse, the temples of ^gina, the Acropolis at Athens, and the temple of Jupiter at Olympus. Such legitimate service of landscape art was present in the capacious mind of Humboldt. Also in Berlin the art of mural painting has been turned to domestic uses ; the practice is rapid and scenic, hke that of the old Romans or the modern Italians, and thus in this facile and inexpensive way many a blank wall, external as well as internal, receives pleasing decoration. The eye hereby, when days are dark and cold, is carried along sunny woods and valleys unto distant hills. Berlin, already one of the most ornate capitals in Europe, wishes still to add to her decorations. A project has been mooted for the erection of an elaborate assemblage of Museums on the so-called Museum-Insel. Every one knows that the late King entertained the ideal but somewhat impracticable scheme of grouping together the old and new Museums already erected with a Cathedral and projected Campo Santo. The ' elevation of the new buildings, as pubhshed in the ' ZeitscTirift fur Bildende Kunst,' displays an imposing parade of columns, cupolas, and spires, which rise triumphantly from the surrounding waters. The design provides accommodation for the National Gallery, the Academy, for exhibition-rooms, studios, and other appliances needful for the culture of the arts. It is only to be hoped that this magnificent project will not prove wholly impracticable. Berlin, 93 Wilhelm Kaulbach, already appearing in Munich, comes into prominent notice here in Berlin. His career was not a little remarkable. Born, in Westphalia in 1805, he owed his descent to a family of artists ; his parentage, however, was humble and poor. His father, like the masters of old in Italy, combined the trade of a goldsmith with the profession of a painter, but necessitous times came ; nevertheless the son, at the age of seventeen, was taken to Diisseldorf, and placed under the tuition of Cornelius, then Director of the Academy in that city. During these early days young Kaulbach had to fight against all kinds of privation, even hunger. But at the end of four years he followed his master to Munich, and set about works which soon brought him into notice. In 1837 he executed for Count Raczynski the cartoon for his imaginative masterpiece, the Battle of the Huns, still in the Raczynski Gallery, Berlin ; and later he painted for King Ludwig the Destruction of .Jerusalem. In 1867, in the Paris Exhibition, the cartoon of the Era of the Reformation obtained one of the few gold medals bestowed only on the most distinguished artists in Europe. These threq grand compositions form part of the great cyclus in the New Museum, Berlin. It might have been said of Kaulbach that it was ^is wont to rush into places .where angels fear to tread, and Count Raczynski draws far from a favourable portrait when he writes that the painter is ' greedy of fame, passionate, dictatorial, impatient of control, confusing his intellect with fancies and symbolisms, and yet indifferent to the significance of any art but his own.' The same discerning critic not inaptly compares Kaulbach with Pietro da Cortona and Luca Giordano ; others, again, have likened him to Hogarth : the artist's comic vein crops out in his somewhat grotesque illustrations to Reineke Fuchs, of which examples are given in the two following pages. A characteristic anecdote is told of the painter's early work, the Narrenhaus, which certain critics in covert censure pronounce to be his best. In Diisseldorf existed a madhouse, and the scholars of Cornelius were invited to paint frescoes on the walls in consideration of a daily allowance of bread, cheese, and beer. The sights and sounds which Kaulbach there witnessed haunted his imagination as an evil dream ; his brain grew fevered, and the demon could not be exorcised. One day, however, the thought was recalled how Goethe, when troubled, had written himself into relief by composing ' Werther ; ' thereupon the painter sat down to draw upon paper the images which had taken possession of his mind, and the effort assumed a final form in the famous Narrenhaus. So great became the success of this appalling concentration of madness, that an enterprising director of a Kunst Verein offered to the artist a commission to make five-and-twenty replicas. But Kaulbach declined the honour, assigning as an excuse that if he were to paint a second madhouse he should become em inmate himself His, indeed, was a genius akin to madness, and sometimes the thin partition is broken down, and the painter wanders into strange places, encounters startling shadows, and, gifted with second sight, glances into spheres beyond the boundaries of this lower world. It is in such moments that the master's art frees itself from habitual thraldom to the Italian Renaissance, and becomes essentially German, brooding darkly on mysterious myths and wild sagas. But the pride of the painter's life undoubtedly was to throw around his goodly shoulders a Roman toga, and enact high art with swelling gesture, ' clothing heroic figures with equally heroic draperies!' Yet his classic compositions lack the simplicity of line and the severity of form which are prized in Greek art. And so with his Christian concep- tions : while dramatic in power and scenic in situation, they want the quietism, the inner life, and the spiritual fervour possessed by the religious and reverentian painters of bygone ages. A change came over the pictorial art of Berlin when, about the year 1845, Kaulbach had been summoned to decorate the Treppenhaus, or grand stairca.se, of the new Museum. The ambitious purpose was to illustrate, after the German generic fashion and ideal mode of conception, leading epochs in the history of the world. The cycle runs as follows : — The Tower of Babel, the Age of Homer, the F^all of Jerusalem, the Battle of the Huns, the B B g4 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. Crusaders, and the Reformation. No less than twenty-four engravings from these large and complete compositions are now before me. The pictures I watched while in course of exe- cution, and I have seen the artist at his work. The whole series was evolved through the best years of the painter's life. Thus, as far back as the Paris Exposition Universelle de i8SS, I found no less than nine cartoons for these wall paintings, while in the great French Exhibition of 1867 the cartoon for the Era of the Reformation gained for Bavaria its one grand prize, eight only being allowed for the whole world. Each of the six large tableaux is 30 feet long, and comprises over one hundred figures above life size. Kaulbach ever worked hard, as witness these and other arduous undertakings. The artist's latitudinarianism has in Germany given occasion to cavil. The apologj' is HANGING THE FOX. AFTER KAULBACH. that the painter is exclusively the artist, that he is not the divine to teach dogmas and doctrines, but is, like Shakespeare or Goethe, the dramatic 'poet, to seek in the world's history noble characters, stirring actions, and grand scenic situations. Kaulbach imposed on himself the difficulty of bringing everything within geometric form, and for the most part he preferred to play out his action within a circle. Certain logicians reason in a circle, and so Kaulbach, even when he. had to occupy a quadrilateral, focussed his compositions in the midst, and then made his figures rotate around. Another disadvantage under which Kaulbach laboured was, that he failed to convince the world of the depth of his convictions : he was all things to all men, yet neither the Greeks of the time of Phidias, the devout painters of the Middle Ages, nor the modern Naturalisti, would have found satisfaction in these hybrid creations. The misfortune is, that from Kaulbach's hand a Venus is a coquette ; ' Pudicitia,' a courtesan ; Cherubs, Cupids ; Christ, an Apollo ; Madonnas, Junos ; Jehovahs, Berlin. 95 Jupiters. The explanation is, that the genius of Kaulbach lay on frontier lines, between classic territories. Renaissance epochs, and modern times. The most appreciative estimate I have met with of the nobly inspired artist comes from the pen of the ' Art-Student in Munich,' a pupil in the atelier of KaullDach. The purport of her remarks is, that the highest merit of the master lies in a certain intensity of imagination, akin to the gift of the seer, whereby he is able to picture the fantastic past with the vividness of present reality, to reveal ' ages lying far off in the early dawn of time,' so that ' the dead bones and ashes, buried in funereal urns, in cairns and barrows, become instinct with life.' Kaulbach's six philosophical readings from history adorn part of a Museum designed by Schinkel, an architect to whom Berlin owes as much as London did in a former day THE SICK LION. AFTER KAULBACH. to Sir Christopher Wren or Inigo Jones. The portico of this Museum is painted with imagi- native figures, also designed by Schinkel. I remember an instructive morning passed among the collections of the architect, when I came upon talent, if not genius, that had wandered wholly from the beaten track. Folio after folio was turned over, each heavily laden with archi- tectural designs, drawings of the figure, and of landscape. In execution there was little to commend ; it was the versatile invention, the teeming imagination, that overwhelmed the spectator. Of course there were fagades of all sorts, but what struck me most was the scenic use made of situations, the happy knack of gaining a striking effect somehow ; and above all, the faculty of bringing the habitations of man in close relationship with outward nature. Schinkel's knowledge of landscape enabled him, by slight adaptation, to make a landscape garden out of a wilderness, in the midst of which he would place his cottage or his mansion. I suppose no man ever constructed a greater number of castles simply upon 96 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. paper. , But J well remember. 'noticing creations which at any rate served to inflate the imagination.:, a. mansion, -l.et me say— a palace of art — with belvideres, balconies, terraces with , cypresses arid . statues, a garden ibelow, and beyond a wide sweep of pasturage and trees, with, the wild- hiljs and sky in . the closing distance. It is much to be regretted that the style of Schinkel. was illicit ; it .acknowledged-, no precedent, it submitted to no law, but thus was, it all .the more ind.ependent. ^ .It .is interesting to mark that the architecture of Berlin, of Munich, and of Vienna, each stands apart distinctive in character. Indeed, I have some- times thought that ■. the . revived architecture , has more originality than the resuscitated painting. ,- . ■ " .. A-i ward .-may „be given to the polychromy which surrounds and throws up the water- glass pictures of Kaulbach. It is not, like that of Munich, Byzantine or Mediaeval ; it is, with some adaptations, directly Pompeian. Gold, however, is in parts applied lavishly, and the attendant figures .borne out by gold backgrounds tell as usual with rich and artistic effect. They do not blind the eye by excess of light and colour, but keep their places quietly on the- flat wall. This' is. the teal test of the right application of gold. Persons with a passion for colour, such as the old Venetians, , might object that the whole system is too scientific; it does not rouse.an' impulse or a love. The Germans, are too dogmatic; they do not admit that, for the rri'ost part. Art begins only at the point where Science ends, that Poetry breaks into song only when. Prose has had its plain say. The Germans are certain sure of their system, as the . French are of . the doctrinaire teaching of Chevreul ; with them, decorative art has been reduced ■ to the certitude of a 'positive philosophy:' hence German colouring, .the product, of the hard intellect, is crude, and fails to satisfy the imagination or the emotions. ' .. * In Berlin, as in Munich, the new ' wEisserglas * process is used in rivalry with the older fresco method. ; Some artists prefer the traditional technique, others the new invention. My own obsei-vation teaches me that each mode has its specific benefits. Kaulbach's treatment in Berlin has the advantage of greater detail and finish, owing to the possibility of adding over-tints on the first stratum of colour ; it has, too, more of unity of light and shade, more of atmospheric distance and -aerial perspective, from the facility of rubbing over the surface semi-ti-ansparent glazings and scumblings of colour. I have never, however, seen in Germany, either in "fresco,' water-glass, tempera or encaustic, a picture comparable in quality to a pure and sirinple Italian fresco of the good old time. Kaulbach's water-glass pictures have proved enduring ; I have never detected the slightest traces of decay ; and when I saw them the other day, the composition first completed was as fresh as the last. In our Houses of Parliament ,. we have had painful experience, which makes this question of processes of almost national .import. Frescoes having failed, the Prince Consort desired Daniel Maclise, R.A., to visit' Berlin, to obtain all possible information from Kaulbach, who was then hard at work on a scaffold before one of his grand cornpositions, Maclise, in the course of his report to the Royal Fine Arts,. Commission, hastily designates fresco as positively repellant to artists. H^-theh' proceeds to say, that, ' with, the purpose of acquainting himself practically with ' watetiglass or stereo-chrpmCj; — ; • . , . s 'I vi sited, Berlin in the aiitumn of 1858, and there I had the opportunity of closely inspecting five large and btherwise- notable oSjects, painted in stereochromy by Kaulbach, his pupils Echter and Muhr, and with the assistance of others who were also" executing in the same style a series, of "designs .under the portjco of -the siree .Museum. The works, appeared to afford marked evidence of the success of the process: a sixth work, to complete the series of the larger set, is in contemplation, • and. for this the cartoon is prepared. Between the. larger compositions, abo.ve mentioned there are colossal allegorical single .figures,. painted also in the new material, _ and owing; their permanence. to having been impregnated with water-glass." Of these" works it may indeed safely be said, that they form a Series of the noblest embellishments 'of one of the grandest halls which architecture has as yet dedicated to the development of a 'kindred art: and here, .too, is to be viewed in perfection how transceridently imposing are tht results when the two arts are harmoniously combined.' 8R W^ ' '*'»''V ^y!^ ^ '^ ■ 'm ', J n Berlin. 97 The illustrations chosen for this paper are characteristic works of Kaulbach. The Deluge is one of those compositions which lays strong hold on the imagination, and the figures floating in the upper sky exemplify the semi-supernatural treatment of which the painter was peculiarly fond. Two minor illustrations in the next and the following page form parts of the ornamental friezes to the compositions in the New Museum. Of more significance are a couple of subjects in pages 94 and 95 — Hanging the Fox and the Sick Lion, from the renowned illustrations to ' Reineke Fuchs,' made about the age of forty. Kaulbach here appears in his true element : he is himself. Often when striving to compass great historic transactions, he throws himself out of his own individuality and assumes the grand proportions of Michael Angelo and other great Italians. But the story of ' Reineke Fuchs ' calls forth drollery, fun, and pungent satire ; and the artist in being true to himself surpasses in this peculiar line every other master. I have recently had the pleasure of seeing in Kaulbach's studio, which is still kept . open, not only the original drawing for the Deluge,\mt first ideas for the Friezes in Berlin, and three studies for Reynard the Fox. Likewise among other caprici are careful pen-and-ink outlines of the contest between storks and frogs, also facetiae of trees transmuted into human figures, and of roses growing into women's faces. Again, it once more appears with what exuberance teemed the artist's fancy: his imagination was peopled with phantoms sometimes grand or lovely, but often fantastic and grotesque. The Deluge here engraved is an epic. The ' Art Student in Munich,' who naturally is in sympathy with the more poetic phase of the painter, became deeply impressed with the drawing, and penned an eloquent description which runs as follows : — ' Kaulbach's Deluge. ' When, shortly before the death of Kaulbach, we visited his studio, the composition which attracted our attention the most was one of a series of subjects taken from the Book of Genesis, in which he sought to depict the Deluge. His treatment of the familiar, yet most difficult subject, struck both my husband and myself as peculiarly original. With the great artist himself, who kindly exhibited to us his works then in progress, this appeared to be a favourite. 'The waters have risen to the topmost' peaks of the mountains, which stand forth, rugged and half-submerged islands. They are crowded with masses of distracted men and women, mingled with wildly-writhing animal and reptile life in their convulsive death-throes. The living and the dead are hurled together by the tossing waves of the mighty waters. Amidst the seething waves of the rapidly- increasing flood a lion roars in his last agony, direfully clutching with claws dug deeply into stony rock or tender human flesh : he heeds not which it is that he clutches. An ox, mad with terror, struggles fiercely, with upturned head, against the blinding waters, entangled amidst the fern-like branches of a submerged palm-tree. Men catch blindly in the waters at the ox's side, and, clinging to him, seek to save themselves. Serpents twist and twine around the bodies of men alive and dead. Women cry for pity in vain to an avenging God, holding aloft with weary outstretched arms their infant children, or wave their imploring hands beseechingly towards the departing Ark of Salvation. Whirling flights of baffled birds battle with the descending clouds, the torrents of rain, and the wild gusts of wind, which tear their outspread wings and batter their plumage. Shadowy and dark against the stormy horizon sails ever onwards across the face of the angry deep the huge and roughly-builded Ark, unheeding the clamour of man, beast, and reptile, which ascends from the island-peaks of the perishing world. ' Upon one huge rock, midway in the picture, has sought to save itself a crowd of the mammoth, the mastodon, and the saurians of the antediluvian world. Serpent-necked, be-scaled, and be-winged creatures of uncouth and ponderous form, they struggle in blind rage against each other, with intertwined trunks and serpentine necks. 'Amidst all these islands of human and brute despair, passes onward the solemn, mystical Ark of Noah, ensphered' by the protection of the Almighty, piloted by a mighty 'Angel of the Lord,' with his widely outspread sail-like pinions, in floating white raiment, and holding in his strong right hand a wand-like oar, with which he guides the mystic ship of the chosen of God. His back is turned upon the perishing world of sin, and his eyes are set steadfastly upon the light of the New Dispensation. 'A. M. H. W.' C C 98 The Schools- of Modern Art in Germany. Berlin fulfils the general law that literature leads the way to new epochs, and that then art follows. In the time of Frederick the Great, under the sway of Voltaire, the arts naturally tended Frenchwards. Then arose in literature a distinctive German revival, and again art became animated by the same spirit. And it may be justly said that in no capital save Barlin has existed so close a proximity between art creation -and criticism, between art products and art philosophers. A leading position is due to the critic Kugler; his intellect was sufficiently clear, his heart was warm, intuition was his guide, the subjective philosophy his law ; he was not misled by the outward show of things, but viewed a picture from within with his mind's eye. This basis of criticism is now obsolete, but with Kugler it led to deep sympathy with the early spiritual and subjective schools, and, by consequence, with their derivatives in modern Germany. Strange enough, the ultimate editing of Kugler's ' Handbook of German Art' fell into the hands of Dr. Waagen — a hard, dry writer, who, unlike Kugler, had never been guilty of eloquent utterances. Waagen I had the privilege of meeting some few FROM A FRIEZE BY KAULBACH. times, and not to be forgotten is a morning when he guided me through the Gallery he himself had greatly formed. I soon found out that the knowledge with which he was accredited had not been overrated ; moreover, that his sympathies for pictures executed before and during the life of Raphael flowed spontaneously. He was a simple-hearted, honest man, and his influence over the contemporary art of Berlin was for good. More recently have arisen critics in Northern Germany, who swerve the stream of con- temporary art. Herr Hermann Grimm, in his life of Michael Angelo, speaks prophetically of the coming of artists who, now working in secret and vahied less than they deserve, will be understood only when Michael Angelo is appreciated as he should be. This manifestly points painters of the present and of the future to grand monumental art. Also Dr. Woltmann, in his admirable life of Holbein, directed the vision of the educated classes to the good old times ; at present, heads painted after the manner of Holbein are not infrequent in exhibitions. But these reciprocities between literature and art are unfortunately exceptional. It cannot be overlooked that for some years, while Kaulbach was painting his wall pictures, a hostile party grew from strength to strength, till at length power fell into the keeping of the Naturalist! Berlin. 99 and Macchinisti, whom historians know as the last, if not the lowest, phase of the aesthetic intellect. Art beginning with spiritualism ends with materialism. I admit that Berlin has taken a middle course ; her career, deviating but little to the one side or to the other, may be compared to an imperial triumph. Before concluding this passage, the reader may be reminded that both Niebuhr and Bunsen were attached to the court of Berlin, and did much to transplant art's finest fruits into the Fatherland. But Bunsen, ignorant of art in the true sense of the term, and indifferent to all works that did not touch human interests, is known to have ' allowed for landscape-painting no place other than that of an innocent amusement and decoration, except when the figures inserted tell a story and give a sense to the whole.' But Humboldt, the greater man of the two, held illimitable faith in the progress of landscape as the reflex of the infinite cosmos — a progress assured by the wider knowledge of nature's ways, and by the opening of new zones to civilisation and to art. Many painters, no doubt, rest content with farm-yards and back-doors, but the best genius of Germany is true to the FROM A FRIEZE BY KAULBACH. inspiration of Humboldt ; it loves mountain masses, a sky of tumult, dark pine-forests, and raging torrents. Such art is dramatic, grand, and soul-moving. Berlin towards the close of the last century, as already said, had in literature fallen under the sway of France. Voltaire tells of himself that he was called in to wash the dirty linen of Frederick the Great. Many are the pictures that Professor Adolph Menzel has composed out of the strange situations of this period. Not even the great Frederick could sustain the character of a hero to his valet, and so, notwithstanding Thomas Carlyle and Adolph Menzel, the grand monarch is now taken down from his pedestal. I am often, indeed, at a loss to know whether or not Professor Menzel, while preserving pictorial proprieties and maintaining state solemnities, is not all the time laughing at the expense of the king. Certainly, I cannot but read as a satire the famous picture in the National Gallery, the Concert Sale in the Castle of Sanssouci. Frederick, standing in the midst with the flute at his lips and the well - lit music - sheet before him, has come in his solo to a cadenza, at loo The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. which the accompanyists, including Emanuel Bach at the piano, solemnly pause, and the whole assembly of princesses, countesses, and other notabilities show themselves transfixed with amazement. The merit of the picture lies in its story; as for "the execution, it is. so loose and sloppy as to lead to the conclusion, sustained indeed by other works, that Menzel draws and composes well, but cannot paint in oils. His drawings and water-colours are eminently artistic. Adolph Menzel contributes, to the National Gallery another serio-comic scene, now become historic, though it sets at naught the pictorial prescripts of historic art. At the round table of the king at Sanssouci sit a distinguished company, and among the guests the eye is specially drawn to the voluble Voltaire, decked in a big-wig and sparkling with wit and repartee. One hand, delicately fashioned, is posed sensitively on the table, the other, elegantly elongated, is nervously raised as if to point the argument with the finger. The French satirist, himself sneered at for. his monkey visage, is courteous and bland in the extreme, and yet he would seem all the while to laugh in his sleeves at the expense of his royal host. Frederick the Great receives the volley with stately stolidity, and his handsome features and proudly condescending bearing recall the aspect of Sir Roderick Murchison when presiding at the Dinner of the Literary Fund. The Library at Sanssouci preserves a copy of the writings of Frederick, annotated by Voltaire with cutting criticisms, .Coming upon the word ' plat ' several times in consecutive lines of the same poem, the censor observes, 'Voici plus de plats que dans un tr^s-bon souper.' Again he writes, ' S'il faut conserver cette ^pigramme, il faut la tourner tout autrement.' But then, in turn, the sycophant peeps out in eulogies, such as the following: 'Que d'esprit! de grice, d'imagination ! qu'il est doux de vivre aux pieds d'un tel homme !' Menzel has hit off to a hair's breadth the two-faced, the double-sided character of Voltaire. The picture is true to the life, and yet is a satire on the men of the time. The conflict between the French and the German intellect, both in literature and art, has been continuously sustained down to the present day, and the contrasts between the German and the French character are not more marked than the differences between their art. The Germans are grave, solemn, heavy ; the French, on the contrary, are light - hearted and even frivolous, and so are their respective art embodiments. In the same way, the Germans are moody and meditative, accordingly their art inclines to melancholy : it is sombre in colour as in conception, it claims to be didactic and philosophic ; on the other hand, French art has no desire to instruct, it is content to amuse : pleased with a feather and tickled by a straw, it smiles while the moments fly. The- Germans are known by an abruptness and roughness of manner which in northern pictures begets hardness, and occasionally degenerates into coarseness ; the French are conspicuous for suavity of deportment and for surface polish which secure the strictest etiquette even on canvas, and constitute the most exquisite ' tableaux de soci^td.' The French are pleased to adorn a tale, though they seldom care to point a moral. On canvas the French Madonna is apt to be a flirting, fascinating grisette, or a sorrowing Magdalen. A French saint is but too often a sinner in the sackcloth of suffering ; the French heaven has a semblance to a select company from the Champs Elysees, and angels seem to take to wings when tired of tip-toe flight ifl a casino. In retaliation many are the accusations laid against the Germans. Their art, as already said, is the elaborated product of metaphysics and mysticism. It would seem as if the abstractions, complications, and involutions of the German language and the supersubtleties of German aesthetics were wrought into the intricate tissues of pictorial canvases. ' German compositions are oppressed and borne down by weight of ponderous thought and intensity of overwrought expression, and hostile critics have objected that the sportive spontaneity of genius, the free fancy of the mind let loose for holiday, is coldly petrified, as by the touch of winter, aged and witheijed. The flowers of the imagination grow not in exuberant joy, as in the sunny fields and wilds of nature. Flowers there are, but they win not by. their colour, they allure not by their beauty ; they are the flowers which the studious Berlin. loi botanist presses within sheets of paper — flat, faded, and rigid. This the Germans call art ; and they measure and map out creation with compasses, and that they term science. The Germans, too, are known as the profoundest of archjeologists, and no philologist ever traced the derivation of a word, or hunted out the origin of a dialect with keener scrutiny than these German savans apply to the elucidation of antiquarian lore. They would appear to have hunted down the pictorial genealogy of each saint, angel, or demon. They can decide whether the wings of St. Michael should be lustrous as rainbow-plumes or grey as eagle-feathers ; they can determine how the scales of Satan in his overthrow shall be burnt by brimstone and the coils of his tail tortured by spear. Painters thus guided become more of archaeologists than artists. They rummage the records of antiquity and lay thick their pallet with the dust of ages : they must unroll a mummy before they would presume to paint a Pharaoh. They, dig in the dark vaults of the Catacombs seeking out Christianity in the sepulchre, and do not care to look to heaven for direct inspiration. I do not wish to prolong a controversy which the recent strife of arms has at this time embittered. It would seem more generous to dwell on the high qualities which distinguish the several combatants, and to remember the good deeds that each has done and yet can do. However, before turning to more amicable topics, I cannot resist the temptation of quoting a caustic passage delivered in April, 1879, by M. Renan on his election to the French Academy: — ' The unity of your traditions, gentlemen,' said M. Renan, ' is in your love of truth, in the genius which discerns it, in the art which places it in the most advantageous light. You do not reward such or such an opinion ; it is talent and sincerity that you crown. You fully admit that in all the schools, systems, and parties, there is a place for eloquence and uprightness of heart. Whatever can be expressed in good French, whatever can make a human being great and lovable, has been admitted here. There is a common source whence is derived a good style, high purposes, the art of correct speaking, and nobility of character. Else- where literature and society are distinct things. A deep gulf separates them. In our country, thanks to you, they intertwine with each other. It matters Uttle to you when you hear pompously announced another culture which will not depend on talent. You are suspicious of a culture which does not render man more amiable or better. I greatly fear that some races, which are serious ones no doubt, since they tax us with frivolity, will be grievously disappointed in the hope they nourish of gaining the favour of the world by pro- ceeding otherwise than you have done. A science pedantic in its solitude, literature without gaiety, a high society without brilliancy, a nobility without wit, gentlemen without politeness, great captains without sonorous battle cries, will not, I believe, at once dethrone this old French society, which is, above everything else, sparkling, polished, and solicitous to please. When a nation, by what it calls its seriousness and application, will have produced, what we brought forth with our frivolity, such literary masters as Pascal and Voltaire, such scientific heads as d'Alembert and Lavoisier, or a nobility more exquisitely bred than ours in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries, or women more charming than those who smiled on our philosophy, or a burst of vigour greater than was shown in our Revolution, or greater facility to embrace noble chimeras, or more courage, more savoir vivre, more good humour in facing death, or, to be brief, a society more sympa- thetic, more worthy of sympathy, more spirituelle, than that of our fathers, then we shall be conquered. But vanquished we are not yet. We have not lost the ear of the world.' In Prussia, a land lying towards the north, and bordering on the Baltic and the North Sea, a proximity and alliance begin to be felt with the literature and art of Scandinavia. It has been long known that the German people owe much to their northern brethren in Norway and Sweden, and that old Teutonic legends found their source in Scandinavian sagas. And writers, such as Thomas Carlyle, wax into unwonted ardour when they approach the massive proportions of the gods Thor and Odin. Hero-worshippers have enough cause for wonderment in mythic creations, rugged, grand, and gigantic, like the savage rocks lashed by wild storpis. The whole of these regions are peopled by unearthly beings, which crowd the air as motes which dance in the sunbeam ; and perhaps it were not too much a stretch of fancy to suppose that the atmo- sphere, the earth and waters, became at length so over-populated, that sprites and elves, and even giants, migrated southwards into Germany, where wider space might be enjoyed. Here, at all events, in the great Fatherland they freely sport themselves even to the present hour. And some doubtless crossed the seas to England, and under the disguise of Puck, Ariel, Oberon, I02 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. Robin Goodfellow, Titania, and Queen Mab, courted companionship with our own Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, and even Milton. A brotherhood has long been recognised between the arts of England and of Germany ; and Shakespeare has long ago in Germany stepped from the library into the picture-gallery. But it has been observed that the tenants of fairy-land in Britain are more mirthful and aerial than their German kinsfolk ; that the sprites dance in the green valleys and on the velvet turf of England with a light fantastic toe not habitual in the solemn ancestral Fatherland. Spirits dwelling in Black Forests cast mysterious shadows, and deal in direful portents of evil. Kaulbach here in Berlin is faithful to northern legends in his almost preterhuman impersonation of Tradition. This wild, wizard woman, with the prophetic head of a sibyl, and the petrifying outlook of a Medusa, receives inspiration not from a dove but from a raven ; she holds a divining rod, and with outstretched hand she seems to reach from the past into the future ; at her feet lie a skull and an urn filled with human bones. Also a like Teutonic second-sight and forecast of destiny possess the bowed-down figure of Veifs aged Druid, the head bound with mistletoe, the hand hanging over a harp of broken strings.' Likewise evidently came, not from the south nor from the east, but from the north, Cornelius's Four Riders of the Apocalypse. With the Greeks the Angel of Death is lovely, and were it not for the inverted torch might almost be mistaken for the Angel of Immortality ; but here Death on the pale horse, with a scythe long enough to sweep down a whole city at a swoop, is a demon of dire destruction. So is Rethel's Death, the Avenger. The same artist has in another design with bitter irony represented Death weighing in the balance a crown against a tobacco-pipe. It is a good sign of the times that Rethel is everywhere recognised as the most German of painters since Durer, Holbein, and Martin Schoen. But it is understood that German lore and literature contain much that is too dull for art uses. It is recorded that in the middle of the last century were found in the library of a virtuoso no fewer than 300 volumes of devotional poetry, containing ' A treasury of 33,712 German hymns; and about the same time a certain scholar is said to have amassed as many as 1500 German novels, all of the seventeenth century. It is added, the hymns were much better than the novels ; or rather, perhaps, the novels were much worse than the hymns. Mention is made of a treatise entitled the "Poetical Funnel," manufactured at Niirnberg in 1650, and professing within six hours to pour in the whole essence of this difficult art into the most unfurnished head.' The great revival in literature and art, of which throughout I am speaking, had for its object to sweep away this long-accumulated rubbish, and to" put in its stead master-works of a prior and better period. Among the prized literary heir-looms is the ever-extolled ' Niebelungen Lied.' Many traditionary poems growing out of and into one another are known to exist : the Germans ' had their Heroic Age, when round the old Valhalla, as a northern Pantheon, dwelt a world of demi-gods.' This thrice-told tale is recounted to indicate the rich storehouse whence painters take apparently inexhaustible treasures. Julius Schnorr, as already said, here found in the 'Niebelungen Lied' endless themes for tedious wall pictures in Munich, and the same national epic incited Moritz Schwind to adorn with chivalric deeds the romantic castle of Hohen- schwangau. But after all, perhaps the precise subject was not of so much import as the animating motive, and the point to be observed is that an entire change had come over art. The middle ages were, brought to li^e again, old costumes, cabinets, tapestries, armour, lances, and banr^ers, were pressed into the service of the painter, who looked moreover beyond the out- ward show, and sought to body forth the manhood and womanhood which spake through the poets and meistersanger of the olden time. Prussia has given birth to several painters thus retrospective yet prospective. Of Alfred Rethel mention has been already made. Of Rudolf Henneberg; whose death three years ago leaves a blank not easily filled, a few words will not be out of place here in Berlin, where the artist's masterpieces are found. The painter's most popular composition is The Chase after Pleasure. A youth here, on a fiery steed, rushes headlong to clasp in his arms an undraped girl, who, as an illusive joy, beckons his approach, and lures him to Berlin. 103 destruction. The skeleton of Death, mounted on a wild horse, follows swiftly, eager to hurl the lance. The composition, which is not free from extravagance, has the movement and the imagery of an old balkd. The coming night, with storm and rain, gathers dark, and deep lies the city mote, into which horse and rider will, in a moment, plunge. The same artist takes another phantom of the imagination from Burger's favourite ballad of 'The Wild Huntsman.' The picture is somewhat of a confused medley of horses and riders tearing along furiously over broken ground in pursuit of a stag just securing his exit from the scene. The ear seems assaulted by the noisy tramp of the wild steeds ; all is stir and movement ; it is a troubled dream, as when the restless mind sleeps, and wakes, and wanders, startled at its own strange conjurings. The picture is eminently German ; it moves with the machinery of the supernatural. In style, and in the crowded superabundance of materials, • it resembles some old woodcut of the time of Burgkmair and Wohlgemuth. The artist was haunted by a revelry of fancy ; he threw off caprici ; he would, in odd moments, draw a mischief-working Cupid on the wing, tapping at a casement to gain admission. I have also seen a sketch of another little Cupid frightened at a barking dog, and climbing a tree to get out of harm's way: likewise in the National Gallery, Berlin, are preserved drawings representing gallant knights and fair ladies that might have delighted the romantic mediaevalism of Sir Walter Scott. Henneberg had a new way of looking at things old ; his mind's perspective ranged through the past as if all were present ; everything was viewed in the colour of the imagination, a colour rich and luminous as that of Titian, and yet deeply shadowed as if the scene were a long way off in the dim vista of ages. Akin in spirit, and allied in training, is Gustav Spangenberg, present in the National Gallery, Berlin, by a somewhat appalling composition. The March of Death. A hooded skeleton, bearing and tolling a bell, leads the way accompanied by children garland- wreathed'; a bride in white follows on one side, on the other an old man struggles along upon crutches. It is a scene of woe told touchingly and yet with the unswerving truthfulness of Diirer and Holbein. German art has much yet to accomplish in this direction. The aim of such painters as Henneberg and Spangenberg is not servilely to revive styles obsolete, but to paint as the old masters would now compose if still living. I may just mention that these two painters are Protestants, and accordingly they move with freedom through the entire domain of the reason and imagination. Count Raczynski, writing in 1841, declared that Berlin could scarcely be said to have a school. Since that time, however, and specially at the present moment, the city has gained and is gaining vastly in power and importance, the teaching in the Academy is well organized ; and as an example of public patronage it may be mentioned that Makart's tremendous picture, Caterina Cornaro, has been purchased for the Berlin National Gallery at the price of 50,000 marks (equal to about 2500/. sterling). Evidence has been already given, in the super- abundant production of pictures, of great activity. All subjects and almost all styles are studied and prosecuted with zeal. The treatment has been by turns grave and gay; the execution has alternated from miniature to the largeness of scene-painting. Schinkel has adorned the city with showy architecture ; Ranch is the creator of historic monuments in bronze and marble ; and Paul Meyerheim and others have made a dull city joyous by pleasure-awakening pictures. The school of Berlin, as already indicated, has passed through successive periods. First came what may be termed the pre-art epoch, which extended unusually far into modern times. The second period may be said, somewhat conjecturally, to date from the closing quarter of last century, to the return of the German pilgrims from Rome in 18 14. With this infusion of new and vigorous blood commenced modern modes. A third period is supposed to have dawned when Kaulbach arrived to paint his imaginative and historic cycles. Berlin had been transformed into a mongrel classic city, and Kaulbach's style accorded well with the mood of the moment. But, fourthly, another change came over public taste, or rather caprice. Kaulbach's style, as already recounted, was denounced as artificial, affected, egotistic, and contrary to nature. Even the newspapers, mostly worthless, were hostile. The I04 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. painter, while yet working in Berlin, was aware of this revulsion in feeling, and he felt it bitterly to his last day. Finally, under this virulent reaction, came things as they now are, when each man does what seems right in his own eyes, each artist being a law unto himself Berlin, Munich, and Dresden, has each a distinctive school of sculpture ; and the Berlin school holds the highest position, inasmuch as Rauch is greater than either Schwanthaler or Rietschel. Johann Gottfried Schadow, born 1764, is considered to be 'the father of modern sculpture in Berlin,' by some he has been deemed an idealist, his largest and most conspicuous work is the colossal Victory, in a car drawn by four horses, crowning the Bran- denburg triumphal gateway to Berlin. But Christian Rauch, born 1777, is the sculptor who eclipses all others, as a visit to the museum of his collected works will prove. He belonged to a good period, and had the advantage of converse with great minds : among his friends were numbered W. Humboldt, Canova, and Thorwaldsen. Yet he formed his style inde- pendently, and hence his manner which, for want of a better term, may be called Teutonic, differs from that of the somewhat over-refined and sensuous Italians on the one hand, and from that of the stern, if not harsh, master of Denmark on the other. Rauch, working in the service of conquering Prussia, became possessed with the idea of victory, accordingly I have just counted among his collected statues more than a dozen Victories, some standing, others sitting; among the latter is a Victory in the Walhalla — than which there is no more renowned figure in modern times. The balance is perfect ; Victory is poised between motion and rest ; with a graceful sweep of the arm the laurel wreath is bestowed. Rauch was a master of drapery, and here too he reconciled repose with movement, and passed from one to the other without sacrificing either. His Victories step forward swiftly, and the drapery consequently falls backwards, and is tossed as by a wind. The study is almost, as a matter of course, an adaptation from the draped torso in the corridor of the Vatican. But Rauch made whatever he borrowed his own. I have just come from the consideration of the drapery in the most admired of the sculptor's figures, that of ' the beautiful, amiable, and unfortunate Louisa, Queen of Prussia,' as she lies on a marble couch in the Mausoleum at Charlottenburg. The drapery of the Fates of Phidias, the beau iddal of all drapery, has more delicacy of touch and rhythm in line ; but Rauch here again proves his independence, and the veil cast over the body which sleeps rather than is dead, reveals the form beneath, and falls lightly, as if loth to burden a lady framed so tenderly. ' The expression is not that of dull, cold death, but of undisturbed repose. The hands are modestly folded on the breast ; the attitude is easy, graceful, and natural' The sculptor's utmost power and resource were put forth in the great equestrian group, Unter den Linden, dedicated to Frederick the Great. The equestrian statue is 17 feet high, and stands on a pedestal 25 feet above the ground, the number of portrait figures grouped around is 31, and to secure accuracy of likeness the most authentic drawings, busts, and medals, were consulted. The result proves Rauch to be the most reliable of realists, and the monument stands as the largest assemblage of portraits in bronze in the whole world. Great is the skill in contrivance, construction, and composition, and no in- considerable amount of art even, has been brought to bear. Rauch is unrivalled within his special sphere; in the way of imagination he hardly made himself known. August Kiss, remembered by innumerable replicas of Tlu Fighting Amazon, has left several effective groups in Berlin : St. George and the Dragon, in a courtyard of the old Schloss, is a masterpiece of casting in metal. The public squares and streets, which bristle with bayonets and warlike weapons in bronze, also are indebted to the fertile plastic powers of Emil Wolff and Friedrich Drake. Berlin, as a military capital, shows her predilection for warriors : she proves her gratitude by giving public statues, in number without precedent in any other city, to the heroes who have won for Prussia power and position. In this preference the idea may be that the appropriate place for men of science, art, and philosophy, is not in the noisy street or public square, but in the quietude and retirement of the librany or museum. The architecture of Berlin presents some few points worthy of note. The surrounding Berlin. 105 neighbourhood being destitute of stone, recourse has rationally been had to brick, and from plain rectangular brick the transition is natural to terra cottas, more or less decorative. I shall speak again of the constructive and. ornamental uses to which baked clay is put in Germany when I come to Vienna ; at present I will briefly mention recent applications of the material in Berlin. Schinkel, who is accepted as a genius of invention and construction, led the way in the design for the Architectural Institute, which appropriately conserves the Schinkel collection or museum. Here the use of brick is comparatively elementary, and the tone of colour has been varied but slightly ; still, some plaques of figures in reljef are introduced with good effect. A neighbouring church in the Gothic style, by the same versatile architect, is remarkable for a winged figure of St. Michael and the Dragon in terra cotta and larger than life. The Gothic tracery in the windows is also of baked clay, and the curves remain true in line — a merit not always found in hke bold attempts in Berlin. There are no examples of Gothic in the town or neighbourhood worth attention. The Imperial Bank and the Mint afford good specimens of the way in which the marble palaces of Italy may be turned into brick. The colour is pleasantly varied by the introduction of light terra cotta and of still lighter stone ; and in the new School of Art string-courses of a bluish-green, throwing rosettes and fleurs-de-lis into light relief, give to the facade a somewhat pictorial aspect. These ideas or methods being once started may, in the detail, be played with according to fancy : architectural ornament in relief or intaglio, arabesques of inlays or designs in the manner of grjiffiti, are all proved to be practicable and pleasing. Sometimes single figures, life-size — as, for example, a full-length of Albert Diirer — are drawn and burnt on clay, and then placed on a fa9ade as a pictorial panel. Bricks to be used simply constructionally can of course be moulded into almost every conceivable form, and thus in the School of Art, which is in itself an exquisite work of art, a cornice of utmost beauty in proportion and detail has been successfully elaborated. Fluted columns and arabesque pilasters decorate the new Physiological Institute, and a varied polychrome has been successfully applied to the facade of a handsome school or gymnasium. But the new Rathhaus is the building above all others wherein the capabilities of the material are the most fully tested. The design is not wholly satisfactory ; the tower is evidently an adaptation from Giotto's campanile in Florence, but the introduction of open arches and detached columns at the corners is unwise, inasmuch as this arrangement necessitates the substitution of stone for clay. In the interior of the building, likewise, there is a Hke surrender : instead of brick, stucco and imitation marble are employed. No doubt the dread was that brick at its best might prove but a rough and rude surface, unsuited to the refihements and delicacies of indoor life and to the pomp of stately ceremonials. But, at all events, the exterior of the Rathhaus is a triumph for clay and terra cotta. The very magnitude of the structure makes it imposing, and the scale has not been frittered away by triviality of detail. The ornament is chiefly concentrated around the great entrances ; there the terra cottas consist of cable and other mouldings, coats of arms, floral designs, and even angels in bas-relief. Along the fagade runs a continuous balcony, enriched by compositions of artisans busy in commercial labours. The anatomies and draperies come out as firmly and sharply as if cut in marble. It is said of the Emperor Augustus that he found Rome of brick and left her of marble. But the Emperors and Kings of Germany found Berlin of stucco or compo ; and marble, and even stone, was too costly for ordinary uses : therefore the city became furnished with bricks and terra cottas, which commended themselves for utility, economy, cleanliness, and a truthfulness which does not pretend to be what it is not. The modern Germans in the decorative use of brick have in some respects surpassed the old Romans and the middle-age Italians: however, I have as yet met with nothing quite equal to the great Hospital in Milan, or to the fagade, including a wheel window, of a church in Monza. In Berlin, stone continues to be appropriately employed for strictly classic buildings, with the usual arrangements of columns, capitals, and pediments. I am glad to observe a tendency E E io6 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. of late to treat Greek styles with greater simplicity and strictness than formerly. An illicit classicism was the vogue some fifty years ago ; a license was indulged in which boasted of independence, and often ended in nothing better than empty ostentation. But the idea has of late prevailed in Germany, as in England, that the beauty of classic styles consists in their strict proportion and simple symmetry, in the unity of their creating thought unbroken by foreign intrusions. Such unison will scarcely be maintained in the large building for the Gewerbe Museum, which some day may rise as a rival to the South Kensington Museum. But in Berlin have recently sprung up two important structures conceived in singleness of spirit. The one is the Bourse, a perfect pattern of classic symmetry and beauty, unmarred by a single discord. The other is the new National Gallery, which as strictly accords with the type of a Grecian temple as the Walhalla near Rattisbon. The Berlin structure may be described as the Temple of Theseus, at Athens, mounted on a lofty basement. The Town Hall at Birmingham has been thus compared. Architecture of this pure tj/pe exerts an ennobling influence on the life of a busy city. Stepping from the noisy crowd to the classic enclosure around the National Gallery, the mind is invited to quiet contemplation and becomes prepared to commune with the arts enshrined within. By far the most important event of recent years bearing on the modern schools of Germany has been the completion of the National Gallery in Berlin. The building, as already said, in itself ranks among the chief ornaments of this supremely architectural city, and the design proves most appropriate to its sculpturesque and pictorial contents. The ground-floor is divided between statues and pictures, the upper story affords abundant space for pictures, drawings, and cartoons. The vaults and spandrils of the arches, like the walls in the New Museum, are decorated with frescoes. Thus Professor Bendemann has fitly been employed to draw accom- paniments to the cartoons designed by Cornelius for the Campo Santo. As a consonant tribute to the genius of the great master, the theme taken is Genius. Thus a winged youth with lyre in hand and star on brow, the personification of Genius, caresses tenderly a simple maiden who re- presents Nature. In another composition a winged genius of art, Apollo-like, draws around him as Orpheus the dwellers of the hills and dales. In a third illustration Genius has come upon evil days ; he is bound hand and wing, he stands pitiless, derided by Philistines and worried by dogs. The line of thought is novel in the pictorial arts. A second Cornelius Saloon, containing the cartoons for the ceilings of the Glyptothek, Munich, is appropriately decorated with frescoes taken from ancient mythology, painted by Peter Janssen of Diisseldorf, a pupil of Director Bendemann. Nothing shows more decisively the change which has come over the school of Berlin, than the estimation in which these cartoons of Cornelius are now held. The Campo Santo, situated within a stone's throw of the National .Gallery, for which many of these grandiose designs were made, stands as a fragment reduced to ruins. The scaffolding which remains as the sign of a forlorn hope that some day the work might be resumed and carried out, has fallen to decay. As for the cartoons, they too belong to a buried past : no one now desires to see them carried out, neither does any painter survive capable of executing such heroic frescoes. However, that mural decoration is not quite dead, pleasing proof comes in the already commenced project for converting the Arsenal into a Ruhmeshalle. The walls will be decorated by Friedrich Geselschap, of the school of Bendemann, Diisseldorf, with pictures commemorating the triumphs of German monarchs. The principal masters present in the National Gallery are as follows : — Cornelius, conspicuous by the cartoons before mentioned ; Overbeck, present by drawings of the Seven Sacraments ; Schnoor, by cartoons illustrative of the 'Niebelungen Lied ;' Rethel, by cartoons for the frescoes at Aix-la-Chapelle ; Lessing, by historic compositions and landscapes, among the former The Preaching of John Huss and Huss at the Funeral Pile; Professor Bendemann by Jeremiah at the Fall of Jerusalem; Franz Adams, of Munich, by several battle-pieces ; Lenbach, also of Munich, by the portrait of Moltke ; Defregger, likewise of Munich, by The Return Home of a Tyrolese Hero; Feuerbach, of Vienna, by The Banquet of Plato; Makart, also of Vienna, by Caterina Berlin. 107 Cornaro; Henneberg by TJie Pursuit of Pleasure, and other compositions ; Knaus by The Children's Festival; Menzel by pictures from the life of Frederick the Great ; Wislicenus by The Four Seasons; Julius Schrader, Carl Becker, and Gustav Richter, all of Berlin, by signal historic and sacred compositions. The landscape art of Germany receives important illustration by drawings by Preller illustrative of the Odyssey, also by Biblical landscapes by Wilhelm Schirmer, likewise by pictures and drawings by Eduard Hildebrandt. It is to be noted that the collection has all the more import from being nearly exclusively German. The masters who illustrate the school of Berlin will alone obtain notice in this chapter. This national collection can scarcely be accounted retrospective. The carefully written catalogue, a model of its kind, giving a biographic sketch of every artist, records no fewer than twenty-four painters of the immediate past. But on looking at their credentials, I cannot wonder that they are already forgotten, with the exception, perhaps of Karl Wach, Karl Begas, August Kolbe, and Karl Sohn. The school of Berlin, undistinguished by conspicuous talent, remained without marked characteristics : Cornelius laboured in the city but left no disciples ; Kaulbach, as before seen, here spent some of the best years of his life, but he had no followers ; thus great opportunities were lost, and the school at last becomes illustrious by a kind of happy chance. Professor Julius Schrader, born in Berlin, 1815, takes the lead in historic art. The Surrender of Calais, Charles I. bidding adieu to his Children, ^nA Esther before A hasuerus, the figures sometimes life-size, the draperies and accessories well studied and capitally painted, are works which proclaim Schrader the Delaroche of Berlin ; hardly, however, equal to the French tragic artist in mental conception, but superior in manual execution. Similar in purpose but merging more into costume, appears Professor Carl Becker in Charles V. at the House of facob Fugger, and Albert Durer in Venice. These painters fail to rise to the height of any great argument, but they have a pleasing way of telling a story, and they attract the eye, and even work upon the feelings, by the allurements of colour and the illusions of the brush. Thus the Berlin school, with certain divergencies, follows closely in the wake of the Academies of Munich and of Vienna. Professor Gustav Richter, born in Berlin, 1823, has like many others become cosmopolitan ; he studied in Paris with L6on Cogniet ; since he has travelled in the East, hence his orientalization of style and subject. The Vienna Exhibition saw his masterpiece, T/te Building of the Pyramids, a picture of great magnitude. The moment chosen is when the King and Queen have come to see the progress of the works ; swarthy Nubians drag across the foreground a massive block of stone, and busy labourers swarm about the pyramid which already rises high into the sky. An extravaganza in colour, a bravura in the composition, and a realistic lajnng on of paint so as to gain texture and actual relief in surface, here exemplify the distinguishing traits which divide the new schools of Germany from the old. In the National Gallery Professor Richter is represented by a sacred subject, for which apparently he has little vocation. The Raising of Jairus's Daughter. The picture has more show than sincerity ; the style is that of the Carracci ; but the drawing and the execution are almost faultless. Again it is seen how greatly the mechanism of art has been perfected within the present generation ; and it is proverbial that in no country are there better draughtsmen than in Germany. Frenchmen, of course, can draw when they think it worth while ; but they sometimes affect carelessness as a proof of great parts. The Germans, at all events, cannot be charged with levity. Berlin has of late years become identified more than any other city, save Paris, with a semi -classic and ultra -romantic treatment of the nude figure, often no less than life-size. Take, as examples, the following pictures thought worthy of the National Gallery : Venus and Bellona, by P. Schobelt ; Pandora before Prometheus and Epimetheus, by H. Schlosser ; The Rape of Helen, by R. Deutsch ; and Tannhduser and Venus, by Professor Knille. Some of these artists have naturally enough stationed their studios in Rome, and their figures assume the immobility and petrefaction of marbles, and thus pictures simulate painted statues. French art assumed the same phase in the time of David, after the great Revolution, and then passed into romanticism under G6ricault But it is a peculiarity of the present day. io8 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. in France and in Germany alike, that classicism and romanticism are able to exist in fraternal relations side by side without threats of mutual destruction. It is impossible to attempt an exhaustive account of the many painters more or less intimately connected with Berlin. There are some few names, however, that cannot be omitted. Battle-painters naturally just now abound, and it becomes painfully oppressive to find how the arts of war supplant the arts of peace ; how in galleries and palaces battles, which, of all subjects, are the most repulsive to art instincts, as well as defiant of art treatment, usurp the place of great historic events marking the progress of civilization or ensuring the well-being of mankind. Professor StefFeck, of Berlin, gives value to a fierce conflict of warriors by a composition based on Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of the Standard. Recent wars are further embazoned by Georg Bleibtreu in large canvases, v/hich cover much wall space in the National Gallery. Battle-fields have widened in area since the time of Salvator Rosa, and battle-pictures have increased in size in the same ratio. Yet I have not seen in the Galleries or Palaces of Berlin pictures approaching the immensity of the canvases at Versailles. Professor O. Heyden gives proof of creative imagination, and he has painted a drop-scene for a theatre which may serve as an instance of how in Berlin academic art mingles with the gaieties of society. Wilhelm Gentz reaps the advantages of prolonged training in Berlin, Antwerp, and Paris, joined with extended experiences in Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, and Turkey. German artists now-a-days are mostly travelled men. The career of this painter has points of contact with John Lewis, R.A. An Egyptian School, oriental in character and radiant in colour, obtained favourable notice in the Paris International Exhibition, and The Entry of the Crown Prince of Prussia into Jerusalem was chosen as one of the pictures worthy to represent Prussia in the International Exhibition, Munich. Among genre painters Professor Giinther obtains the distinction of a place in the National Gallery ; also Paul Meyerheim, a kind of universal penny-a-liner or pressman in picture making, gains like honour. On the same walls Professor Amberg endows genre .with poetic feeling; the reading of Goethe's 'Werner' by a circle of sentimental girls, seated in a quiet woodland, is a pathetic scene, a replica of which the fastidious critic, Count Raczynski, placed in his select Gallery in the Thier Garten. Professor Thumann makes an impression in the Munich Exhibition by a sly hit at the expense of the priests — an ever 'irresistible topic ; he depicts an extremely bewitching gipsy girl, dancing after the fashion of the daughter of Herodias, to the delight of grave monks grouped at a cloister door. German painters, it cannot be questioned, possess an inventive faculty which opens new and untrodden paths to genre painting. Friedrich Kraus, known in the Salon and elsewhere, boils a cup of coffee amid the wintry snow eutside the Brandenburg Gate. Ludwig Knaus, already noticed where longest known, in Diisseldorf, but now Professor in Berlin, gives to rude rustics a raciness, and endows the lower classes with a shrewdness, honesty, and simplicity, unspoilt by city life, and unpolished by the approach of civilization. The Children! s Festival, in the National Gallery, displays the master's persuasive manner. Last, but far from least, mention must again be made of Professor Menzel. The painter's most arduous work, as far as I know, is Wilhelm I. in Konigsberg, 1861, a large composition hanging in the old Schloss. Some of the heads are life-size ; the characters, as a matter of course, are trenchant, and the execution is more than usually well sustained. Mr. .W. B. Scott, in his interesting account of German painters, says, ' Menzel is every inch a Prussian, and has lived in Berlin all his life.' He has directed his studies mainly to the history of the Brandenburgs, especially to the career of Frederick the Great. In early life he illustrated in lithography the Artists Wanderings. The drawing was marvellous for touch and point ; but his true vocation has been to do full justice to the military life of the last century. In his art he has stood aloof from every school, and in a way peculiar to himself he works out his ends independently. In Paris, 1878, six pictures formed a dazzling group ; the painter had never been in such force before, and yet, to the surprise of every one, Menzel was denied the first prize. ' In Berlin. 109 Munich, where he contributes two famous compositions, An Ironfoiindry and A Ball Supper, he has received his due by the award of a First Class Gold Medal. Adolph Menzel, as already indicated, occupies in Europe a position entirely apart ; no painter approaches him : he' has no predecessors, and can have no followers. A. Werner, Director of the Berlin Academy, has gained in Munich a first class gold medal by The Proclamation of the Emperor of Germany at Versailles — perhaps the largest and most crowded portrait-picture in the world. He is also seen on an ususual scale in his design — a kind of pictorial potpourri — executed by Salviati in mosaic for the Column of Victory. But more artistic are his compositions from the life of the old Romans decorating the Caf6 Bauer, Unter den Linden. These tableaux of dancing, wrestling, bathing, feasting, are eminently scenic and effective. Moreover, the composition representing a Roman youth, lyre in hand, reciting poems on the Bay of Baiae, to spell-bound girls, matrons and senators, rises to a fervour akin to inspiration. In the evening when the Cafd Bauer is crowded with town-folk of Berlin, the clatter of cups and the clamour of voices clash strangely with this scene, of incantation on the shores of the sunny south. It may strike as an anomaly, but it can scarcely be deemed an ill sign of the time, that the Director of the Academy should condescend to paint accompaniments to iced coffee and hot punch. No citj' in Germany has made such rapid and astounding progress as Berlin. It was an inconsiderable town before the time of Frederick I., and situated in a dreary plain of sand, and being destitute of either beauty or fertility, the wonder is that it should ever have grown into one of the most magnificent cities in Europe. Forty years ago the population was only 250,000, the number has since increased fourfold, and is now 1,000,000. Commerce has grown in an equal ratio. Berlin, too, becomes all the more aggrandised from being the focus of political power, the centre of military rule, for the whole of Germany. She is now in fact for Germany what Turin formerly was for Italy ; and Bismarck has done for Prussia and her dynasty what Cavour achieved for Sardinia and the House of Savoy. Neither are the dwellers in Berlin without resemblance to the inhabitants of Turin : they are dis- tinguished by energy, ambition, and the power of organization. In Berlin, even in the very streets, the pulse of life throbs strongly; the people, at least the educated classes, have shrewd heads and resolute wills : they do whatsoever they resolve. Such are the conditions under which the arts have shared a common progress and prosperity. It is not that Berlin has shown herself fertile in art genius : she is about as sterile in talent as in soil. But like Rome in the eras of Augustus and of Leo X., she attracts within her circuit any gifts of the intellect which nature may have denied her. Many cities renowned in history have had their day, but Berlin, though great already, will be greater yet ; the next ten years will bring for architecture, painting, and possibly for sculpture also, signal manifestations. F F I lO 1- .'■.;■ '* ' ■ \cHApfER\yiiL— c.e^j'trAl'gerMany: ^ ' ; ;; ^, IT is, but a fewijrears ago. that G^ermany, like Italy, was divided into .separate ,stateg,, with independent political and social. institutions, and. with distinct provision fonthe. culture and encouragement of science, literature,- and art. ,But latterly events in both countries have tended towards the concgntratipn of power, at a few.chief centres., .. Still in Germany, as in Italy, njany pld.foundations.-.though, shaken, continue to .stand. 1 The^Academigs of Florence; and of Rome ^aye not engulphed, the' schools of Pisa, Sienna, -and ■ Pprugia. And so in Germany the grcyyth qf art^in. MCimch, DijSseldQrf, and. Berlin, harS ngt sw^ept aWay the institutiqas long planted at Frankfort, Dresden, Nuremberg, Carlsruhe, Stuttgard, Cassel, Darmstadt, Weimar,, and. Gotha? SmalLcommuni^iescdiffsr from;l.arge countries in.manyjvays.; :A,schpol pf art in the capita] of one of the great Europeati -nations is : backed usually by- a: considerable, population, by .an accurnulation of we.alth, and>by, the ; strength: c5f a go,yerpment C;ap^ble of undertakjog, public work?. ,But the, rninor duchies of. Germany ,have,ifor, the 'ijiost . part, toyed w:ith the M^es lettnes, and-wi.th,..the;fin.e,arts.' . After-. this, fashion, the Grand-Duk^ of Weilxiar,: in ^th^ time of Gqethe, amused-himself, looking on art, liot.asa study, a vocation, .or the rne.ai\s of raising a people, but as an easy and agreeably mode of whilihg.;- aw.ay a yacailt^hQur.. I The- direction- given to the arts naturally depended much oa the, -taste, or caprice of tlie; r,uiing .soy.ej-eign.: : Qne might aspire to the possession pf the Madpjina. di San.sSisto.: others w:Ould possibly rest s.atigfi^d with' Nuremberg., eggs, planetariums, and, a rooin,ful(l Of eurj.ous clacking clocks. In, the present ^; day, an advantage of these local.schools !s,!t.hat,the arts become -difftised throughout the length and.the breadth of a widely-extended fterritpry,. and, are .brought to the .veryidoor. of ; persons in humble life, tied to ,the spot of thei.r birt-h..-- The, success and '-.the ; originality which- may attach'to any given academy depend greatly, on ^ome happy luck in the choiceiof &: director or professpr^- ; , The high posj-tioh of Ffankfor^t -as a sphool of art- is mainly dueto the bequest, of M. Stadel; j| rich bank,er. This .Endowment, ^together with-the gift of pictures,-„drawingaii:and, other. treasu,res,' was, in a,ccordan.ce with- the.testator's will, formed- intb: the .Stad el Institut'in -which .the„chi]idEen of^poor. citizens of Frankfort obtain, special consideration. The pictures. in the .Galle.ry, have. been augmented by the yearly revenues since the .death of M. Stadel'in -18.16. The Institute has been fortunate in' its officers. , IJrofessor Philip ;Veit became. Director. in- i830,:,an,d. the, same: office since 185,0 .has been held, by .Professor. Steunle,w,hose rare , gifts, studious and- imaginative creations, and assiduity as a teacher, have been highly valued by numerous pu.pils, who now constitute the chief ornaments of the Frankfort school. Of late years^ however, I have not fpiiridithe school take a conspicuous position when brought to the test of exhibitions.' Johanri Eduard Steinle, born in 18 10,., reached .Rome in 1828, joined company with Overbeck and Veit,.and betimes executed numerous cartoons, and practised with success fresco- painting. In- 1850 he was called to Frankfort as Professor, of Historic Painting, andbecarde Director .pf-the-StadeMnstitut Asa teacher hetids his, pupils to study nature, but under the inspiration, however, of. the masters of the fifteenth and sixteenm centuries; Among his. distinguished and sympathetic scholars "may be numbered' Sir, Frederick Leighton, P.R.A. In years past might be traced between the earlier works of our .Royal Academician ' and the pictures of Director Steinle points of contact Friendly feelings between ma^te^land pupil, engendered by mutua:l aims and aspirations; have remained warm during.many years. - Director Steinle has been identified, though, not, exclusively, with the . religious school. Ten cartoons, afterwards executed, in a church -in /resco, afe^ in ..the Stadel Institut. Steinle is also known by Mad'onhas with the'Child,likewiseiby'thempst"popular reading of Tke Raikng jiii(5wij5" >'ii(-(lj-K'h.FC tlBK. Central Germany. 1 1 [ ofjairus's Daughter, iMx^&xmoxt. by designs for engravings published by the Society in Dussel- dorf for the Diffusion of Rehgious Art, likewise by the Tiburtine Sybil in the Stadel Institut, but superlatively by a boldly imaginative conception of TJie Last Judgment. The scene is laid in the upper sky, Christ appears in the midst surrounded by angels and the heavenly choir. Steinle in mode of creation takes a middle course ; he lies between the objective and the subjective, between the world of material forms and the ideas which in consciousness struggle for expression ; his thoughts extend to frontier territories, and sometimes they come with far-off memories of distant lands. German artists, in common with others, bring forth pictorial embryos contrariwise. Some sea'rch out a subject in nature, and then surround it with cognate accessories and studio properties. I have known both in Germany and England painters who assemble in the afternoon a company of friends to ask them for suitable names to pictures which, having come into the world without intellectual purpose, were nameless and wanting a christening. Other artists, again, of whom Steinle is one, begin with the purpose and idea, and then go to nature for outward form, visual expression, and natural symbolism. Director Steinle is better known in his own country than in England by the pictorial annals of secular history. He has painted in a Treppephaus in Cologne ' a cycle ' in four panoramic compositions, setting forth the development of Art, and the advance of intellectual culture in and about the capital of the Rhine. He manages in these four frescoes to epitomise about thirty centuries, beginning with the Pyramids at Cairo, and ending with the Cathedral of Cologne. The narrative may be compared to a history of the world in four quarto volumes ; the compiled composition is cyclopaedic. These frescoes, though superior, with very few exceptions, to similar attempts in England, did not strike me very favourably. Discords and incongruities mar the harmonies. Also the style is at enmity with itself in its incertitude and contrariety ; for example, Queen Helena is spiritual, the River-God of the Nile naturalistic-classic, Constantine and Charlemagne of the wooden school, while, coming down to recent times, the King of Prussia, the Archbishop of Cologne, with the municipality and the masons all assisting in raising the finial to the southern porch of the Cathedral, do not escape utter commonplace. The difficulties of historic painters are known to increase as they approach modern times. The Germans themselves have subjected these frescoes to severe criticism — assuredly the artists' deserved renown lies in other directions. Steinle has established his right to be reckoned a poetic painter. His imagination creates a world for itself; he can also, through sympathetic insight, make his own the fantasies he finds in the literature of Europe. He enters the field of romance ; his copious powers of production are manifest in his illustrations to the Rhine Legends of Brentano and to the plays of Shakespeare. Scenes from the ' Merchant of Venice ' he has cast into a triptych, which has fortunately found a place in a private collection in London. The first illustration chosen for this chapter having for its subject, Bringing Home the Bride, is a fairly good example of the romantic side of the painter's art. Scarcely sufficient stress has been laid on the German practice of painting in ' cycles,' or in a series of successive subjects, after the manner of Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel, Padua, or as in the series from the lives of the Saints, or the scenes from Life, Death, and the Last Judgment, severally in the Campo Santo, Pisa. The sequence is sometimes divided by frameworks, either painted or in the solid, but occasionally one passage in a picture passes into the next, without any break in continuity. Steinle, in common with very many of the Pre- Raphaelite painters, avails himself of this license. The advantage of such free distribution is obvious ; painting hereby gets rid of the disability or shortcoming of being limited to one moment of time, without a before or an after; thus, like poetry, it becomes competent to compose a drama in several acts, to compass a wide chronology, stretching over separate yet consecutive compositions. This just suits the Germans, who, appropriating large areas of space, naturally seek to take large pieces out of eternity. Mrs. Jameson has made a pretty apology for the incongruities as to time and space into 112 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. which most imaginative painters, whether ancient or modern, have fallen, from the times of Orcagna and Raphael to those of Overbeck and Steinle. The ' Naturalisti ' of course cry aloud against what they assume the absurdity of bringing within one composition characters divided by centuries of years or by hundreds of miles. Mrs. Jameson's plea for a gathering Such as a Sacra Conversazione is that the divine personages are no longer on earth but hold com- munion in some higher sphere. This is the way to view Overbeck's masterpiece. The Triumph of Religion in tJte Arts. I am glad that Frankfort affords me another opportunity to speak of Overbeck, whom I would wish to remember affectionately by three masterpieces, the Vision of St. Francis in the church at the foot of the hill of Assisi, the Madonna surrounded by. Angels in the Cathedral of Cologne, and supremely by this Triumph of Religion in the Stadel '^"^^j^^k'^^M j3 GERMANIA, AFTER VEIT. Institut. As might be expected from an artist of this loving and almost effeminate fibre, the Madonna and Child are enthroned as the divine source of inspiration. It has often been said that genius has its female side ; certainly Mariolatry with painters like Overbeck finds expression in emotions which centre in womanhood. This sacerdotal Composition deliberately propounds an art creed. Beneath the feet of the Madonna rises a fountain, and immediately below this heaven-aspiring finial of water are two basins, both brimfuU and serving as reflecting mirrors. This fountain is not only the spring of the world's art, but in its diffused waters becomes the symbol of the spirit whence all art takes its origin or inspiration. The higher basin nearest to the Madonna pertains to religious aspiration, the lower, close on the earth, is set apart to artists of the earth earthly. The destiny which here befalls painters, sculptors, and architects of all times, is just about what might be expected when Overbeck holds the balances of Justice. Central Germany. 1 1 3 Michael Angelo, as would be anticipated, suffers an avenging Nemesis ; he is placed with only a single disciple in comparative isolation, he is seated on a classic fragment by the side of the merely mundane basin, and is wrapped so gloomily in a mantle that he turns no glance to the heavenly heights, I once asked Overbeck why he had been so severe. His reply, conveyed in a tone of voice humble, timid, and yet firm as his character, was, that he felt the picture to be a true reading of the character. Philip Veit, who furnishes the illustration on the preceding page taken from his chief fresco, was the son of the banker Simon Veit, one among the wealthiest of the Jews^ and his mother was the daughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. The young artist thus illustrious in descent became still more favoured when his accomplished mother ran away with, and subsequently married, the aesthetic critic Frederick Schlegel. The Judaical mother turned Romanist, and induced her artist son Philip Veit to join the same Church. His step-father, Frederick Schlegel, 'was received into the bosom of the Catholic Church' in 1808, and is known to have declared that ' Church as the greatest historical authority on the earth.' These THE WISE AND FOOLISH VIRGINS, AFTER SCHADOW. conditions of religion and family relationship bore fruit in the nascent art. The first patronage came when the Consul Bartholdi, related by marriage with the Mendelssohns, gave a com- mission to Veit, in company with Cornelius, Overbeck, and Schadow, to decorate with frescoes his dwelling on the Pincian. As a natural consequence of Madame Veit's second marriage, Frederick Schlegel became in his criticisms, which are read even now as among the best authorities, the warm eulogist of Philip Veit and the Christian brethren. The earnest-minded artist had a long life, though his works are comparatively few. As recently as September, 1877, at the age of eighty-four, Veit died, as he had lived, a devout Roman Catholic. Nowhere, save in Rome, are so many pledges of the painter's genius as in Frankfort. ■ Here is the cartoon for the fresco- executed in the Casa Bartholdi, Rome ; also an admirable drawing of the shield of Achilles. But by far the most important creation is the Introduction of the Arts through Christianity into Germany, seen in the Stadel Institut, both as a drawing in a frame and as a fresco on a wall. The work is noteworthy for its form, its thought, and sound tech- nique; also for its Gothic and Germanic character ; likewise for the mystic meaning, the syinbolic G G 1 14 Th Schools of Modern Art in Germany. form, and the pictorial allegory which in the new school, when permitted free utterance, speak- out with peculiar weightiness and unction. The composition accords with the panoramic principle before described. The pictorial story may be thrown into words thus : in the midst stands the allegorical figure of Religion, one hand placed on the Holy Scriptures borne up by an angel, the other hand holding a palm-branch, the symbol of enduring peace. St. Bonjface, the great apostle of Germany, proniinently proclaims, to the dwellers in the woods the good., tidings of redemption, thereupon a venerable bard, seeing that his dominion is at an end, bows in submission to his fate. A sylvan youth, hatchet in hand, is rea;dy to cut down the Druid's grove ; a fountain for baptism bursts from the ground ; a Gothic church is already well-nigh finished ; under a laurel-tree repose the personifications of Architecture and Painting, while in! the foreground stand emblematic figures of Poetry, Music, and Chivalry. Little children; spelling a lesson-book indicate that through culture alone can the arts flourish and fill the. land. All serves to enforce the thesis that the arts were introduced into Germany through Chris- tianity. The. composition joins painting, poetry, and philosophy into one. Among designs before me by Veit is a small print. The Heavenly Stranger, from which it has been often surmised that Holman Hunt took his idea of The Light of the World. The close coincidence of thought, and even of detail, is remarkable, but before the charge of plagiarism be entertained, it were fair to consider how often, both in science and art, the. same or cognate conceptions and discoveries have occurred to divers minds about the same time. Veit gives literal reading to the text, ' Behold, I stand at the door and knock ;' the ' Heavenlj'- Stranger,' as in the picture by Holman Hunt, with one hand knocks at the door and with the other bears a lantern. Wilhelm Schadow has been left in Rome painting with Veit, Cornelius, and Overbeck ; he is now met, with several of his old companions, in the Stadel Institut. He is still chiefly remembered by posterity through a large fresco, covering a whole wall, of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, which is engraved on the preceding page. The composition is singularly feeble, but Schadow would seem to have been a refined and gentle-minded man, and accordingly his figures are endowed with delicacy and clothed in beauty. Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A., some years since depicted the same subject in the church at Lyndhurst, a wall-painting which has been reproduced in the pages of the PORTFOLIO. I have this autumn visited Frankfort, in order to bring the narrative down to the latest moment. Great have been the changes and so-called improvements eflfected here of recent years. It was thought, when Frankfort lost her municipal independence, that her fortune was gone, but it is evidently better to become a portion of the collective German Empire than to remain in comparative isolation a ' Free City.' Yet the signs of increasing prosperity are not in the direction so much of art progress as of decadence. The traveller, set down in the fine new streets, might fancy himself in Paris or Berlin ; the Judengasse has lost half of its old tenements and. is thrown broadly open, and although the gabled family dwelling- of the Rothschilds is still abutted on one side by a boot shop, and on the other by a clothes shop, yet it is evident that the Jews for the most part are flying from their picturesque rookery to palaces and villas. The street architecture, I repeat, has lost its distinguishing features ; even such signal edifices as the ' Stadelsches Kunstinstitut ' assume the phases of the Italian renaissance which have of late years taken all but absolute possession of Germany. A, favourable exception is the good work done in finishing the Gothic tower of the Cathedi"aX which had been left incomplete for four centuries. The structure is exceptional for its beauty, originality, and magnitude. It leaves the earth as a square tower, it then springs into an octagonal spire, afterwards it is canopied by a dome-like vault, and, lastly, has a fleche for a finial. The gain to the city is great ; a commercial town obtains at once ecclesiastical significance. It is surprising how a place, which has seemed to grovel on the low level of the earth, takes possession of the upper sky by the elevation of a spire or dome. Frankfort may remain still dear to the antiquary and artist Central Germany. 115 by the possession of some few picturesque houses three or four hundred years old, with carved woodwork and steep roofs, studded with dozens of dormer windows. Some of the gables soar so high into the sky as to seem to catch the wind as jib-sails, and the topmost wihdows glitter as burnished gold at sunset. But twilight is the witching hour at which to wander about the narrow streets of Frankfort, Augsburg, Ulm, or Nuremberg. The shadows then grow deep and still deeper, and yet colour from these wooden fabrics glows, though darkly, as from old panel pictures. The windows, as with heavy and half-closed eyelids, look out dreamily on the coming night. A bat flits stealthily from the overhanging eave, and it needs not much fancy to people the dim scene with funereal Spectres and hooded monks, and a train of darkly-draped citizens of the middle ages. The Kaisersaal of the Rathhaus calls for notice by reason of fifty-two royal portraits, ranged in order of succession round the room, and painted by Rethel, Lessingj Bendemann, and others. These imperial figures, standing above life-size, are in treatment statuesque, yet pictorial, and in colour and effect decorative and powerful. But it need scarcely be added that they are not such portraits as Rubens or Van Dyck might have painted. One of the best is Rethel's Charles V., a figure shadowed in gloom, and moody in melancholy ; the painter had an innate sympathy for a character of this complexion. The end of the grand Hall is appropriately commanded by Steinle's Judgment of Solomon; the figures are life-size, the subject may be taken as a symbol of the Justice which should preside over the council of kings. This versatile artist, who passes at will from religion to history, and thence into romance, is here seen at his best ; the reading of the subject is original, the situation dramatic ; the action and the passion of the agonized mother go beyond the usual limits of German art, and reach the intensity of the Niobe marbles and of Guido's Murder of the Innocents. In Frankfort, as in Nuremberg, Munich, and Mannheim, a Town Museum of Antiquities has been formed ; indeed, if the multiplication of museums could reanirnate the arts, a further revival in Germany, as well as in Italy, may be looked for. Such collections favour present tendencies to what may, perhaps, be called the Bric-a-brac school of painting. They do, moreover, service in bringing together the historic arts peculiar to each locality, and here in Frankfort, we are once more impressed with the presence and the power of the Romans throughout Germany, especially in districts bordering on the Rhine, the Mosel, and the Danube. Among the local Roman remains are helmets, one finely" and firmly wrought as a mask, a worthy model for German metal work in modern times. The collection of pictures, which naturally commences with the Cologne and the Rhine School, are brought down to the present day by a Holy Family, ascribed, possibly correctly, to Cornelius, a painter who, like the old Romans, is almost omnipresent. The work is early, almost infantile ; it belongs to that teachable period when artists commonly trust to care and compilation. But the event which will most advance the best interests of art is the opening in 1878' of the new, spacious, and handsome Gallery and Academy of the Stadel Institut. The Schools are arranged on a well-ordered system, with needful but simple appliances. First comes the drawing-class, with a black board on the wall. The second room is for the study from the life, with a raised and well-lighted stage for the model. Then follows the painting- class ; provision is also made for students of architecture and sculpture. The large open staircase is decorated by the pupils with a frieze from the design of their master, Director Steinle. After the much to be commended custom of German Academies, studios are pro- vided on the spot for the professors, who thus labour in the midst of their scholars. The advantages are many and mutual ; on the part of the pupils, it is no slight benefit to see pictures and statues in the successive stages of progress from the first sketch to the last finishing touch. Among the studios that of Steinle, as may be well imagined, is most worthy of remark. In its simplicity it contrasts with the showy superfluities by which artists now-a-days ostentatiously surround themselves. The walls, are merely coloured with a warm neutral wash, and their only decorations are an oil picture and a few photographs. The 1 1 6 The Schools of Modern Art in Germany. tables are occupied by rolls of canvas, a cast from an early Christian ivory, and sundry other small art objects, while on the floor stand some half-dozen easels. The abstemiousness of these provisions tells that the artist does not trust to materialism, to rich draperies and tissues, but that for him the outward show of things is secondary to creative thought. On an easel rests a cartoon, which shows the sphere in which the painter's imagination loves to dwell. The scene is laid mid heaven : the figures are ranged in three ranks. The highest is occupied by prophets, the next by apostles, and then follow saints. The figures are in the act of adoration, entranced with the beatific vision. The manner in no material degree differs from that which is habitual to the religious art of Munich and Diisseldorf; in fact, as often happeried with the earliest of Christian painters, so is it with modern men — the individual artist becomes merged in the school. This cartoon forms one of a series which Steinle has for three years been executing in fresco within the Cathedral of Strasburg. Among the retributions of the Franco-German War, it seems specially cruel that a German painter should be brought to decorate a church which was the peculiar pride of Frenchmen. The new Gallery corresponds to the general plan adopted in Munich, Dresden, and other towns : the basement is devoted to sculpture, the upper story to painting. This higher floor has five central rooms with top lights, and ten lower and narrower galleries with side lights. About one half of the space is occupied by the old masters, the other half by modern painters. Among the former the place of honour is given to the master-work of Moretto, while on the side of contemporary art the chief positions" are assigned to the Introduction of the Arts through Christianity into Germany, by Veit ; the Triumph of Religion in the Arts, by Overbeck ; and the Wise and Foolish Virgins, by Schadow. These great representative works have never before looked so well. In coming once more before such famous products of the modern school, I am struck with two things : first, that the art is one not only of tranquillity but of absolute silence ; and, second, that it is not only poor but almost obnoxious in colour. There was not a single colourist born in Germany over a period of half-a-century. This is perhaps the chief reason why modern German painters have gained so little popularity in England. As to silence, Overbeck was himself personally a man of few words : he talked little, but the type of his own head and person, even to the shape of his hands, expressed the meaning of his art. And so it is with his pictures : the characters do not speak, save it may be to say, Look and see what we are : they do not even move ; they only think, feel, and contemplate, abidingly. In the Triumph of Religion several hundred historic personages are in 'silent meeting,' and even Dante stands up and teaches with closed lips. The same is true, even to a fault, with Veit's masterpiece : historic ages, denied utterance, are silent as the grave ; not a mouth opens, and scarcely a limb moves. It cannot be said that these artists owe much .to the Laocoon, the Niobe group, or the Fighting Gladiator. In no other spot can be found so good an epitome of modern German art as in the Stadel Institut, Among the painters present several come with official credentials : thus- Veit, as already said, was Director of the Institute, and Steinle is its present chief, Passavant the author of the 'Life of Raphael,' by whom is a small picture in this Gallery, was formerly Inspector, Jacob Becker acted as Professor in the schools, Cornelius was successively Director in Diisseldorf and Munich, Schadow had a serviceable career as Director in the Diisseldorf Academy, Schnorr held the Directorship of the Dresden Gallery, Julius Hubner now occupies the same position, while Lessing acts as the present Director of the Academy at Carlsruhe. It would seem that the artists of Germany find the means to feather their nests comfortably. Among other well-known painters represented in the Stadel Gallery are foremost Overbeck, then his poor friend Joseph Koch in Rome, also Franz Pforr and Karl Fohr, remembered among the early but comparatively unillustrious pilgrims to the Eternal city, likewise Moritz Schwind, Alfred Rethel, and the landscape-painters, Carl Rottmann and Andreas Achenbach. A few notes made before the pictures may be here added by way of supplement to what appears in other pages. It is interesting in this gallery to trace Overbeck's fresco from Central Germany i 117 the history of Joseph executed in Rome, back to its original cartoon. I find the outlines and the drawing generally, though tentative and a little feeble in hand, strong and firmly- pronounced in form and intention. The work is altogether of the right sort, and no wonder that sixty years ago, when all was done for show and little for study, it produced an impression and inspired a faith. The cartoons by Schnorr for the frescoes, illustrative of Tasso in the Villa Massimo in Rome, confirm the judgment already expressed ; they are in manner unequal and discordant, and in execution they have a feeble yet rash incertitude : the action, however, especially in horses and riders, occasionally gains fire and rapid movement. Professor Lessing's two historic works, renowned throughout the world, prove now as ever worthy of their fame. Eccelino in Prison is engraved in these pages. John Huss pleading his cause before the Council of Constance once more strikes me as eminently a thought-picture : a creation and conflict of the intellect; the figures possess the individuality of studies from the life; the attitudes, the types of the heads, and the form and action of the hands, tell the story with a purpose and perspicuity which make a strong appeal. The unmistakable meaning of the composition, which is always a strong point with this painter, depends partly on its breadth and the symmetry of its arrangement, and very much on the striking out of all accidents for the sake of essentials, nothing being deemed worthy of a place that does not bear directly on the subject and situation. The colour is the chief fault : it is always a bad sign when the colours can be counted and named : here are scarlets, purples, greens, and blacks, and they have about as much agreement among themselves as the theological dogmas which at the Council are here under dispute. Leasing does not in this Gallery add to his fame as a landscape-painter : he looks on nature as the naturalist who counts leaves and culls flowers, not as a poet, such as Coleridge, who sings of a presence and a power. It is scarcely needful to say more of Professor Steinle, yet it is hard to pass in silence the Tiburtine Sibyl — a figure which when once seen for ever haunts the imagination. It is, perhaps, the misfortune of these scholastic painters that they ever seek inspiration not first-hand but through the indirect intervention of some one of their great predecessors ; they say now we will sit under Fra Angelico or Perugino, as the case may be, and on this occasion Steinle has placed himself at the feet of Michael Angelo ; yet his Sibyl is somewhat showy and stagey, and in the ostentatious display of the whites in the upturned eyes, his art becomes melodramatic. The painter in his effort to force up expression not unfrequently, in common with his brethren, falls in spasm. Steinle is also here seen in ten or more small coloured cartoons; indeed, I am once again struck with the amazing amount of work which these Germans manage to" get through ; it is but too clear that they do not wait long for inspiration, whatever comes to hand serves as grist in the mill. A finely conceived and highly but not harmoniously coloured picture by Alfred Rethel, Daniel in the Lions' Den, hangs fitly as a companion to Steinle's Sibyl This is the most studiously designed and carefully finished work by this powerful painter I have yet met with. After his more vigorous and rough manner is the figure in fresco which was executed as a sample for the arduous compositions in Aix- la-Chapelle, which have come among the minor illustrations to ' Dusseldorf ' This trial-study has merits wanting in the consummated compositions ; it possesses the essentials of mural decoration, breadth, simplicity, and firmness in the forms. Another artist, Moritz Schwind, of whom I am always anxious to learn more, so prolific is he in creative ideas, gives proof in the Bards' Contest at the Wartburg, of a perfected technique for which he hardly takes credit. But here is yet another poet-painter guilty of spasm ; indeed, in this sphere the choice often lies between stagnation and a storm, and many prefer the latter, possibly thinking that the art of painting cannot speak loud enough. A word must be here given to a perilous art-process which may be compared to a dangerous surgical operation. When last I saw Veit's famous composition, it was a fresco on the walls of the old Institute ; I now find it in the new building transferred to canvas. The method used has been often practised in Italy, indeed an Italian has been here called in to assist in the critical H H 1 18 The Schools of Modern Art' in Germany. manipulation. He first, according to the usual -manner, stuck a linen cloth to the surface of the picture, and then loosened and broke off and carried away the ' intonaco,' or stratum of plaster on which the frejco ,was pajnted. The^ operation, is, qften, regarded as one of kill. or cure, but the late Mr. Macphersoh, in Rome,*thought-so lightly, of such >perilous;experipients, that he is said to have carried aboM with him. ah extra^.poeket^hkndkerchief in, ;;:eadiHess, after, -the example of St. Veronica, to' place on the^ face, and receive". an 'impression from , any fresco. that chance might throw in his way. I can?)Pt.think that Veit's masterpiece' has passed.- intact . through the ordeal. It strikes me that 'the. surface, looks a %reat-.deaj too 'smooth, bright, and new ; and that the absence of allcracks, abrasions, or% Gunther, Otto, A 1838 ; living; Diisseldorf, Konigs- berg — 108 Gysis, N., living; Athens, Munich — 35, 50, 51 Haag, Carl, living — 20 Hahnel, Ernst, b. 181 1 ; living; Dresden — 119 Hartmann, L., b. 1835 ; living; Munich — 53 Hasenclever, J. P., b. 1810; d. 1853 ; Diisseldorf^72 Hauberisser, living — 41 Hawrdnek, Friedrich, b. 1821 ; Prague — 144 Heilbuth, Ferdinand, living — 10, 21 Heinlein, H., living; Munich — ^49 Hellich, Joseph, b. 1810 ; Prague — 144 Henneberg, Rudolf, b. 1825 ; d. 1876 ; Berlin— 102, 103, 107, 125 Her, Theodor, living; Munich — ^48, 49 Hermann, Karl, b. 1802 ; Diisseldorf — 74 Herwig, J., living; Vienna — 132 Herzog, H., living; Diisseldorf — 87 Hess, Heinrich, b. 1798 ; d. 1863 ; Munich — 10, 38, 41, 42,43 Hess, Peter, b. 1792 ; Munich — 45 Heyden, Otto, A 1820; living; Berhn — 108 Hiddemann, Friedrich, b. 1829; living; Diisseldorf — 82 Hildebrand, Theodor, b. 1804; d. 1874 ; Diisseldorf — 67, 69, 72, 82 Hildebrandt, Eduard, b. 1818 ; d. 1868; Berlin — 107 Hiltensperger ; Munich — 45 Hofelich, F. L., living; Munich — ^49 Hoff, Karl, b. 1838 ; living; Diisseldorf, Carlsruhe — 123 .Hofmann, Heinrich, b. 1824; living; Dresden — 122 Hornemann; living; Diisseldorf — 83 Hiibner, C, b. 1814 ; living; Diisseldorf^72, 9^ Hiibner, Julius, b. 1806; living; Dresden — 69, 116, 120, 121, 122 Hiinten, J. E., b. 1827 ; living; Diisseldorf — 80, 89. Ittenbach, Franz, (5. 1813 ; living; Diisseldorf— 65, 66, 72 Janssen, Peter, living; Diisseldorf — 61, 78, 79, 90, 106 Jettel, Eugen, living; Vienna — 133 Jordan, Rudolf, b. 1810 ; living; Diisseldorf— 82 Jungheim, Karl, b. 1830 ; living; Diisseldorf— 88 Kaulbach, H., living; Munich — 34 Kaulbach, Wilhelm, b. 1805; d. 1874; Diisseldorf, Munich, Berlin— i, 3, 4, 8, 10, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 38, 39, 44, 45, 50, 57, 72, 74, 93, 98, 102, 103, 107, 120, 125 Keller, Ferdinand, b. 1842 ; living; Carlsruhe — 123 Keller, Joseph, living; Diisseldorf — 70 Keller, P. W., living; Munich — 57 Kessler, August, i5. 1826; living; Diisseldorf— 88 Kiessling, Paul, living; Dresden — 122 Kiss, August, b. 1802 ; d. 1865 : Berhn— 104 Klein, Johann, b. 1823; living; Vienna, 62, 71 Klemt, Agathon, b. 1830; Prague — 144 Klenze, Leo de, b. 1784 ; d. 1864; Munich — 41, 67, 119 Knaus, Ludwig,^. 1829; livifig; Diisseldorf, Berlin — I, 4, 69, 72, 82, 84, 107, io8, 139, 140 Knille, Otto, b. 1832 ; living; Berhn- 107 Koch, Joseph, b. 1768,; d. 1839; Rome— 9, 12, 18, 86, 116 Kohjer, Christian, b. i8og ; Diisseldorf — 72 Kolbe, Karl, b. 178 1 ; d. 1853 ; Berlin— 107 Roller, Wilhelm, b. 1829; living; Vienna — 131 Konewka, P., living^72 Kopf, Joseph, b. 1827 — 10 Krafft; Peter ; Hungary — 137 Kraus, Friedrich, living; Berlin — 108 Kreling, A., deceased; Nuremberg — 45 Kroner, Christian, b. 1838; living; Diisseldorf — 88 Kurzbauer, E., d. 1879!; Vienna, Munich — 56, 132, 133 L'AUemand, Sigmund, (5. 1840; living; Vienna — 131 Lasch, Karl, b. 1821 ; living; Diisseldorf— 83, 90 Lauffer, Emil, living; Prague — 144 Laupheimer, A., living; Munich— 57 Lehmann, Rudolph, living — 10, 21 Leighton, Sir Frederick, living — no, 114, 118 Lenbach, Franz, b. 1836; living; Munich — 57, 106 Lerche, Vincent, living; Diisseldorf — 83 Lessing, Karl Friedrich, b. 1808; living; Diisseldorf, Carlsruhe— 4, 7, 8, 61, 67, 69, 72, 75, 85, 86, 91, 106, 115, 116, 117, 123 Leu, August, living; Diisseldorf — 91 Leutze, Emanuel, A 1 8 16; d. 1868; Diisseldorf — 72 Lichtenfels, Eduard,^. 1833; living; Vienna — 132 Lier, Adolf, b. 1826; living; Munich — 48, 49, 84 Lietzen-Mayer, Alexander, living; Hungary, Munich —34, 35, 47, 50, 52, i34, 136, 138 Lindemann-Frommel, living — 10, 20 Lindenschmit, Wilhelm, b. 1829; living; Munich — 50, 52 Loefftz, Ludwig, living; Munich — 36 Lotz, Karl, living; Pesth — 134, 135, 136, 138 Luders ; Hungary — 136 Ludwig, Karl, b. 1839; living; Diisseldorf— 88 Madarasz, Victor, living; Hungary — 136 Maixner, Peter, living; Prague^i44 Makart, Hans, b. 1840; living; Munich, Vienna — 34, 35, 38, 50, 51, 103, 106, 122, 130, 132, 134 Manes, Guido, b. 1829 ; living; Prague — 144 Marko, Karl, b. 1792; d. i860; Hungary— 136, 137 Matejko, Johann, b. 1838; living; Cracow— i, 134, 145 Max, Gabriel, b. 1840; living; Prague, Munich— 3, 34, 50, 51, 52, 134, 142, 143, 144 Max, Joseph, i5. 1804; d. 1855 ; Prague— 142, 143 Meisel, E., living; Munich — 57 Mengs, Raphael, b. 1728 ; d. 1779 — 9, 127 Menzel, Adolph, b 181 5 ; living; Berlin— 99, 107, io8 Meyer, living; Rome — 10 Meyerheim, Paul, b. 1842; living; Berlin— 103, 108 Mintrop, Theodor, b. 1814; d. 1870; Diisseldorf— 72, 81 Mohn, Ernst, living; Dresden — 119, 142 Molitor, P., living; Dijsseldorf— 66, 72 Molnar, Josef, /zz'z'«^j- Hungary — 136, 137 Moseler, deceased; Coblentz, Rome — 18 Index of Artists. 149 Mucke, Carl, Kving; Dusseldorf— 83 Miicke Heinrich K. A., b. 1806; livings Dusseldorf —67 MuUer, Andreas, b. 181 1 ; living; Dusseldorf— 44. 41; 65, 71 ^^' ^^' MuUer of Coburg, living— \q Miiller, Karl, b. i8i8 ; living; Dusseldorf— 65, 66, 72 MuUer, Leopold, b. 1834; /zW«g-y Vienna— 132, 133 Munkdcsy Michael, b. 1846; /m«g-y Hungary, DiJssel- dorf, Paris-i, 65, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 143 Munthe, Ludwig, living; Dusseldorf— 5, 48, 88 Nordenberg, Bengt, living; Dusseldorf— 82, 83 Oehmichen, H., living; Diisseldorf-^83 Oesterley, C, living; Hamburg— 87 Ohlmuller, b. ijgi ; d. 1839 ; Munich— 41 Orlay, Samuel, living; Pesth — 137 Osbom, Emily, living — 34 Overbeck, Friedrich, b. 1789 ; d. 1869 ; Vienna, Rome —I) 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, II, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 31, 35, 44, 60, 61, 63, 6s, 70, 71, 72, 74, 78, 112, 113, 114, 116, 124, 125, 127, 132, 137 Pape, Eduard, living; Berlin — 92 Passavant, Johann D., b. 1787 ; d. 1861 ; Frankfort— 116 Peschel, Karl, ,5. 1798; d. 1879; Dresden— 119, 121 Pettenkofen, C. A., b. 1821 ; living; Vienna— 132, 133 Pforr, Franz, b. 1788; d. 1812; Frankfort, Rome— 116 Pichler, Adolph, living; Hungary, Munich— 135, 136 Piepenhagen, Augustus, 3. 1792; d. i868; Prague— 144 Piepenhagen, Louise, living; Prague — 144 Piepenhagen- Weyhrother, Charlotte de, living; Prague —144 Piloty, Carl, b. 1826; living; Munich— i, 2, 4, 8, 10, 31,^32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 44, 45, Si, 57, 136, I37, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144 Piloty, Ferdinand, living; Munich — 44 Platner, Ernst Z.,b. 1773; d. 1855 ; Leipzig, Rome— 17, 18 Preller, Friedrich, b. 1804; d. 1878; Weimar — 84, 86, 107, 123 Probst, Carl, living; Vienna — 131 Purkyne, Carl, b. 1834; d. 1869; Prague — 144 Piittner, Joseph, ^ 1821; living; Bohemia Raab, J. L., living; Munich— 37 Rahl, Karl, b. 1812 ; d. 1865; Vienna — 10, 131, 137 Ramberg, Freiherr, deceased; Munich — 45 Rasmussen, J., living; Diisseldorf — 87 Rauch, Christian, A 1777; d. 1857; Berlin — 6, 10^44, 103, 104 Regnier, E., living; Prague — 144 Rethel, Alfred, b. 1816; d. 1859; Aix-la-Chapelle, Diisseldorf — 1,4, 5, 6, 70, 76, 78, 79, 102, 106, 115, 116, 117, 125 Retzsch, Moritz, b. i77<); d. 1857; Dresden — 119 Ribarz, Rudolph, b. 1848; living; Vienna — 132 Richter, Gustav, b. 1823; living; Berlin — 107 Richter, Ludwig, b. 1803; living; Dresden — 72, 119, 122 Riedel, August, living; Rome — 10, 20 Rietschel, Ernst, b. 1804; d. 1861; Dresden — 104, 119 Roeting, Julius, living; Diisseldorf^72, 90 RoSsler, Ludwig, living; Diisseldorf^83 Rottman, Karl, b. 1798; d. 1850; Munich — 48, 85, 116 Russ, Carl, b. 1779 ; d. 1843; Vienna— 127, 133 Russ, Franz, b. 1844 ; living; Vienna — 132 Salentin, Hubert, (5. 1822; living; Diisseldorf— 72, 73, Schadow, Friedrich Wilhelm, iJ. 1789; ^.1862; Rome, piisseldorf-8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 60, 65, 67, 74, 82, 113, 114, 116 Schadow, Johann Gottfried, b. 1764; d. 1850; Berlin— 104 \ Schadow, Rudolph, b. 1786; d. 1822; Rome— 10, 11, i8, 19 Schilhng, Johann, b. 1829; living; Dresden— 119, 120, 121 Schindler, Emil, b. 1842 ; living; Vienna — 132 Schinkel, Karl, b. 1781 ; deceased; Berlin— 10, 41, 84, 95, 103, 105, 119 Schirmer, Friedrich, (5. 1802; d. 1866; Berlin— 84, 92 Schirmer, Wilhelm, b. 1807; d. 1863; Diisseldorf— lo, 84, 86, 87, 88, 107 Schlitt, H., living; Munich — 56 Schlosser, Hermann, b. 1832 ; living; Diisseldorf, Berlin — 107 Schmid, Mathias, b. 1835 5 Umng; Tyrol, Munich— 54, 132 Schmidt, Friedrich, b. 1825 ; living; Vienna — 128 Schmidt, Max, b. 181 8 ; living; Berlin, Konigsberg — 92 Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Julius, b. 1794; d. 1872; Rome, Munich, Dresden— 5, 9, 11, 22, 25, 27, 41, 45, 91, 102, 106, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 125, 127 Schobelt, Paul, ^. 1838; living; Berlin — 107 Scholtz, Julius, living; Dresden — 122 Schonleber, G., living; Munich — 48, 49 Schonn, Alois, b. 1826 ; living; Vienna — 131 Schrader, Julius, b. 181 5 ; living; Berlin — 107 Schreyer, Adolf, b. 1828 ; living; Frankfort — 118 Schrodl, Norbert, b. 1842 ; living; Vienna — 131 Schiilze, W., living; Munich — 57 Schultze, R., living; Munich — 49 Schwanthaler, Ludwig M..,b. 1804; d. 1848; Munich — 10, 44, 104 Schwind, Moritz, A 1804; d. 1871 ; Vienna, Munich — 72, 116, 117, 123, 129, 133 Seel, Adolph, b, 1829 ; living; Diisseldorf^88 Seifert, A., living; Munich — 56 Seller, C, living; Munich — 57 Seitz, A., ^. 1830; living; Munich — 57 Sell, Christian, living; Diisseldorf — 83 Semper, Gottfried, b. 1803 ; d. 1879 > Dresden — 119 Sohn, Karl, b. 1805; living; Diisseldorf — 67, 69, 107 Sohn, Wilhelm, b. 1830 ; living: Diisseldorf — 72 Sondermann, Hermann, b. 1832 ; living; Diisseldorf -83 Spangenberg, Gustav, b. 1828 ; living; Berlin — 103 Spitzer, E., living; Munich — 57 Stammel, E., b. 1832 ; living; Diisseldorf — 83 Steffan, J. G., living; Munich — 49 Steffeck, Karl, b. 1818; living; Berlin — 108 Steinhardt, F. C, living; Frankfort, Rome — 21 Steinle, Johann Eduard, ^. 1810; living; Frankfort — 8, 10, no. III, 115, 116, 117, 125, 127, 132 Stilke, Hermann,^. 1803 ;V. i860; Dusseldorf, Munich, 74 Sturmer, Karl, b. 1803; Diisseldorf, Berlin — 74 Swoboda, Carl, living; Prague — 144 Szekely, Bartholomaus, living; Hungary — 137 Than, Moritz, b. 1828; living; Vienna — 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138 Thiersch, Ludwig, living; Munich — 56 Thoma, H., living; Frankfort— 36 Thoren, Otto, b. 1828; living; Vienna— 132, 133 QQ ISO Index of Artists. Thorwaldsen, Albrecht, b. 1770; d. 1844; Rome — 9, 12, 18, 104 Thumann, Paul, b. 1834; living; Berlin — 108 Tidemand, Adolf, b. 1815; deceased; Diisseldorf — 72, 83, 91, 139 Trenkwald, Joseph, ^. 1824; living; Prague — 144 Tiishaus, B., living; Diisseldorf — 83 Ullik, Hugo, b. 1836; Prague — 144 Unger, Wilhelm, living; 35, 69, 118, 133, 138, 140 Valentiny, J., living; Hungary — 135 Vautier, Benjamin, b. 1829; living; Diisseldorf — 72, 73, 82, 89, 139 Veit, Philip, b. 1793 ; d. 1877; Rome, Frankfort — 5, 8, 9, 12, 16, 19, 22, 25, 35, 74, 77, 102, no, 113, 114, 116, 117, 125 VoUmar, L., living; Munich — 57 Voltz, J, F., living; Munich — 48, 53 Wach, Karl Wilhelm, b. 1787 ; d. 1845; Rome, Berlin —19, 107 Wagner, Alexander, living; Hungary, Munich — 34, 50,. 52, 134, 136, 137, 138 Waldmiiller, Ferdinand, ^. 1793; d. 1865; Vienna — 127 Walther, W. A., living; Dresden — 122 Weber, A., b. 1817 ; d. 1873; Dusseldorf— 72 Welsch, F. C, living; Rome — 20 Werner, Anton, b. 1843; living; Berlin — 109 Wertheimer, Gustav, b. 1847; living; Vienna — 132 Wieschebrink, Franz, b. 1818; /m«_fy Diisseldorf— 83 Willroider, L., living; Munich — ^49 Wislicenus, Hermann, b. 1825; living; Dusseldorf — 90, 91, 107 Wolff, Emile, living; Rome, Berlin — 10, 20, 104 Zenisek, Franz, b. 1849; living; Prague — 144 Zichy, Michael, living; Hungary, St. Petersburg — 136, 137 Ziebland, G. F., b. 1800; Munich — ^41 Zimmermann, E., living; Munich — 56 Zimmermann, R. S., living; Munich — 56 Zwirner, Ernst Friedrich, b. 1802; d. 1861; Berlin — 65 LONDON ; Printed by Strangeways and Sons, Tower Street, Upper St. Martin's Lane.