Munich, with its magnificent art collections, its picture and sculpture galleries, its thousand artists; Munich, with its bronze statues, the home of Schwanthaler, the city of broad streets, the capital of Bavaria, and the city that makes the best beer in all Europe.
The great hotel, "The Four Seasons," was filled with guests, but good rooms were obtained at the Baierischer Hof, on the Promenaden Platz; and our comfortable quarters were welcome indeed, after eleven hours' rapid journeying. The last portion of the way approaching Munich was dull enough, as it was over a broad, flat plain, with scarcely any trees, and the signs of life were confined to an occasional lonely shepherd, with his dog, guarding a flock. In fact, Munich is built in the middle of a great plain, which is flat and uninteresting, and the city itself is not considered healthy for Americans or English to reside in any length of time. It is, however, one of the European cities that have grown in size very rapidly the last thirty years, and the newer parts, built out into the plain, away from the old city, waiting for the gap between to fill up, remind the American traveller of cities in his native land.
The first sights of all others in Munich to which the tourist turns his attention, are the art collections. The Glyptothek is the gallery of sculpture, and the Pinacothek the picture gallery; and the admission to these superb and priceless collections is free to all. The buildings stand opposite to each other; and, as we find how much this city owes to old King Louis for its position as a seat of the fine arts; how many beautiful buildings, statues, galleries, public edifices, and streets, were built by his order; and, still further, that the expenses of the Glyptothek and other collections were paid for from his own privy purse,—we feel inclined to look with a lenient eye upon the old monarch's regard for pretty women, and the Lola Montez scandal.
The Pinacothek is a magnificent building, shaped like the letter I, and is divided off into nine splendid halls, devoted to different schools of art. Opening off or out of these halls are twenty-three smaller rooms, or cabinets, for the smaller pictures of each school. Thus there are three great halls devoted to the Italian school of art, two to the Dutch school, two to the German, one to the French and Spanish, and a great central hall to Rubens. In these great halls the larger pictures are hung, and the light, which comes from the roof, is well and artistically managed for displaying their beauties. In the cabinets are the ordinary sized and smaller paintings. But what a wealth of art! There are nearly fifteen hundred elegant paintings, hundreds of them by some of the most celebrated artists that ever lived, and nearly all of them works that you want time to study and admire.
The American who has been shown an occasional old dingy head or blackened landscape, half obliterated by age, in his own country, and told it is a rare treasure,—one of the old masters,—and who, as many do, comes to the conclusion that the old masters did not put what he should call finish into their works, will have all impressions of that nature removed by his visit to this priceless collection. Here he will see pictures that startle even the casual observer by their wondrous faithfulness to nature; pictures upon which the hand of the artist is visible in the minutest detail, the coloring and finish of which betray the most laborious application, and which excite from him who may have been silent over expressions of admiration at pictures at home which were not his ideals of excellence,—silent, perhaps, from fearing that he might be incorrect in judgment,—the honest assertion, that here is his ideal of the artistic, and convince him that a picture cleanly finished in all its details, fresh in color, sharp, distinct, and well defined, can be artistic; and that even the best of the old masters, if their works can be taken as an indication, thought so, too.
There is a good deal of humbug in the popular admiration of muddy, indistinct old daubs, half defaced by age; and the visitor here, in inspecting some of these wondrous creations, where the artist, in groups of angels and cherubs, puts exquisite features to faces the size of one's thumb nail, and grace into those ten times that size in the same work, ascertains that a picture, to be really beautiful, must be completely and artistically finished.
It would be useless, in these limits, to attempt a detailed description of this world-renowned collection, to which two or three visits are but an aggravation to the lover of art. Tourists generally "do" it in one hasty visit, like many other sights, simply to say they have been there.
My note-book and catalogues are crammed with sentences of admiration and marginal notes; but a few extracts will give the reader who has not been abroad an idea of the interest of this gallery. First, there were two great halls and six or eight ante-rooms devoted to the German school of art. Here we saw numerous pictures by Albert Dürer—a Knight in Armor, St. Peter and St. John, the Birth of Christ, &c.; a number by Holbein, the elder and younger; Wohlgemuth, some strikingly effective pictures from the life of Christ; Quentin Matsys' well-known picture of the Misers; Mabeuse's noble picture of the archangel Michael; Dietrich's splendid sea scenes; Van Eyck's Adoration of the Magi, Annunciation, and Presentation in the Temple—pictures of wonderful execution, the faces finished exquisitely, and the minutest details executed in a manner to command admiration; Albert Dürer's Mater Dolorosa; the head of an old woman and man, the most wonderful pictures of the kind I ever saw, painted by Balthasar Denner, and every wrinkle, hair, speck, pore of the skin, depicted with such wonderful and microscopic exactness as to render it an impossibility to tell it from a living person at three feet distance.
The third and fifth halls are filled with paintings of the Dutch school by the pupils of Rubens and other artists, and the nine cabinets, or smaller halls opening out of them, with pictures by various Flemish and Dutch masters. Here were Teniers' elegantly finished and admirable pictures of Boors Smoking, Boors at Cards; Ostade's Boors Quarrelling and Boors Merry-making; Gerard Dow's Mountebank at the Fair, Wouvermans' Stag Hunt, Vandyke's Susanna and the Elders, Rembrandt's magnificent Descent from the Cross, &c., besides many other Rembrandts, Teniers, Ostades, and Van der Werfs, any one of which was a study, a plethora, a wilderness of beauty.
The fourth apartment, or central hall, is devoted entirely to the works of Rubens, and contains nearly a hundred of the great master's pictures. There was his Christ on the Cross, a most terribly real picture, that made one almost shudder to look upon; the Fall of the Angels, a remarkable and wondrous work of art; the Massacre of the Innocents, the Sabine Women, the Last Judgment, Triumph of Religion, Rubens and his Wife in a Garden, the Lion Hunt, &c. But just think of one room in a gallery with a hundred of Rubens's best works surrounding you; it is useless to attempt description. The ante-room, containing the best pictures, to my mind, was that filled with Van der Werf's paintings, which were marvellously clear and sharp in their execution, and finished with exquisite skill. Here were the Magdalen in a Grotto, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Ecce Homo—all pictures of superb coloring never seen in any modern work of art; Abraham sending forth Hagar and Ishmael; portrait of the wife of the Elector John William; these two paintings were finished equal to engravings. In Jesus disputing with the Doctors in the Temple, the faces of the disputants are wondrous studies, exhibiting various emotions, and the figure of Christ, a beautiful boy, has the look of Heaven in every lineament of his face. Many other perfectly finished pictures that hold one entranced with their wondrous beauty are in this room.