The influence of Rubens and his school is not perceptible in modern Belgian work. This is rather curious when we consider the immense amount of Rubens-worship which is perpetually going on at Antwerp. Rembrandt, Franz Hals, and Vanderhelst have had much more influence on the Belgian school than Rubens, but the modern artists of Brussels are not a race of copyists. They evidently study nature a good deal, and this, it appears to me, is the secret of their strength. On the whole I have formed a very favorable opinion of the Belgian school, and when I recall to mind the excellent mural paintings at Ypres and Courtray, I must say that the old Parisian sneer about the “contrefaçon Belge” is quite inapplicable at the present day.
It is manifestly unfair to compare the German gallery of the Great Exhibition with the French, English, or Belgian section. The pictures sent by Germany were hastily got together at the eleventh hour, and were notoriously inadequate specimens of German art. Still they were interesting, as showing the tendency of the school.
The first impression on entering the German gallery was a favorable one. It was like entering a gallery of old masters after a surfeit of garish, crude modern pictures. A closer examination led one, however, to form a less favorable opinion of the peculiarities of German art. The imitation of the old masters is, in my opinion, carried too far. Reminiscences of Holbein and Albert Durer crop up everywhere, and many pictures which are not directly imitative of the old masters have a brown old-varnished appearance. There may not have been any thing offensively bad or ludicrously absurd in the German gallery, but on the other hand, with a few exceptions, there appeared to me to be a sad want of originality. These exceptional pictures were humble and unpretentious enough both in subject and dimensions, but full of truth and character.
The artist, Knaus, enjoys a great reputation both in Germany and Europe generally. His color, though true, is not very attractive. There is no great charm in his execution. The nature of his subjects precludes fine, classical drawing or noble composition. It may be asked, What, then, is his great merit? It is simply the intense realism of his figures. We always feel that we must have seen and known his peasants, his children, and his Jews. He has the same power of seizing types which John Leech so eminently possessed. Whether he quite deserves to be in the front rank of European painters is another question, but it is interesting to note the reputation such an artist has obtained in Germany, where art, though often learned, is seldom truthful or harmonious.
It has often been said that German art is never seen at its best in easel pictures, and that to express an opinion about it one ought to go to Germany, and study the mural paintings which abound there. It is more than twenty-five years since I visited either Munich or Berlin, and I am therefore not qualified to give an opinion about the present state of art in Germany. I confess I was not favorably impressed with what I then saw; and have often in the course of these lectures found fault with Kaulbach and his school for neglecting Horace’s well-known precept, “Artis est celare artem.”
The large mural works at Munich and Berlin used to be considered by Germans as the highest development of heroic painting. They asserted that their country was at the top of the ladder in high art, just as it undoubtedly was in music, and my criticisms on their great painters have always been provoked by this assertion. I have never stigmatized these decorative paintings as being absolutely bad or contemptible, but as being unworthy of the great esteem in which they were held.
I hear that at the present time other artists have in great measure superseded those of the school of Kaulbach, and that the highly artificial style of thirty years ago has been almost abandoned.
Scandinavian and Danish art are derived from Germany, as Belgian and Swiss are derived from France. In the case of Norway and Sweden, however, all the best artists emigrate to more southern regions; and small blame to them, for when daylight begins at ten and ends at two, there is not much time for painting pictures. These artists, who are mostly landscape-painters, return to their native countries in summer and make their sketches and studies; but the pictures themselves are painted either in Germany, Belgium, or France.
In Denmark the winter days are rather longer, and we find at Copenhagen a feeble attempt at a native school, bearing about the same relation to Dusseldorf or Berlin, that Birmingham or Liverpool would to London.
Leaving these humble followers of the German school, we will now enter the Austrian and Hungarian galleries.