CHODOWIECKI.ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF WOMEN.Cassell & Co.

Daniel Chodowiecki, with all his commonplaceness, is a genuine expression of this phase of German art. He in Germany, Hogarth in England, and Chardin in France, are products of the same tendency of the age. After Lessing had produced in Minna the first domestic German tragedy, Chodowiecki, following the road of Hogarth and Chardin, was able to become the painter of the German middle class. He is not a master of such penetrating strength as they were, but he is no less an artist of notable merit. He is certainly no genius—in fact almost a handicraftsman, sober and philistine, but, like Hogarth, a self-made man who in his whole artistic and personal outlook was rooted in the soil of his city and of his age. Berlin society of that day was the basis of his art, the daily life of house and street his domain. He began by illustrating poems and depicting scenes out of the Seven Years’ War and the History of Charles the Great, and went on from that to the pleasant, homely life of the small bourgeoisie. Himself of the middle classes, he chiefly worked for them, and with his sensitive and dexterous graving tool he kept the liveliest and most exhaustive chronicle of the German bourgeoisie of that age. At times almost too reasonable and prosaic, a genuine Nicolai, he has in other plates an enchanting freshness, and—which should not be forgotten—is more of an artist than Hogarth, since he is neither moralist nor satirist. His object, without any moral after-thought, was the true and kindly observation of life as displayed in the world around him. He took the wholly naïve delight of the genuine artist in turning everything he saw into a picture. These chronicles of his have some, it may be but a particle, of the spirit of Dürer. Simultaneously, the young Tischbein delved into the past of the nation, the age of Conradin and the Hohenstaufen, with the intention of finding there the simplicity which the academic pictures had come to lack; and, later on, he painted in Hamburg extremely realistic historical pictures of his own period, such as that which is to be found in the Oldenburg Gallery: “Entry of General Benigsen into Hamburg, 1814.” He did good work too as a portrait painter. In his best picture, “Goethe amongst the Ruins of Rome,” the head of the poet is energetic and full of strength, the colouring of an excellent clear grey.

In portrait painting in general, the revolution is reflected with especial clearness. The artificial manner that had been copied from the seventeenth century, the age of long perukes, gives way, slowly but surely, to an ever-growing naturalness, simplicity, and originality. At that time, while the spirit of Louis XIV still hovered over everything, the passion of the individual to be king in his own sphere had penetrated into the family. The honest citizen, therefore, would not let himself be painted as such, but only as a prince,—he, himself, in gala dress, with a pompous air, as stately as though he were giving an audience to the spectator, his wife in silk and gold and lace; she has a great mantle of state worn loose over her shoulders and hips, and looks down with an assumption of grandeur on her grandchild, who is half respectful and half inclined to make fun. The frame is as rich as the costume, and probably bears a crown. We are with difficulty persuaded that these are pictures of simple citizens, that the man, apart from the hours during which he sat to the painter, is an industrious tradesman, and the wife, glancing out so haughtily, most probably darned his stockings. Their portraits seem to form part of an ancestral gallery.

This age of princely state was followed by that of fraternity. In place of berouged and postured portraits with allegorical accessories, there appeared simple, unpretentious likenesses of human beings in their work-a-day clothes; in place of stiff attitudes, genre motives with the easy naturalness of everyday life.

Cassell & Co.
CHODOWIECKI.THE MORNING COMPLIMENT.

In Berlin, ever since 1709, Antoine Pesne had been for half a century the centre of artistic life, and in his works the revolution may be traced. Something familiar and intimate takes the place of that stately pomp. The princes, hitherto, had liked to be represented in mediæval armour or antique equipment; Pesne painted them in the costume of the time. And in his portraits of his friends and his family circle he has been still more unconstrained. There is the charming picture of 1718, in the New Palace at Potsdam, which shows the painter himself with his wife and his two children; the portrait of Schmidt the engraver, in the Berlin Museum; and the beautiful picture of 1754 in the collection of Colonel Von Berke, at Schemnitz, which depicts him again at the age of seventy-one with his two daughters. Pesne is revealed in these characteristic portraits, as well as in his character pictures in the Dresden Gallery (“The Girl with the Pigeons,” 1728, “The Cook with the Turkey-hen,” 1712), as a thoroughly sane and strong realist, of a kind which became almost extinct in Berlin a hundred years later.

In the next generation, in the Sturm-und-Drang period, Anton Graff, the Swiss, took the lead with his simple, domestic, honest, real portraits. It was a happy disposition of fate that Graff’s activity just corresponded with the great period of the awakening of intellectual life in Germany, that Lessing and Schiller, Bodmer and Gessner, Wieland and Herder, Bürger and Gellert, Christian Gottfried Körner and Lippert, Moses Mendelssohn and Sulzer, and a long succession of other poets and scholars of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, found in him a portrait painter whose quick and agile hand left us their features in the truest and most authentic manner. What and how robust his art is, how clear and plastic the execution of the heads, how adroit and infallible the technique!

Besides Graff, there worked in Dresden Christian Leberecht Vogel, likewise a most independent, picturesque, and sensitive artist, who, if only for his pictures of children, deserves a place of honour in the history of art in the eighteenth century. In the portrait of his two boys, in the Dresden Gallery, the naïveté of child-life is observed with such tenderness and rendered with such vigour as only Reynolds understood. The boys are sitting close together on the ground. One, in a brown frock, is holding a book on his knees, which the other, in a red frock, with a whip in his hand, is looking at. The thoughtful expression of the little ones is quite charming; the execution broad and strong, the colour treatment delightful and tender.

In Munich lived the excellent Johann Edlinger, the most industrious of these sturdy masters, who were so modest and yet so capable.