As a boy, in his little native village of Kratzau, in Bohemia, he had tended the cows in summer time and had acquired a certain sincere knowledge of nature and shepherd-life. He had to thank Dürer for his preference for the idyllic and patriarchal family scenes in Sacred History, and these tendencies found pleasing expression in pictures like “Jacob and Rachel,” or “The Passage of Mary across the Mountains.” No matter that the figures in “Jacob and Rachel” are taken out of the early pictures of Pinturicchio and Raphael, they are still interwoven, with their background of landscape, into an idyll of great naïveté and charm. More especially, however, did the qualities which he owed to Dürer acquire value—a sturdy characterisation, a naïve art in telling the story, and a great wealth of fresh traits, straight from nature—in the serial compositions of his old age. There is no sentimental vagueness, nothing academical. Führich had a keen eye for what was intimate, familiar; a tender sense of the individualities of landscape in woodland and meadow, of the charm of everyday life as well as of the animal world; and though an idealist, he knew how to assimilate ingeniously what he had observed with a certain realistic fulness. The old story of Boaz and Ruth grew beneath his hands into a delicious idyll of country life. From the story of the Prodigal Son he has extracted with sensitiveness the purely human kernel, and as late as the winter of 1870-71, at the age of seventy-one, he illustrated the legend of St. Gwendolen, in which he depicted with tender reverence the escape of a human soul, withdrawn from the world and resigned to God’s will, into Nature and her peace.

Edward Steinle, who went from Rome to Vienna in 1833, and settled in Frankfort in 1838, is called, not very appropriately, by his biographer, Constantine Wuzbach, “a Madonna painter of our time.” His name deserves to come down to posterity rather for what he created outside the essential characteristics of his art. In his frescoes in the minster at Aachen, in the choir of the cathedrals of Strasburg and Cologne, he stood firm on the standpoint of the Nazarenes; which is as much as to say they contained nothing novel in the history of art. In his fairy pictures, however, imagination broke through the narrow confines of dogma, and entwined itself in creative enjoyment round the vague figures of fable. His “Loreley,” in the Schack Gallery, as she looks down, a Medusa-like destroyer, from the tall cliff; his watchman who looks dreamily into space over the houses of the old town; his violin player on his tower who plays, forgetful of the world,—these have something musical, poetical, that freshness of sentiment and unsought naïveté which as an inheritance of his Viennese home was also peculiar in such a high degree to Schwind.

The Romantic aspiration is revealed in Steinle, even, in a certain “yearning after colour.” There lives in his works a refined feeling for colour that, especially in his water-colours, rarely forsakes him. Take, for instance, the fresh, tinted pen-drawings, engraved by Schaffer, in which he displayed with the naïveté of Memlinc the life of St. Euphrosyne; the five aquarelles of Grimm’s “Snow-White and Rose-Red”; or his illustrations to Brentano’s poems, such as the Chronicle of the Wandering Student, and the Fairy Tale of the Rhine and Radlauf the Miller, in which he developed a delight in the world and an idea of landscape that in the ascetic Nazarene excite astonishment.

VEIT.THE TWO MARYS AT THE SEPULCHRE.

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld went, after the completion of the Ariosto Room of the Villa Massini, first to Vienna, then in 1827 to Munich, in order to paint the Nibelungen in the halls of the royal residence of that time, and in the imperial halls of the state palace the history of Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, and Rudolf of Hapsburg. He also, however, created his best work at the close of his life in Dresden,—the forcible woodcuts of his Picture Bible, which narrated the world’s sacred history in strong and vigorous strokes.

Strangest to the present-day taste have become the drawings of Cornelius. His plates to Goethe’s Faust have, indeed, a certain austere strength of conception, which he learnt from Dürer; but also faults of drawing, exaggerations, crudities, and errors in perspective, which he did not find in Dürer.

In his second work, the Nibelungen cycle, an intentional old-German angularity, with an unintentional modern clumsiness, has effected a mésalliance even less attractive.

OVERBECK.PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF AND CORNELIUS.