This revival of romanticism opened up a wide field to science and poetry. The apotheosis of the old imperial times was made manifest amid fairy-like glamour. Poetry grasped the pilgrim’s staff, or rode with beauteous dames on milk-white palfreys through forest and glade. Enchanted genii, elves, fairies, and goblins were encountered on the road. Nowhere is there so sweet a scent of blossoms, so innocent a sound of children’s merriment, as in Tieck’s delightful and dainty fairy-tales, or in the works of Clemens Brentano, those precious stories of Father Rhine, of the water-nymphs and the crystal castles at the bottom of the green current, pictures full of charming wilfulness, dreamily winsome, like summer evenings on the Rhine. Uhland sang, as once had sung the knightly poets with the golden harps—
| “Von Gottesminne, von kühner Helden Muth, Von lindem liebesinne, von süsser Maiengluth.” |
To this day we seem to peep between the weather-beaten castles, standing on their grey rocks along the Rhine Valley, into the realm of romance as into an enigma propounded by mountain and dale. Rhine and romance!
No spot in Germany was better fitted to become the cradle of a romantic art than Düsseldorf, the peaceful town on the legend-haunted banks of the green river. In the fifteenth century, in addition to the school of Florence, where flowed a rich current of political and human life, where great buildings, monuments, and frescoes kept architects and sculptors and painters uniformly busied, there existed in the remote Umbrian valleys, in the land of miracles and visions, that school of painting in oils which saw its only eternal ideal in the deep eyes and soft aspect of the Madonna, and made the visionary aspirations of the soul, emotions, and sentiment the exclusive subject of their pictures. In the same manner, in the nineteenth century, we find in contrast with the Munich school, with its numerous architectural products, its massive statuary, and the epic-dramatic fresco painting of Cornelius—“wedding the German to the Greek, and Faust to Helen”—that lyrico-sentimental Düsseldorf school of painting which embraced Madonnas and prophets, knights and robbers, gipsies and monks, water-nymphs and nuns with the same languishing tenderness. In matter and technique it completes the art of Cornelius and the Nazarenes; that of the Munich master by its encouragement of oil-painting; that of the Nazarenes by the stress which it lays upon the more worldly side of mediæval life, upon chivalry, and in a less degree upon that other pillar of mediævalism the Church. The Nazarenes are archæological and ascetic; the Düsseldorf school is insipid in a modern way, feeble, colourless, and sentimental.
Count Raczynski and Friedrich von Uechtritz have given us interesting descriptions of life at Düsseldorf at that time, and their story reads like a chapter of Tacitus’ Germania. “Grand dieu! Bons et affectueux allemands!” exclaimed a Parisian critic of the Count’s book in sad emotion, and held up this virtuous German life, as an example worthy of imitation, to his compatriots, the decadents of fashionable artistic Paris, fallen into modern luxury. Undisturbed by the hum of a big city, and without any communication with its surroundings, the Düsseldorf colony of artists lived its life of seclusion. The painters saw none but painters. They herded together in the studios, and the sole recreation in the intervals of their work was a visit to another studio. The whole of the day was devoted to painting; when the picture was complete it went to the art union; and the hours of tediousness were overcome with the assistance of a little intrigue. Hildebrandt possessed the nucleus of a collection of beetles. Lessing, the hunter, collected pipes and antlers, and only felt himself at home in the little room which he occupied with Sohn when it assumed the appearance of a gamekeeper’s cottage. Convinced that politics were the ruin of character, they allowed no questions of the day to interfere with the calmness of their artistic life. Few of them ever read a newspaper. In the year of revolution, 1830, their sole interest in the events around them was concentrated in the fear that a war might disturb their idyllic life. The end of the day’s work saw them in summer-time bent on a pilgrimage to the Stockkämpchen, to refresh themselves with a cup of buttermilk, to play at bowls, or to enjoy a race among the cabbage patches of the garden. In winter they made a point of meeting at seven o’clock every Saturday night at the inn for a literary reading. Each taking his part they recited the dramas of Tieck, of Calderon, and Lopez; or Uechtritz read extracts from German history, the Crusades, the period of the emperors, the riots of the Hussites. Every Sunday night there met at Schadow’s a very distinguished intellectual circle, consisting of Judge Immermann (the reformer of the stage at Düsseldorf), Felix Mendelssohn the composer, Kortum, author of the Jobsiade, and Assessor von Uechtritz, with their ladies. But the great gala-days were the theatrical performances which took place twice a week. Under the leadership of Immermann the theatre had become the place whence the young painters gathered their liveliest suggestions. Some of them went even so far as to take part in amateur performances, conducted by Immermann, and given in Schadow’s house, under the auspices of the whole of the distinguished society. And thus the pictures of this school were not conceived under the influence of life, but of the theatre. The Düsseldorf artists were youths whose productions were not rooted in life, but in reading and culture; youths who always moved in good society, and who had passed through the great ordeals of life, but only on “the boards representing the universe.”
Theodor Hildebrandt became the Shakespeare of Düsseldorf. The translation of the works of the English poet by Schlegel had been published some time earlier, and Immermann, in Düsseldorf, had been the first to offer Shakespeare a home on the German stage. The performances of his tragedies were regarded as red-letter days. During the three years of Immermann’s leadership (1834-37), Hamlet, Macbeth, King John, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Julius Cæsar were performed on fifteen occasions in all.[1] To give the titles of these plays is at once to characterise the subject-matter of Hildebrandt’s paintings. He very often had a hand in the staging of the plays, and is said to have shown a remarkable histrionic talent in the performances at Schadow’s. He rarely went to other poets for his inspiration, as in his “Pictures from Faust” and his “Beware of the Water Nymph,” where he honoured Goethe, and in his “Brigands,” where he may have been inspired by one of the many variations on Rinaldo Rinaldini that flooded the market at the time, or perhaps also by Byron, whose influence was very marked on the Düsseldorf school.
Goethe’s Frauengestalten, more especially the Leonoras, were reproduced in oils by old father Sohn. Eduard Steinbruck painted Genevièves, Red Riding Hoods, Elves, and Undines, after Tieck and Fouqué; H. Stilke’s “Pictures from the Crusades” introduced Walter Scott to the German public. Uhland’s first ballads had brought into fashion the damsels who from the ramparts of their castles wave a sad farewell to the lonely shepherds; the ancestral tombs, in which the last knight of his race takes his everlasting rest; the lists, where melancholy heroes stab themselves. His Love-song of the Shepherd to the Shepherdess—
| “Und halt ich dich in den Armen Auf freien Bergeshöhn, Wir sehn in die weiten Lande Und werden doch nicht gesehn,” |
gave Bendemann the motive for his picture of the same name. Young Lessing had to thank Uhland for the subject of his first success, “The Sorrowing Royal Pair,” which at one bound made his name one of the most honoured in German art.
| “Wohl sah ich die Eltern beide Ohne der Kronen Licht Im schwarzen Trauerkleide, Die Jungfrau sah ich nicht.” |