And now for him who was the most admirable of them all, Lady Adventure’s true knight.

“Master Schwind, you are a genius and a Romanticist.” This stereotyped compliment was paid by King Ludwig to the painter on each occasion that, without buying anything of him, he visited his studio. And with equal regularity Schwind, when he had sat down again at his easel, after the royal visit, to smoke his pipe, is said to have muttered something extremely disloyal. In this trait the whole Schwind is already revealed,—free from all ambition, every inch an artist.

W. H. Riehl has described a series of such episodes, which one must know in order to understand Schwind, that highly gifted child of nature, who separates himself from the group of philosophical, “meditative” artists of his age, both as an individual and as an audacious, original genius of effervescent wit.

Seemann, Leipzig.
RETHEL.HANNIBAL’S PASSAGE OVER THE ALPS.

When an æsthetic once hailed him as “the creator of an original, German kind of ideal, romantic art,” Schwind repeated very slowly, weighing each word: “’An original, German kind of ideal, romantic art.’ My dear sir, to me there are only two kinds of pictures, the sold and the unsold; and to me the sold are always the best. Those are my entire æsthetics.” Or a noble amateur comes to him with the request that he would take him just for a few days into his school, and instruct him especially in his masterly art of drawing in pencil. Whereupon Schwind: “It does not require a day for that, my dear Baron; I can tell you in three minutes how I do it, I can give you all the desired information at once. Here lies my paper,—kindly remark it, I buy it of Bullinger, 6 Residenz Strasse; these are my pencils, A. W. Faber’s, I get them from Andreas Kaut, 10 Kaufinger Strasse; from the same firm I have this indiarubber too, but I very seldom use it, so that I use this penknife all the more, to sharpen the pencils; it’s from Tresch, 10 Dienersgasse, and very good value. Now, I have all these things lying together on the table, and a few thoughts in my head as well; then I sit down here and begin to draw. And now you know all that I can tell you.” Again he asks “to be decorated with an order,” because he “is ashamed to mix in such a naked condition with his bestarred confrères,” and after the bestowal of the desired decoration he says: “I wore it only once, at the last New Year’s levée, but I vowed at the same time that six horses should not drag me there again. Before, there was at any rate a beautiful queen there, and then the court ladies laughed at one; but amongst men only, the stupidity of it is not to be endured.” When he grumbles over commissions which have been given to others, and adds good-temperedly, “Indeed, I’m an envious fellow”; when he paints the most delicate pictures and then growls, “What am I to do with the things, if nobody buys them?” when he indulges in outbursts of wrath, and a minute later has forgotten again the abusive words which the others spitefully bring up against him years afterwards,—then here, too, his happy humour forces its way everywhere, that divine naïveté which forms the soul of his and of all true art.

RETHEL.DEATH AT THE MASKED BALL.
Seemann, Leipzig.
RETHEL.DEATH THE FRIEND OF MAN.

Schwind remains a personality by himself—the last of the Romanticists, and one of the most amiable manifestations in German art. He was free from the malady of that sham Romanticism which sought the salvation of art in the resurrection of the Middle Ages, misunderstood, and grasped sentimentally, and as it were by stencil. He was spiritually permeated by that which had given Romanticism the capacity to exist: the sense of that forgotten and imperishable world of beauty which it has again discovered. The others sought for the “blue flower,” Schwind found it; resuscitated in all its faëry beauty that “fair night of enchantment which holds the mind captive.” He incorporated the romantic idea in painting as Weber did in music, and his works, like the Freischütz, will live for ever. Many a man listened to him holding forth upon water-nymphs, gnomes, and tricksy kobolds, as of beings of whose existence he appeared to have no doubt whatever. On one occasion, while out walking near Eisenach in the Annathal, a friend laughingly observed to him that the landscape really looked as if gnomes had made the pathway and had had their dwellings there. “Don’t you believe it was so? I believe it,” answered Schwind in all seriousness. He lived in the world of legend and fairy-tale. If ever a fairy stood beside the cradle of a mortal man, assuredly there was one standing by Schwind’s; and all his life long he believed in her and raved about her. Born in the land where Neidhart of Neuenthal had sung and the Parson of the Kahlenberg had dwelt, to his eyes Germany was overshadowed with ancient Teutonic oaks: for him, elves hovered about watersprings and streams, their white robes trailing behind them through the dewy grass; a race of gnomes held their habitation on the mountain heights, and water-nymphs bathed in every pool. In him part of the Middle Ages came back to life, not in livid, corpse-like pallor, but fanned by the revivifying breath of the present day.

For that is what is noteworthy about Schwind; he is a Romanticist, yet at the same time a genuine, modern child of Vienna. There are three things in each of which Vienna stands supreme: hers are the fairest women, the sweetest songs, and the most beautiful waltzes. The atmosphere of Vienna sends forth a soft and sensual breath which encircles us as though with women’s arms; songs and dances slumber in the air, waiting only for a call to be awakened. Vienna is a place for enjoyment rather than for work, for pensive dreaming rather than for sober wakefulness of mind. Moritz Schwind was a child of this city of beautiful women, songs, and dances, as may be observed in the feminine nature of his art, in its melody and rhythm: in music, indeed, it had its source. In song-singing, bell-ringing Vienna it was difficult for him to guess in what direction his talents lay; but all his life long he kept an open eye for the charms of beautiful womanhood. No artist of that time has created lovelier forms of women, beings with so great a charm of maidenly freshness and modest grace. Instead of the goddesses, heroines, and nun-like female saints, whose appearance dated from the Italy of the Cinquecento, Schwind depicted modern feminine charm. The group of ladies in “Ritter Kurt” is, even to the movement of their gloved fingers, graceful in the modern sense. He was a painter of love—a breath of Walter von der Vogelweide’s ideal perfection of womanhood pervades his pictures.

“Durchsüsset und geblümet sind die reinen Frauen, Es ward nie nichts so Wonnigliches anzuschauen, In Lüften, auf Erden, noch in allen grünen Auen.”