Albert, Munich.
FEUERBACH.PIETA.

He was handsome, small, and refined, and rather pale and spare—of that delicacy which in highly bred families is found in the last heirs with whom the race dies out—and he had dark locks which clustered wildly round his head. The moulding of his features was feminine, and his complexion southern; his eyes, shadowed by long lashes, were brown, sometimes fiery, sometimes sad and earnest, and his glance was swift. He loved to sing Italian songs to the guitar in his fine, deep voice, and Boecklin and Reinhold Begas would join in.

The impressions he received in Italy were formative of his life. For he learnt to understand the divine simplicity and noble dignity of antique art better than Couture was capable of understanding them; and he achieved a simple amplitude to which the French Classicism had never risen.

From his first works, to which the Düsseldorf egg-shell is still sticking, down to the “Symposium of Plato”—what a route it is, and through what phases he passes. “Hafiz at the Well,” surrounded by voluptuous, half-naked girls, painted at Paris in 1852, was his first eminent achievement. In subject it is a late fruit from Daumer’s study of Hafiz: as a work of art it is one of the most genuine products of the school of Couture. No other German artist has surrendered himself so entirely to the French. With a large brush, never losing sight of the complete effect, Feuerbach has painted his canvas, almost for the sake of showing that he has assimilated everything that was to be learnt in Paris. The same influence preponderates in the “Death of Pietro Aretino,” done in 1854. But, side by side with the Parisian master, the later Venetians have an unmistakable share in this work. The capacity to grasp things in a monumental largeness is already announced. Evidently Feuerbach has studied Paul Veronese, and realised how high he stands above the French painters. At the same time he has examined the other Venetians for their technique, and discovered something which has appealed to him in Bordone’s colouring. But “Dante walking with high-born Ladies of Ravenna,” finished at Rome in 1857, was the ripest fruit of his Venetian impressions. In sunny warmth of colour, fine golden tone, and quiet simplicity of pictorial treatment, no modern has come so near to Palma and Bordone. And in “Dante’s Death,” of 1858, there predominates a still greater depth and golden glow, a grave and devout beauty.

Seemann, Leipzig.
FEUERBACH.IPHIGENIA.

In the following works, however, Feuerbach, with a conscious purpose, denies himself the quality to which the Dante pictures owe a principal part of their powerful effect: the mild glow, the sunny beaming of colour. He confines himself to a cool scheme of tone, reduced to grey, almost to the point of colourlessness; to a glimmer of leaden blue, a moonlight pallor. At the same time he has concentrated the whole life of his figures in their inward being, whilst every movement has been taken from their limbs. Even the expression of spiritual emotion in the eyes and features has been subdued in the extreme. The “Pietà,” both the “Iphigenias,” and the “Symposium of Plato” are the world-renowned proofs of the height of classic inspiration which he touched in Italy. Measure, nobility, unsought and perfected loftiness characterise the “Pietà,” that mother of the Saviour who bows herself in silent agony over the body of her Divine Son, and those three kneeling women, whose silent grief is of such thrilling power, precisely because of its emotionlessness. For “Iphigenia” Feuerbach has given of his best. She is in both examples—the first of 1862, the second of 1871—a figure sublime beyond human measure, grand like the figure of the Greek tragedy. But the “Symposium of Plato” will always assert its high value as one of the finest pictorial creations of an imagination nourished on the great art of the ancients, and filled brimful with the splendour of the antique world. There is nothing in it superfluous, nothing accidental. The noblest simplicity of speech, a Greek rhythm in all gradations, the beautiful lines of bas-relief, decisive colour and stringent form—that is the groundwork of Feuerbach’s art. And through it there speaks a spirit preoccupied with greatness and heroism. Thus he created his “Medea” in the Munich Pinakothek, that picture of magnificent, sombre melancholy that affects one like a monologue from a Sophoclean tragedy. Thus he painted his “Battle of the Amazons,” one of the few “nude” pictures of the century which possesses the perfectly unconcerned and unsexual nudity of the antique. Italy had set him free from all the insincere and calculated methods which had deformed French art since Delaroche; it had set him free from all theatrical sentiment, by which he had accustomed himself to understand everything that was forced in costume, pigment, pose and movement, light and scenery. In the place of the ordinary treatment from the model, with its set gestures and grimaces, he gave an expression of form which was great, simple, and plastic. His study seems to have been an incessant exercise of the eye, to see and to hold fast to the essential, to the great lines of nature as of the human body.

Albert, Munich.
FEUERBACH.   PORTRAIT OF A ROMAN LADY.