That is true of the entire Berlin school of the fifties and sixties. The most independent of the many artists who journeyed from the Spree to the Seine is, probably, Rudolf Henneberg, who died young. His technique he owed to Couture, in whose studio he worked from 1851, and his subject-matter to the German classical authors. Born a Brunswicker, he felt himself specially attracted by his countryman Bürger, and became a Northern ballad painter with French technique. Movement, animation, wildness, and a certain romantic eeriness, proper to the Northern ballad—these are Henneberg’s prominent features, as they are Bürger’s. His pictures have a bold caprice and a peculiarly powerful and sombre poetry. The hunting party storm past irresistibly, like a whirlwind, in his “Wild Hunt,” the illustration to Bürger’s ballad, which in 1856 won him the gold medal in Paris.

“Und hinterher bei Knall and Klang Der Tross mit Hund und Ross und Mann.”

A Düsseldorfian Romanticism, from the Wolf’s Glen, is united to Couture’s nobleness of colouring in his “Criminal from Lost Honour,” of 1860. And a part—even if only a small one—of the spirit which created Dürer’s “The Knight, Death, and the Devil” lives in his masterpiece “The Race for Fortune,” a picture breathed on by the spirit of sombre, mediæval Romanticism, which made his name the most honoured in the Exhibition of 1868.

SCHRADER.CROMWELL AT WHITEHALL.

The negation of power, an almost feminine painter of no distinctive character, a new edition of Winterhalter, was Gustav Richter. His popularity is connected with the fisher-boys and odalisques, the reproduction of which every sempstress at one time used to wear on her brooch, while in printed colours they added splendour to all the bonbon and handkerchief boxes. The accomplished workmanship and sparkling treatment of material which he acquired in Paris made him in 1860, after Eduard Magnus had made his exit, the most famous painter of feminine beauty. A pleasure-loving man of the world, elegant in appearance, fame, honour, and distinction were showered upon him, and he became the shining spoilt darling of society, the central point of an extensive and animated convivial intercourse. His works were carried out in a style which, at that time, had not been learnt in Berlin, and had an air of Court life which was held to be exceedingly fashionable. It was later that the banal emptiness and insipid taste of his toilette portraits first became obvious, and that their everlastingly sweet and doll-like smirk, and their kind and winning eyes, always the same, began to grow tiresome. In all his life-size chromolithographs there is a distinction of build and appearance, which in the originals was perhaps to have been desired, although the originals unquestionably looked like something that was more human and individual. In riper years, after the happiness of family life had been given him, he executed works which assure his name a certain endurance; this he did in some of his family portraits,—for instance, in those of his boys and his wife. To this last period belongs the ideal portrait of the Baroness Ziegler as Queen Louisa, which became such a popular picture in Prussia. But Richter’s “great” compositions, which once charmed the visitors at exhibitions, are now forgotten. In “Jairus’s Daughter”—admired in 1856 as a fine performance in colouring—what strikes one now that its colouring has long been surpassed is the inadequacy and theatricality of its characterisation, the outward show, and the banality of this handsome young man who performs his miracle with a declamatory pose. The “Building of the Pyramids,” painted for the Maximilianeum in Munich, with its swarming crowd of dark-coloured people, and the royal pair come to inspect with an endless train, is a gigantic ethnographical picture-sheet, which did not repay the expenditure of twelve long years of work.

In Paris Otto Knille learnt to approach huge canvas and wall spaces with fearlessness, and by executing the many monumental commissions which fell to his share in Prussia, he put this French talent to usury in a manner which was as blameless as it was uninteresting. Some good paintings by Julius Schrader, such as the historical pictures with which his fame is associated, have remained fresh for a longer period. The “Death of Leonardo da Vinci,” as well as the “Surrender of Calais to Edward III,” “Wallenstein and Seni at their Astrological Studies,” “The Dying Milton,” and “Charles I parting from his Children,” are only a collection of what the Parisian studios had transmitted to him. Delaroche and the illustrative and theatrical painting of history, having gone the rounds in Belgium, in the next decade demanded their sacrifice in Germany.

Seemann, Leipzig.
LESSING.THE HUSSITE SERMON.

Here also similar political and literary conditions were prescribed. A backward people, uncontent with itself, pined for deeds and glory. Through the presentment of the great dramas of the past the spirit of the present was to be quickened, as a relaxed body by massage. Here also the knowledge of history levelled the ground for painting, as it did in France. While, in the imagination of the Romanticists, different ages melted dreamily into each other, and the Hohenstauffen period, because of its tender melancholy character, gave the keynote for all German history, the scientific writing of history had, since the thirties, entered as a power into literature. Schlosser began his Universal-historische Uebersicht der Geschichte der alten Welt, which swelled to nine volumes, and represented with a completeness hitherto unapproached the civilisation of antiquity. His history of the eighteenth century was a still greater departure, for, after the example of Voltaire, he included manners, science, and literature in his account of political events. On the uncompromising subjectivity of Schlosser followed the scientific objectivity of Ranke, who, a master of the criticism of sources, delineated with delicate, silver-point portraits the Papacy after the Reformation, the French Court, the policy of the princes of the age of the Reformation, Cromwell, and the heroes of the rising power of Prussia. Luden, Giesebrecht, Leo, Hurter, Dahlmann, Gervinus, and many others began their great labours. German painting, like French, sought to take advantage of the results of these scientific investigations; and Schnaase was the first who, in the Kunstblatt in 1834, described historical painting as the pressing demand of the age, and the cultivation of the historical sense in such a disconsolate epoch as a “truly religious necessity.” Soon afterwards Vischer began to preach historical painting as a new gospel. History, he says, is the revelation of God. His Being is revealed in it as much as in the sacred writings of religion. Historical painting is therefore the completion and full exemplification of those principles which, five centuries back, in Giotto, led to the movement of the new Christian painting. It is called forth by the development of all forms of life and knowledge, and is the last and highest step which sacred painting is able to reach: it is the final completion of sacred painting itself. “Who represents the Holy Ghost with more dignity? He who paints Him as a dove upon a sheaf of sunbeams, or he who places before me a great and lofty man, a Luther or a Huss in the flame of divine enthusiasm?”

Something of the sort had been in the mind of Strauss when he advocated the worship of genius as a substitute for religion. The infidel idealistic painting and satire had been followed by a religious art which evaporated in Nazareanism; pure history in boots and spurs was next preached as a religion. “We stand,” says Hotho in his history of German and Netherlandish painting, “with our knowledge, culture, and insight, on a summit from which we overlook the whole past. The Orient, Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and modern times, with their religion, literature, and art, their deeds and their life, spread like a universal panorama before us; and it is one that we must grasp with a universal feeling for the distinctiveness of every people, of every epoch, and of every character. In this fashion to bury one’s self in the past, to get at the most essential meaning of its life by knowledge, to awaken what is dead, and by art to renew what is vanished, and thus to elevate the present to the level of the still living, kindred Mnemosyne of the past, such is the vivifying work of our time; and to that work its best powers must be devoted.”

CARL PILOTY.