Hans Makart was a genius most picturesque in his mode of life. Whether this life was enacted in his studio, fitted up like a ballroom, in the Ring-Strasse, converted into a stage, or upon his canvas, everything was transformed for him into decoration gleaming with colour. And through this delight in colour the most important impulses were given in the most diverse provinces of life. Against the dowdy lack of taste and the harsh gaiety of ladies’ fashions in that era he set his distinguished costume pictures, carried out in iridescent satin tones; and the enterprising modistes translated them into fact. The Makart hat, the Makart roses, the Makart bouquet—very old-fashioned, no doubt, at the present time—were disseminated over the world. Under the influence of Makart the whole province of the more artistic trades was regarded from a pictorial point of view. Oriental carpets, heavy silken stuffs, Japanese vases, weapons and inlaid furniture, became henceforth the principal elements of decoration. The fashionable world surrounded itself with brilliant colours; papers were supplemented by portières and Gobelins, ceilings were painted, and gay umbrellas stood in the fireplace. The bald, honest city-alderman style gave way, and a bright triumph of colour took its place. In the studio of the master were the finest blossoms of all epochs of art; richly ornamented German chests of the Renaissance stood near Chinese idols and Greek terra-cotta, Smyrna carpets and Gobelins, and old Italian and Netherlandish pictures were mingled with antique and mediæval weapons. And amid this rich still-life of splendid vessels, weapons, sculpture, and costly stuffs and costumes, which crowded all the walls and corners, there rose to the surface as further pieces of decoration a velvet coat, a pair of riding breeches, and a smart pair of Wallenstein boots. Their wearer was a little man with a black beard, two piercing dark eyes, and one of those splendid broad-browed heads which are universally accepted as the sign of genius.

Makart’s pictures are similar studies of still-life out of which human figures rise to the surface. One hears the rustle of silk and satin, and the crackle of costly robes of brocade; one sees velvet door-hangings droop in heavy folds, but the figures which have their being in the midst are merely bodies and not souls, flesh and no bones, colour and no drawing. Sometimes he draws better and sometimes worse, but never well. And therefore he seems unspeakably small by the side of the old Venetians, who in such representation combined a highly developed knowledge of form with luxuriant brilliancy of colour. But even his colour, that flaunting, piquant, bituminous painting derived from Delaroche, which once threw all Germany into ecstasies, no longer awakes any cordial enthusiasm; and the fault is only partially due to the rapid decay, the sadly dilapidated appearance of his pictures. There is not much more remaining of them than of that shining festal procession which for a forenoon set the streets of Vienna in uproar. Tone and colouring have not become finer and more mellow with the years, as in old Gobelins, but ever more spotty and dead. And even if they had remained fresh, would they yet appeal to the present generation, so much more discriminating in their appreciation of colour?

Makart, so much lauded as a painter of flesh, was never really able to paint flesh at all. His feminine flesh tints are often bloodlessly white, and often tinged by an unpleasant, sugary rose hue. The fresh fragrance of life is not to be found in his figures, for they have been begotten, not by contact with nature, but by commerce with old pictures. He was often reproached with immorality by the prudish critics of earlier years; Heaven knows how stagnant and stereotyped this nudity seems in the present day, and how tame this sensuousness, even when one’s thoughts do not happen to have been raised to the great, carnal, and divine sensuousness of Rubens. Like Robert Hamerling, allied to him by his intoxication in colour, Makart had a great momentary success; but, like the former, the brilliancy of his work has swiftly paled, and it is now seen how poor and sickly was the theme hidden behind the lavish instrumentation. Because a correct and solid anatomy was wanting to his creations from their birth upwards, they can live no longer now that their blooming flesh is withered. In fact, Makart’s painting was a weakly and superficial art. He had a sense for nothing but what was external. It is said that in Chile there are huge and splendid façades on which are written Museo Nacional, Theatro Nacional, and there is nothing behind. And so for Makart the world was a house with a splendid façade glowing with colour, but without dwelling-rooms in which the sorrow and joy of humanity make their abode. His men do not think and do not live; they are only lay figures for splendid garments, or materially circumscribed spaces of rosy flesh colour; they make a stuffed, brainless, animal effect. All his women heave up their eyes in the same meaningless fashion, and have a vapid, doll-like trait about their white teeth, laid bare as if for the dentist. It makes no difference whether they are meant to be portraits or merely embody a feminine plastic lyricism. It was not wise of Makart to paint a portrait. He might drape his original after Palma Vecchio, after Rubens or Rembrandt, as Semiramis or a Japanese; his intellectual incapacity remained always the same; the poetry of the psychical nature evaporated from his art.

MAKART.THE ESPOUSALS OF CATTERINA CORNARO.

But all that cannot alter the fact that Makart takes a very high place amongst his contemporaries, in that epoch dominated by the historical painting, and not yet arrived at an original conception of nature. Poussin said of Raphael: if you compare him with the moderns he is an eagle, but if you place him by the Greeks he is a sparrow. So when one thinks of Veronese or Rubens, one finds on Makart the feathers of a sparrow, but amongst his contemporaries in Germany he seems like an eagle. While all those from whom he derived, those Pilotys, Gallaits, and Delaroches, were no more than skilled historians in painting, Makart, though much tamer and smaller, has a relationship with Delacroix in his sovereign artistry. That joy in the purely pictorial which expressed itself in the festal procession in the Ring-Strasse and in the furnishing of his studio was, moreover, the ground-principle of his art. With the naïveté of the old masters he has boldly set himself above all historical truth; with absolute want of respect for books of history he has committed anachronisms at which any critic would be irritated. Revelling in splendid revelations of colour, all that he concerned himself about was that his costumed figures should render a fine harmony of hues. So exclusively was his eye organised for colour that every picture was first conceived by him on the palette as a luxuriant mass of colour, and he invented afterwards the theme which was proper for it. If Delaroche transformed painting into the flat, sober, and scientifically pedantic illustration of history, Makart gave it again a bright and splendid play of colour. The Nazarenes were philosophers and theosophers, the Romanticists revelled in lyrical sentiment. Kaulbach was a philosophic historical student of the Hegelian school, Piloty a prosaic and declamatory professor of history, Makart was the first German painter of the century. His personages weary themselves out in the enjoyment of their own dazzling outward personality. Free as the ancients with their gods and legends, he pours forth his Cupids, beautiful women, genii, Bacchantes, and historical figures, and at the same time draws into his kingdom of art all nature with its variety of plants, flowers, and fruits, all civilisation with its fulness of splendid vessels and jewels, of shining stuffs, emblems, weapons, and masks. All that he created breathes the naïve, sensuous satisfaction of the genuine painter.

“The Pest in Florence” undoubtedly had its origin in Boccaccio’s description of the great epidemic which visited the town on the Arno; but the picture is a free fantasy of sensuous enjoyment and naked flesh, a colour symposium in which there really lives an atom of the flaming vital energy of Rubens.

Take “The Espousals of Catterina Cornaro,” that gay procession of representatives from Cyprus and Venice, of dignified men, of procurators of St. Mark, of women in foreign garb, of bright colour, who crowd round their young mistress, the queen of the feast, rejoicing amid the splendid architecture of the piazza. To the anger of the historian, he removes the scene from the fifteenth century to the blossoming period of the sixteenth, when the creations of Sansovino, Titian, and Veronese adorned the Queen of the Adriatic. “The Entry of Charles V into Antwerp” derived only its external impulse from Dürer’s Diary. The picture with the naked girls strewing flowers might almost as well represent the triumphal entry of Alexander into Babylon. In the magic land by the Nile it is not the history of civilisation and ethnography that attracts him, nor the monumental world of the pyramids and the temples of the gods, but the sensuous glow of southern nature and the still-life and artistic accessories out of which the beautiful serpent Cleopatra is seen to rise. Female bodies, animals, and fruits, set in the midst of rich, luxuriant landscapes, painted with oil and bitumen, such are the elements of which his pictures of the old world of legend—the hunt of the Amazons and of Diana—are composed.

With these capacities Makart was scenical painter par excellence. His Abundantia pictures in the Munich Pinakothek and the ceiling-pieces of the Palais Tumba in Vienna are among his best creations. There lives in them something of the Olympian blitheness of the ancients, of that easy joyousness which since Tiepolo seemed to have been buried in melancholy reflection and constrained brooding. They fulfil their purpose, as an invitation to the enjoyment of life, precisely because they carry no intrinsic thought to burden the sensuous display. Moreover, the unctuous and gorgeous colouring, with the animated contrasts of warm brown and light blue, mediated by the deep, glowing Makart red, corresponds to the mood they have been designed to awaken—one which called forth the joy of life, luxuriant, full-blooded, and foaming over. The great, fiery red flower, which sprouts out of the ground at the feet of the nymph in “Spring,” was the last thing touched by Makart’s brush, the last flare of the marvellous colour-demon by which he was possessed.

MAKART.THE FEAST OF BACCHUS.