At the very time when the East attracted the French Romanticists, the German and Belgian painters discovered the rustic. Romanticism, driven into strange and tropical regions by its disgust of a sluggish, colourless and inglorious age, now planted a firm foot upon native soil. Amid rustics there was to be found a conservative type of life which perpetuated old usages and picturesque costume.

It is not easy for a dilettante to enter into sympathetic relationship with these early pictures of peasant life. They are gaudy in tone, smooth as metal, and the figures stand out hard against the atmosphere, as if they had been cut from a picture-sheet. But the historian has no right to be merely a dilettante. It would be unfair of him to make the artistic conceptions of the present time the means of depreciating the past. For, after all, works of the past are only to be measured with those of their own age, and when one once remembers what an importance these modest “little masters” had for their time it is no longer difficult to treat them with justice. In an age when futile and aimless intentions lost their way in theory and imitation of the “great painting” there blossomed here, and for the first time, a certain individuality of mind and temper. While Cornelius, Kaulbach, and their fellows formed a style which was ideal in a purely conventional sense, and epitomised the art of the great masters according to method, the “genre painters” seized upon the endless variety of nature, and, after a long period of purely reproductive painting, made the first diffident attempt to set art free from the curse of system and the servile repetition of antiquated forms.

KOBELL.   A MEETING.

Even as regards colour they have the honour of preparing the way for a restoration in the technique of painting. Their own defects in technique were not their fault, but the consequence of that fatal interference of Winckelmann through which art lost its technical traditions. They did not enjoy the advantages of issuing from a long line of ancestors. In a certain sense they had to make a beginning in the history of art by themselves; for between them and the older German painting they only met with men who held the ability to paint as a shame and a disgrace. With the example of the old Dutch and Flemish masters before them, they had to knit together the bonds which these men had cut; and considering the æsthetic ideas of the age, this reference to Netherlandish models was an event of revolutionary importance. In doing this they may have been partially influenced by Wilkie, who made his tour in Germany in 1825, and whose pictures had a wide circulation through the medium of engraving. And from another side attention was directed to the old Dutch masters by Schnaase’s letters of 1834. While the entire artistic school which took its rise from Winckelmann gave the reverence of an empty, formal idealism to classical antiquity and the Cinquecento, applying their standards to all other periods, Schnaase was the first to give an impulse to the historical consideration of art. In this way he revealed wide and hitherto neglected regions to the creative activity of modern times. The result of his book was that the Netherlandish masters were no longer held to be “the apes of vulgar nature,” but took their place as exquisite artists from whom the modern painter had a great deal to learn.

In Munich the conditions of a popular, national art were supplied by the very site of the town. Since the beginning of the century Munich had been peculiarly the type of a peasant city, the capital of a peasant province; it had a peasantry abounding in old-fashioned singularities, gay and motley in costume as in their ways of life, full of bright and easy-going good-humour, and gifted with the Bavarian force of character. Here it was, then, that “the resort to national traits” was first made. And if, in the event, this painting of rustic life produced many monstrosities, it remained throughout the whole century an unfailing source from which the art of Munich drew fresh and vivid power.

Even in the twenties there was an art in Munich which was native to the soil, and in later years shot up all the more vigorously through being for a time cramped in its development by the exotic growths of the school of Cornelius. It was as different from the dominant historical painting as the “magots” of Teniers from the mythological machinery of Lebrun, and it was treated by official criticism with the same contempt. Cornelius and his school directed the attention of educated people so exclusively to themselves, and so entirely proscribed the literature of the day, that what took place outside their own circle in Munich was but little discussed. The vigorous group of naturalists had not much to offer critics who wished to display their knowledge by picking to pieces historical pictures, interpreting philosophical cartoons, and pointing to similarities of style between Cornelius and Michael Angelo. But for the historian, seeking the seeds of the present in the past, they are figures worthy of respect. Setting their own straightforward conception of nature against the eclecticism of the great painters, they laid the foundation of an independent modern art.

The courtly, academic painting of Cornelius derived its inspiration from the Sistine Chapel; the naturalism of these “genre painters” was rooted in the life of the Bavarian people. The “great painters” dwelt alone in huge monumental buildings; the naturalists, who sought their inspiration in the life of peasants, in the life of camps, and in landscape, without troubling themselves about antique or romantic subjects, furnished the material for the first collections of modern art. Both as artists and as men they were totally different beings. Cornelius and his school stand on the one side, cultured, imperious, fancying themselves in the possession of all true art, and abruptly turning from all who are not sworn to their flag; on the other side stand the naturalists, brisk and cheery, rough it may be, but sound to the core, and with a sharp eye for life and nature.

PETER HESS.A MORNING AT PARTENKIRCHE.HEINRICH BÜRKEL.A MORNING AT PARTENKIRCHE.

Painting in the grand style owed its origin to the personal tastes of the king and to the great tasks to which it was occasionally set; independent of princely favour, realistic art found its patrons amongst the South German nobility and, at a later date, in the circle of the Munich Art Union, and seems the logical continuation of that military painting which, at the opening of the century, had its representatives in Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Munich. The motley swarm of foreign soldiers which overran the soil of Germany incited Albrecht Adam, Peter Hess, Johann Adam Klein, and others, to represent what they saw in a fashion which was sincere and simple if it was also prosy. And when the warlike times were over it was quite natural that some of the masters who had learnt their art in camps should turn to the representation of peasant life, where they were likewise able to find gay, pictorial costumes. Wilhelm Kobell, whose etchings of the life of the Bavarian people are more valuable than his battle-pieces, was one of the first to make this transition. In 1820 sturdy Peter Hess painted his “Morning at Partenkirche,” in which he depicted a simple scene of mountain life—girls at a well in the midst of a sunny landscape—in a homely but poetic manner. When this breach had been made, Bürkel was able to take the lead of the Munich painters of rustic subjects.

Heinrich Bürkel’s portrait reveals a square-built giant, whose appearance contrasts strangely with that of his celebrated contemporaries. The academic artists sweep back their long hair and look upwards with an inspired glance. Bürkel looks down with a keen eye at the hard, rough, and stony earth. The academic artists had a mantle—the mantle of Rauch’s statues—picturesquely draped about their shoulders; Bürkel dressed like anybody else. No attribute is added which could indicate that he was a painter; neither palette, nor brush, nor picture; beside him on the table there is—a mug of beer. There he sits without any sort of pose, with his hand resting on his knee—rough, athletic, and pugnacious—for all the world as if he were quite conscious of his peculiarities. Even the photographer’s demand for “a pleasant smile” had no effect upon him. This portrait is itself an explanation of Bürkel’s art. His was a healthy, self-reliant nature, without a trace of romance, sentimentality, affected humour, or sugary optimism. Amongst all his Munich contemporaries he was the least academic in his whole manner of feeling and thinking.