Sprung from the people, he became their painter. He was born, 29th May 1802, in Pirmasens, where his father combined a small farm with a public-house and his mother kept a shop; and he had been first a tradesman’s apprentice, and then assistant clerk in a court of justice, before he came to Munich in 1822. Here the Academy rejected him as without talent; but while it shut the door against the pupil, life revealed itself to the master. He went to the Schleissheimer Gallery, and sat there copying the pictures of Wouwerman, Ostade, Brouwer, and Berghem, and developed his powers, by the study of these Netherlandish masters, with extraordinary rapidity. His first works—battles, skirmishes, and other martial scenes—are amateurish and diffident attempts; it is evident that he was without any kind of guidance or direction. All the more astonishing is the swiftness with which he acquired firm command of abilities, admirable for that age, and the defiant spirit of independence with which he went straight from pictures to nature, though hardly yet in possession of the necessary means of expression. He painted and drew the whole new world which opened itself before him: far prospects over the landscape, mossy stones in the sunlight, numbers of cloud-pictures, peasants’ houses with their surroundings, forest paths, mountain tracks, horses, and figures of every description. The life of men and animals gave him everywhere some opportunity for depicting it in characteristic situations. And later, when he had settled down again in Munich, he did not cease from wandering in the South German mountains with a fresh mind. Up to old age he made little summer and winter tours in the Bavarian highlands. Tegernsee, Rottach, Prien, Berchtesgaden, South Tyrol, and Partenkirche were visited again and again, on excursions for the week or the day; and he returned from them all with energetic studies, from which were developed pictures that were not less energetic.

BÜRKEL.BRIGANDS RETURNING.
BÜRKEL.A DOWNPOUR IN THE MOUNTAINS.

For, as every artist is the result of two factors, of which one lies in himself and the other in his age and surroundings, the performances of Bürkel are to be judged, not only according to the requirements of the present day, but according to the conditions under which they were produced. What is weak in him he shares with his contemporaries; what is novel is his own most peculiar and incontestable merit. In a period of false idealism worked up in a museum—false idealism which had aped from the true the way in which one clears one’s throat, as Schiller has it, but nothing more indicative of genius—in a period of this accomplishment Bürkel preferred to expose his own insufficiency rather than adorn himself with other people’s feathers; at a time which prided itself on representing with brush and pigment things for which pen and ink are the better medium, he looked vividly into life; at a time when all Germany lost itself aimlessly in distant latitudes, he brought to everything an honest and objective fidelity which knew no trace of romantic sentimentalism; and by these fresh and realistic qualities he has become the father of that art which rose in Munich in a later day. Positive and exact in style, and far too sincere to pretend to raise himself to the level of the old masters by superficial imitation, he was the more industrious in penetrating the spirit of nature and showing his love for everything down to its minutest feature; weak in the sentiment for colour, he was great in his feeling for nature. That was Heinrich Bürkel, and his successors had to supplement what was wanting in him, but not to wage war against his influence.

BÜRKEL.A SMITHY IN UPPER BAVARIA.

The peculiarity of all his works, as of those of the early Dutch and Flemish artists, is the equal weight which he lays on figures and on landscape. In his eyes the life of man is part of a greater whole; animals and their scenic surroundings are studied with the same love, and in his most felicitous pictures these elements are so blended that no one feature predominates at the expense of another. Seldom does he paint interiors, almost always preferring to move in free and open nature. But here his field is extraordinarily wide.

Those works in which he handled Italian subjects form a group by themselves. Bürkel was in Rome from 1829 to 1832, the very years in which Leopold Robert celebrated his triumphs there; but curious is the difference between the works of the Munich and those of the Swiss painter. In the latter are beautiful postures, poetic ideas, and all the academical formulas; in the former unvarnished, naturalistic bluntness of expression. Even in Italy he kept romantic and academic art at a distance. They had no power over the rough, healthy, and sincere nature of the artist. He saw nothing in Italy that he had not met with at home, and he painted things as he saw them, honestly and without beatification.

To find material Bürkel did not need to go far. Picture to yourself a man wandering along the banks of the Isar, and gazing about him with a still and thoughtful look. A healthy peasant lass with a basket, or a plough moving slowly in the distance behind a sweating yoke of horses, is quite enough to fill him with feelings and ideas.

His peculiar domain was the high-road, which in the thirties and the forties, before the railways had usurped its traffic, was filled with a much more manifold life than it is to-day. Waggons and mail-carts passed along before the old gateways; in every village there were taverns inviting the wayfarer to rest, and blacksmiths sought for custom on the road. There were vehicles of every description, horses at the forge, posting-stages, change of teams, the departure of marketing folk, and passengers taking their seats or alighting. Here horses were being watered, and an occasion was given for brief dialogues between the coachman and his fares. There travellers surprised by a shower were hurrying under their umbrellas into an inn; or, in wintry weather, they were waiting impatiently, wrapped up in furs, whilst a horse was being shod.

CARL SPITZWEG.