The beaten tracks through field and forest offered much of the same sort. Peasants were driving to market with a cart-load of wood. Horses stood unyoked at a drinking-trough whilst the driver, a muscular fellow with great sinews, quietly enjoyed his pipe. Along some shadowy woodland path a team drew near to a forge or a lonely charcoal-burner’s hut, where the light flickered, and over which there soared a bare and snowy mountain peak.

Such pictures of snow-clad landscape were a specialty of Bürkel’s art, and in their simplicity and harmony are to be ranked with the best that he has done. Heavily freighted wood-carts passing through a drift, waggons brought to a standstill in the snow, raw-boned woodmen perspiring as they load them in a wintry forest, are the accessory objects and figures.

Albert, Munich.
SPITZWEG.   AT THE GARRET WINDOW.

But life in the fields attracted him also. Having a love of representing animals, he kept out of the way of mowers, reapers, and gleaners. His favourite theme is the hay, corn, or potato harvest, which he paints with much detail and a great display of accessory incidents. Maids and labourers, old and young, are feverishly active in the construction of hay-cocks, or, in threatening weather, pile up waggons, loaded as high as a house, with fresh trusses.

In this enumeration all the rustic life of Bavaria has been described. It is only the Sunday and holiday themes, the peculiar motives of the genre painter, that are wanting. And in itself this is an indication of what gives Bürkel his peculiar position.

By their conception his works are out of keeping with everything which the contemporary generation of “great painters” and the younger genre painters were attempting. The great painters had their home in museums; Bürkel lived in the world of nature. The genre painters, under the influence of Wilkie, were fond of giving their motive a touch of narrative interest, like the English. Cheerful or mournful news, country funerals, baptisms, and public dinners offered an excuse for representing the same sentiment in varying keys. Their starting-point was that of an illustrator; it might be very pretty in itself, but it was too jovial or whimpering for a picture. Bürkel’s works have no literary background; they are not composed of stories with a humorous or sentimental tinge, but depict with an intimate grasp of the subject the simplest events of life. He neither offered the public lollipops, nor tried to move them and play upon their sensibilities by subjects which could be spun out into a novel. He approached his men, his animals, and his landscapes as a strenuous character painter, without gush, sentimentality, or romanticism. In contradistinction from all the younger painters of rustic subjects, he sternly avoided what was striking, peculiar, or in any way extraordinary, endeavouring to paint everyday life in the house or the farmyard, in the field or upon the highway, in all plainness and simplicity.

At first, indeed, he thought it necessary to satisfy the demands of the age by, at any rate, painting in a broad and epical manner. The public collections chiefly possess pictures of his which contain many figures: “The Return from the Mountain Pasture,” “Coming Back from the Bear Hunt,” “The Cattle Show,” and “From the Fair”; scenes before an inn at festivals, or waggoners setting out, and the like. But in these works the scheme of composition and the multitude of figures have a somewhat overladen and old-fashioned effect. On the other hand, there are pictures scattered about in private collections which are of a simplicity which was unknown at the time: dusty roads with toiling horses, lonely charcoal burners’ huts in the dimness of the forest, villages in rain or snow, with little figures shivering from frost or damp as they flit along the street. From the very beginning, free from the vices of genre and narrative painting and the search after interesting subjects, he has, in these pictures, renounced the epical manner of representing a complicated event. Like the moderns, he paints things which can be grasped and understood at a glance.

SPITZWEG.A MORNING CONCERT.

But, after all, Bürkel occupies a position which is curiously intermediate. His colour relegates him altogether to the beginning of the century. He was himself conscious of the weakness of his age in this respect, and stands considerably above the school of Cornelius, even where its colouring is best. Yet, in spite of the most diligent study of the Dutch masters, he remained, as a colourist, hard and inartistic to the end. Having far too much regard for outline, he is not light enough with what should be lightly touched, nor fugitive enough with what is fleeting. What the moderns leave to be indistinctly divined he renders sharp and palpable in his drawing. He trims and rounds off objects which have a fleeting form, like clouds. But although inept in technique, his works are more modern in substance than anything that the next generation produced. They have an intimacy of feeling beyond the reach of the traditional genre painting. In his unusually fresh, simple, and direct studies of landscape he did not snatch at dazzling and sensational effects, but tried to be just to external nature in her work-a-day mood; and, in the very same way, in his figures he aimed at the plain reproduction of what is given in nature.

The hands of his peasants are the real hands of toil—weather-stained, heavy, and awkward. There are no movements that are not simple and actual. Others have told droller stories; Bürkel unrolls a true picture of the surroundings of the peasant’s life. Others have made their rustics persons suitable for the drawing-room, and cleaned their nails; Bürkel preaches the strict, austere, and pious study of nature. An entirely new age casts its shadow upon this close devotion to life. In their intimacy and simplicity his pictures contain the germ of what afterwards became the task of the moderns. All who came after him in Germany were the sons of Wilkie until Wilhelm Leibl, furnished with a better technical equipment, started in spirit from the point at which Bürkel had left off.