JACOB BECKER.A TEMPEST.

Jacob Becker went to the Westerwald to sketch little village tragedies, and won such popularity with his “Shepherd Struck by Lightning” that for a long time the interest of the public was often concentrated on this picture in the collection of the Staedel Institute. Rudolf Jordan of Berlin settled on Heligoland, and became by his “Proposal of Marriage in Heligoland” one of the most esteemed painters of Düsseldorf. And in 1852 Henry Ritter, his pupil, who died young, enjoyed a like success with his “Middy’s Sermon,” which represents a tiny midshipman with comical zeal endeavouring to convert to temperance three tars who are staggering against him. A Norwegian, Adolf Tidemand, became the Leopold Robert of the North, and, like Robert, attained an international success when, after 1845, he began to present his compatriots, the peasants, fishers, and sailors of the shores of the North Sea, to the public of Europe. There was no doubt that a true ethnographical course of instruction in the life of a distant race, as yet unknown to the rest of Europe, was to be gathered from his pictures, as from those of Robert, or from the Oriental representations of Vernet. In Tidemand’s pictures the Germans learnt the Norwegian usage of Christmas, accompanied the son of the North on his fishing of a night, joined the bridal party on the Hardanger Fjord, or listened to the sexton giving religious instruction; sailed with fishing girls in a skiff to visit the neighbouring village, or beheld grandmother and the children dance on Sunday afternoon to father’s fiddle. Norwegian peasant life was such an unknown world of romance, and the costume so novel, that Tidemand’s art was greeted as a new discovery. That the truth of his pictures went no further than costume was only known at a later time. Tidemand saw his native land with the eyes of a Romanticist, as Robert saw Italy, and, in the same one-sided way, he only visited the people on festive occasions. Though a born Norwegian, he, too, was a foreigner, a man who was never familiar with the life of his country people, who never lived at home through the raw autumn and the long winter, but came only as a summer visitor, when nature had donned her bridal garb, and naturally took away with him the mere impressions of a tourist. As he only went to Norway for recreation, it is always holiday-tide and Sabbath peace in his pictures. He represents the same idyllic optimism and the same kindly view of “the people” as did Björnson in his earliest works; and it is significant that the latter felt himself at the time so entirely in sympathy with Tidemand that he wrote one of his tales, The Bridal March, as text to Tidemand’s picture “Adorning the Bride.”

To seek the intimate poetry in the monotonous life of the peasant, and to go with him into the struggle for existence, was what did not lie in Tidemand’s method of presentation; he did not live amongst the people sufficiently long to penetrate to their depths. The sketches that resulted from his summer journeys often reveal a keen eye for the picturesque, as well as for the spiritual life of this peasantry; but later in Düsseldorf, when he composed his studies for pictures with the help of German models, all the sharp characterisation was watered down. What ought to have been said in Norwegian was expressed in a German translation, where the emphasis was lost. His art is Düsseldorf art with Norwegian landscapes and costumes; a course of lectures on the manners and customs of Norwegian villages composed for Germans. The only thing which distinguishes Tidemand to his advantage from the German Düsseldorfers is that he is less humorously and sentimentally disposed. Pictures of his, such as “The Lonely Old People,” “The Catechism,” “The Wounded Bear Hunter,” “The Grandfather’s Blessing,” “The Sectarians,” etc., create a really pleasant and healthy effect by a certain actual simplicity which they undoubtedly have. Other men would have made a melodrama out of “The Emigrant’s Departure” (National Gallery in Christiania). Tidemand portrays the event without any sort of emphasis, and feels his way with tact on the boundary between sentiment and sentimentality. There is nothing false or hysterical in the behaviour of the man who is going away for life, nor in those who have come to see him off.

In Vienna the genre painters seem to owe their inspiration especially to the theatre. What was produced there in the province of grand art during the first half of the century was neither better nor worse than elsewhere. The Classicism of Mengs and David was represented by Heinrich Füger, who had a more decided leaning towards the operatic. The representative-in-chief of Nazarenism was Josef Führich, whose frescoes in the Altlerchenfeld Church are, perhaps, better in point of colour than the corresponding efforts of the Munich artists, though they are likewise in a formal way derivative from the Italians. Vienna had its Wilhelm Kaulbach in Carl Rahl, its Piloty in Christian Ruben, who, like the Munich artist, had a preference for painting Columbus, and was meritorious as a teacher. It was only through portrait painting that Classicism and Romanticism were brought into some sort of relation with life; and the Vienna portraitists of this older régime are even better than their German contemporaries, as they made fewer concessions to the ruling idealism. Amongst the portrait painters was Lampi, after whom followed Moritz Daffinger with his delicate miniatures; but the most important of them all was Friedrich Amerling, who had studied under Lawrence in London and under Horace Vernet in Paris, and brought back with him great acquisitions in the science of colour. In the first half of the century these assured him a decided advantage over his German colleagues. It was only later, when he was sought after as the fashionable painter of all the crowned heads, that his art degenerated into mawkishness.

TIDEMAND.THE SECTARIANS.

Genre painting was developed here as elsewhere from the military picture. As early as 1813 Peter Krafft, an academician of the school of David, had exhibited a great oil-painting, “The Soldier’s Farewell”—the interior of a village room with a group of life-size figures. The son of the family, in grey uniform, with a musket in his hand, is tearing himself from his young wife, who has a baby on her arm and is trying in tears to hold him back. His old father sits in a corner with folded hands beside his mother, who is also crying, and has hid her face. In 1820 Krafft added “The Soldier’s Return” as a pendant to this picture. It represents the changes which have taken place in the family during the warrior’s absence: his old mother is at rest in her grave; his grey-headed father has become visibly older, his little sister has grown up, and the baby in arms is carrying the musket after his father. They are both exceedingly tiresome pictures; the colour is cold and grey, the figures are pseudo-classical in modern costume, and the pathos of the subject seems artificial and forced. Nevertheless a new principle of art is declared in them. Krafft was the first in Austria to recognise what a rich province had been hitherto ignored by painting. He warned his pupils against the themes of the Romanticists. These, as he said, were worked out, since no one would do anything better than the “Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci or the Madonnas of Raphael.” And he warmly advocated the conviction “that nothing could be done for historical painting so long as it refused to choose subjects from modern life.” Krafft was an admirable teacher with a sober and clear understanding, and he invariably directed his pupils to the immediate study of life and nature. The consequence of his career was that Carl Schindler, Friedrich Treml, Fritz L’Allemand, and others set themselves to treat in episodic pictures the military life of Austria, from the recruiting stage to the battle, and from the soldier’s farewell to his return to his father’s house. A further result was that the Viennese genre painting parted company with the academical and historic art.

Just at this time Tschischka and Schottky began to collect the popular songs of the Viennese. Castelli gave a poetic representation of bourgeois life, and Ferdinand Raimund brought it upon the stage in his dramas. Bauernfeld’s types from the life of the people enjoyed a rapid popularity. Josef Danhauser, Peter Fendi, and Ferdinand Waldmüller went on parallel lines with these authors. In their genre pictures they represented the Austrian people in their joys and sorrows, in their merriment and heartiness and good-humour; the people, be it understood, of Raimund’s popular farces, not those of the pavement of Vienna.

Josef Danhauser, the son of a Viennese carpenter, occupied himself with the artisan and bourgeois classes. David Wilkie gave him the form for his work and Ferdinand Raimund his ideas. His studio scenes, with boisterous art students caught by their surly teacher at the moment when they are playing their worst pranks, gave pleasure to the class of people who, at a later date, took so much delight in Emanuel Spitzer. His “Gormandizer” is a counterpart to Raimund’s Verschwender; and when, in a companion picture, the gluttonous liver is supping up the “monastery broth” amongst beggars, and his former valet remains true to him even in misfortune, Grillparzer’s Treuer Diener seines Herrn serves as a model for this type. Girls confessing their frailty to their parents had been previously painted by Greuze. Amongst those of his pictures which had done most to amuse the public was the representation of the havoc caused by a butcher’s dog storming into a studio. In his last period he turned with Collins to the nursery, or wandered through the suburbs with a sketch-book, immortalising the doings of children in the streets, and drawing “character heads” of the school-teacher tavern habitués and the lottery adventurer.