Norway and Sweden were fructified from Düsseldorf immediately. When Tidemand had shown the way, the academy on the Rhine was the high school for all the sons of the North during the fifties. They set to translating Knaus and Vautier into Swedish and Norwegian, and caught the tone of their originals so exactly that they almost seem more Düsseldorfian than the Düsseldorfers themselves.

Karl D’Uncker, who arrived in 1851 and died in 1866, was led by the influence of Vautier to turn to little humorous incidents. After “The Two Deaf Friends” (two old people very hard of hearing, who are making comical efforts to understand each other) and “The Vagabond Musician and his Daughter before the Village Magistrates” there followed in 1858 the scene in “The Pawnshop,” which divided the honours of the year with Knaus’s “Golden Wedding.” He is an artistic compromise between Knaus and Schroedter, a keen observer and a humorous narrator, who takes special pleasure in the sharp opposition of characteristic figures. In his “Pawnshop” and his “Third Class Waiting Room” vagabonds mingle in the crowd beside honest people, beggars beside retired tradesmen, old procuresses beside pure and innocent girls, and heartless misers beside warm-hearted philanthropists. In these satirically humorous little comedies Swedish costume has been rightly left out of sight. This ethnographical element was the forte of Bengt Nordenberg, who as a copyist of Tidemand gradually became the Riefstahl of the North. His “Golden Wedding in Blekingen,” his “Bridal Procession,” his “Collection of Tithes,” “The Pietists,” and “The Promenade at the Well,” are of the same ethnographical fidelity and the same anecdotic dryness. He gets his best effects when he strikes an idyllic, childlike note or one of patriarchal geniality. The “Bridal Procession” received in the village with salvoes and music, “The Newly Married Pair” making a first visit to the parents of one of them, the picture of schoolboys playing tricks upon an old organist, that of children mourning over a lamb slain by a wolf, are, in the style of the sixties, the works of a modest and amiable anecdotist, who had a fine sense for the peaceful, familiar side of everyday life in town and country.

BRION.   JEAN VALJEAN.

In Wilhelm Wallander, as in Madou, noise and frolic and jest have the upper hand. His pictures are like saucy street ditties sung to a barrel-organ. The crowd at the market-place, the gossip in the spinning-room on a holiday evening, hop-pickings, dances, auctions on old estates, weddings, and the guard turning out, are his favourite scenes. Even when he came to Düsseldorf he was preceded by his fame as a jolly fellow and a clever draughtsman, and when he exhibited his “Market in Vingaker” he was greeted as another Teniers. His “Hop-Harvest” is like a waxwork show of teasing lads and laughing lasses. He was an incisive humorist and a spirited narrator, who under all circumstances was more inclined to jest than to touch idyllic and elegiac chords. In his pictures peasant girls never wander solitary across the country, for some lad who is passing by always has a joke to crack with them; it never happens that girls sit lonely by the hearth, there is always a lover to peep out laughing from behind the cupboard door.

Anders Koskull cultivated the genre picture of children in a more elegiac fashion; he has poor people sitting in the sun, or peasant families in the Sunday stillness laying wreaths upon the graves of their dear ones in the churchyard. Kilian Zoll, like Meyer of Bremen, painted very childish pictures of women spinning, children with cats, the joys of grandmother, and the like. Peter Eskilson turned to the representation of an idyllic age of honest yeomen, and has given in his best known work, “A Game of Skittles in Faggens,” a pleasant picture from peasant life in the age of pig-tails. The object of August Jernberg’s study was the Westphalian peasant with his slouching hat, long white coat, flowered waistcoat, and large silver buttons. He was specially fond of painting dancing bears surrounded by a crowd of amused spectators, or annual fairs, for which a picturesque part of old Düsseldorf served as a background. Ferdinand Fagerlin has something attractive in his simplicity and good-humour. If he laughs, as he delights in doing, his laughter is cordial and kind-hearted, and if he touches an elegiac chord he can guard against sentimentalism. In contrast with D’Uncker and Wallander, who always hunted after character pieces, he devotes himself to expression with much feeling, and interprets it delicately even in its finer nuances. Henry Ritter, who influenced him powerfully in the beginning of his career, drew his attention to Holland, and Fagerlin’s quiet art harmonises with the Dutch phlegm. Within the four walls of his fishermen’s huts there are none but honest grey-beards and quiet women, active wives and busy maidens, vigorous sailors and lively peasant lads. But his pictures are sympathetic in spite of this one-sided optimism, since the sentiment is not too affected nor the anecdotic points too heavily underlined.

Amongst the Norwegians belonging to this group is V. Stoltenberg-Lerche, who with the aid of appropriate accessories adapted the interiors of cloisters and churches to genre pictures, such as “Tithe Day in the Cloister,” “The Cloister Library,” and “The Visit of a Cardinal to the Cloister,” and so forth. Hans Dahl, a juste-milieu between Tidemand and Emanuel Spitzer, carried the Düsseldorf village idyll down to the present time. “Knitting the Stocking” (girls knitting on the edge of a lake), “Feminine Attraction” (a lad with three peasant maidens who are dragging a boat to shore in spite of his resistance), “A Child of Nature” (a little girl engaged to sit as model to a painter amongst the mountains, and running away in alarm), “The Ladies’ Boarding School on the Ice,” “First Pay Duty,” etc., are some of the witty titles of his wares, which are scattered over Europe and America. Everything is sunny, everything laughs, the landscapes as well as the figures; and if Dahl had painted fifty years ago, his fair maidens with heavy blond plaits, well-bred carriage, and delicate hands that have never been disfigured by work, would undoubtedly have assured him no unimportant place beside old Meyerheim in the history of the development of the genre picture.

An offshoot from the Munich painting of rustics shot up into a vigorous sapling in Hungary. The process of refining the raw talents of the Magyar race had been perfected on the shores of the Isar, and the Hungarians showed gratitude to their masters by applying the principles of the Munich genre to Magyar subjects when they returned home. The Hungarian rooms of modern exhibitions have consequently a very local impress. Everything seems aboriginal, Magyar to the core, and purely national. Gipsies are playing the fiddle and Hungarian national songs ring forth, acrobats exhibit, slender sons of Pusta sit in Hungarian village taverns over their tokay, muscular peasant lads jest with buxom, black-eyed girls, smart hussars parade their irresistible charms before lively damsels, and recruits endeavour to imbibe a potent enthusiasm for the business of war from the juice of the grape. Stiff peasants, limber gipsies, old people dancing, smart youths, the laughing faces of girls and bold fellows with flashing eyes, quarrelsome heroes quick with the knife, tipsy soldiers and swearing sergeants, drunkards, suffering women and poor orphans, pawnshops and vagabonds, legal suits, electioneering scenes, village tragedies and comic proposals, artful shop-boys, and criminals condemned to death, the gay confusion of fairs and the merry return from the harvest and the vintage, waxed moustaches, green and red caps and short pipes, tokay, Banat wheat, Alfoeld tobacco, and Sarkad cattle,—such are the elements worked up, as the occasion demanded, either into little tales or great and thrilling romances. And the names of the painters are as thoroughly Magyar as are the figures. Beside Ludwig Ebner, Paul Boehm, and Otto von Baditz, which have a German sound, one comes across such names as Koloman Déry, Julius Aggházi, Alexander Bihari, Ignaz Ruskovics, Johann Jankó, Tihamér Margitay, Paul Vagó, Arpad Fessty, Otto Koroknyai, D. Skuteczky, etc.

L’Art.
MARCHAL.THE HIRING FAIR.

But setting aside the altered names and the altered locality and garb, the substance of these pictures is precisely the same as that of the Munich pictures of twenty years before: dance and play, maternal happiness, wooing, and the invitation to the wedding. Instead of the Schuhplattler they paint the Czarda, instead of the drover’s cottage the taverns of Pesth, instead of the blue Bavarian uniform the green of the Magyar Hussars. Their painting is tokay adulterated with Isar water, or Isar water with a flavour of tokay. What seems national is at bottom only their antiquated standpoint. It is a typical development repeating itself in the nineteenth century through all branches of art; the sun rises in the West and sets in the East. Any other progress than that of the gradual expansion of subject-matter cannot be established in favour of the productions of all this genre painting. In colour and in substance they represent a phase of art which the leading countries of Europe had already left behind about the middle of the century, and which had to be overcome elsewhere, if painting was again to be what it had been in the old, good periods.

Seemann, Leipzig.
PETTENKOFEN.A HUNGARIAN VILLAGE (PENCIL DRAWING).