LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN GERMANY

That landscape would become for the nineteenth century even more important than it was for the Holland of the seventeenth century had been clearly announced since the days of Watteau and Gainsborough, and since this tendency, in spite of all coercive rules, could be only momentarily delayed by Classicism, it came to pass that the era which began with Winckelmann’s conception of “vulgar nature” ended a generation later with her apotheosis. The thirty years from 1780 to 1810 denoted no more than a brief imprisonment for modern landscape, the luxuriantly blooming child being arbitrarily confined meanwhile in the strait-waistcoat of history. At first the phrase of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, which declared that landscape was no subject for painting because it had no soul, held painters altogether back from injuring their reputation by such pictures. And when, after the close of the century, some amongst them overcame this dread, Poussin the Classicist was of course set up as the only model. For an age which did not paint men but only statues, nature was too natural. As the figure painter subordinated everything to style and moulded the human body accordingly, landscape became mannered to suit an historical idea, and was used merely as a theatrical background for Greek tragedies. As the draughtsmen of the age freed the human figure from all “individual blemishes,” and thereby abandoned the most essential points of life and credibility which are bound up with personality, the landscapists wished to purify nature from everything “accidental,” with the result that dreary commonplaces were produced from her, the infinitely manifold. As the former sought the chief merit of their works in “well-balanced composition,” the latter regarded trees and mountains, temples and palaces, clouds and rivers, merely as counters which only needed to be changed in their mutual position according to acquired rules of composition to make new pictures. They did not reflect that nature possesses a more original force than the most able self-conscious work of man, or, as Ludwig Richter has so well expressed it, that “what God Almighty has made is always more beautiful than what men can invent.” There were summary rules for landscapes in the Poussin style, the beauty of which was sought above all in an opulent play of noble lines, corresponding to the fine and flowing lines of Carstens’ figures. But the conception was all the more pedantic whilst the drawing was hard and dry and the colour feeble and vitreous. The most familiar of the group is the old Tyrolese Josef Anton Koch, who came to Rome in 1796, and, during two years, had an opportunity of allying himself with Carstens. His pictures are usually composed with motives taken from the Sabine Mountains. A landscape with “The Rape of Hylas” is possessed by the Staedel Institute in Frankfort, a “Sacrifice of Noah” by the Museum in Leipzig, and a landscape from the Sabine Mountains by the New Pinakothek in Munich. All three show little promise in technique; it was only in water-colour that he painted with more freedom.

JOSEF ANTON KOCH.

Without a doubt nature in Italy is favourable to this “heroic” style of landscape. In South Italy the country is at once magnificent and peaceful. The naked walls of rock display their majestic lines with a sharp contour; the sea is blue, and there is no cloud in the sky. As far as the eye reaches everything is dead and nugatory in its colour, and rigid and inanimate in form: a plastic landscape, full of style but apparently devoid of soul. Nowhere is there anything either stupendous or familiar, though, at the same time, there is no country on the earth where there is such a sweep of proud majestic lines. It was not the composition of Poussin, but the classic art of Claude—which aimed at being nothing but the transparent mirror of sunny and transparent nature—that gave perfect expression to this classic landscape; and in the nineteenth century Karl Rottmann, according to what one reads, has most completely represented this same classical form of art. His twenty-eight Italian landscapes in the arcades of the Munich Hofgarten are said to display a sense of the beauty of line and a greatness of conception paralleled by few other landscape works of the century. And those who draw their critical appreciations from books will probably continue to make this statement, with all the greater right since the world has been assured that the Arcade pictures are but a shadow of earlier splendour. To a spectator who has not been primed and merely judges with his own eyes without knowing anything about Rottmann’s celebrity, these pictures with their hard, inept colouring and their pompous “synthetic” composition seem in the majority of cases to be excessively childish, though it is not contested that before their restoration by Leopold Rottmann and their present state of decay they may very possibly have been good. Rottmann’s Grecian landscapes in the New Pinakothek are not ranked high even by his admirers. Standing in the beginning entirely upon Koch’s ground, he was led in these pictures to give more importance to colour and light, and even to introduce unusual phenomena, such as lowering skies, with rainbows, sunsets, moonlight scenes, thunderstorms, and the like. This mixture of classical principles of drawing with effect-painting in the style of Eduard Hildebrandt brought a certain confusion into his compositions, to say nothing of the fact that he never got rid of his harsh and heavy colour, Bengal lights, and a crudeness of execution suggestive of tapestry. His water-colours, probably, contain the only evidence from which it may be gathered that Rottmann really had an eminent feeling for great characteristic lines, and did not unsuccessfully go through the school of Claude with his finely moulded, rhythmically perfected, and yet simple conception of nature.

Gräphische Künst.
KARL ROTTMANN.

Otherwise Friedrich Preller is the only one of all the stylists deriving from Koch who rose to works consistent in execution. To him only was it granted to assure his name a lasting importance by exhaustively working out a felicitous subject. The Odyssey landscapes extend through his whole life. During a sojourn in Naples in 1830 he was struck by the first idea. After his return home he composed for Doctor Härtel in Leipzig the first series as wall decoration in tempera in 1832-34. Then there followed his journeys to Rügen and Norway, where he painted wild strand and fell landscapes of a sombre austerity. After this interruption, so profitably extending his feeling for nature, he returned to the Odyssey. The series grew from seven to sixteen cartoons, which were to be found in 1858 at the Munich International Exhibition. The Grand Duke of Weimar then commissioned him to paint the complete sequence for a hall in the Weimar Museum. In 1859-60 Preller prepared himself afresh in Italy, and as an old man completed the work which he had planned in youth. This Weimar series, executed in encaustic painting, is artistically the maturest that he ever did. Of the entire school he only had the secret of giving his figures a semblance of life, and concealed the artificiality of his compositions. Nature in his pictures has an austere, impressive sublimity, and is the worthy home of gods and heroes. During his long life he had made so many and such incessant studies of nature in North and South—even at seventy-eight he was seen daily with his sketch-book in the Campagna—that he could venture to work with great, simple lines without the danger of becoming empty.

At the time when these pictures were painted the rendering of still-life in landscape had in general been long buried, although even to-day it has scattered representatives in the younger Preller, Albert Hertel, and Edmund Kanoldt. As antique monuments came into fashion with Classicism, German ruins became the mode at the beginning of the romantic period and the return to the national past. For Koch and his followers landscape was only of value when, as the background of classical works of architecture, it directed one’s thoughts to the antique: shepherds had to sit with their flock around them on the ruins of the temple of Vesta, or cows to find pasture between the truncated pillars of the Roman Forum. But now it could only find its justification by allying itself with mediæval German history, by the portrayal of castles and strongholds.

ROTTMANN.THE COAST OF SICILY.

“What is beautiful?—A landscape with upright trees, fair vistas, atmosphere of azure blue, ornamental fountains, stately palaces in a learned architectural style, with well-built men and women, and well-fed cows and sheep. What is ugly?—Ill-formed trees with aged, crooked, and cloven stems, uneven and earthless ground, sharp-cut hills and mountains which are too high, rude or dilapidated buildings, with their ruins lying strewn in heaps, a sky with heavy clouds, stagnant water, lean cattle in the field, and ungraceful wayfarers.”

In these words Gérard de Lairesse, the ancestor of Classicism, defined his ideal of landscape, and in the last clause, where he speaks of ugliness, he prophetically indicated the landscape ideal of the Romanticists, as this is given for the first time in literature in Tieck’s Sternbald. For the young knight in Sternbald who desires to become a painter exclaims with enthusiasm: “Then would I depict lonely and terrible regions, rotting and broken bridges, between two rough cliffs facing a precipice, through which the forest stream forces its foaming course, lost travellers whose garments flutter in the moist wind, the dreaded figures of robbers ascending from the gully, waggons fallen upon and plundered, and battle against the travellers.” Which is all exactly the opposite to what Lairesse demanded from the landscapist. Alexander Humboldt has shown that the men of antiquity only found beauty in nature so far as she was kindly, smiling, and useful to them. But to the Romanticists nature was uncomely where she was the servant of civilisation, and beautiful only in tameless and awe-inspiring savageness. The light, therefore, was never to be that of simple day, but the gloom of night and of the mountain glens. Such phenomena are neither to be seen in Berlin nor in Breslau, and to be a Romanticist was to love the opposite of all that one sees around one. Tieck, who lived in the cold daylight of Berlin with its modern North German rationalism, has therefore—and not by chance—first felt the yearning for moonlight landscapes of primæval forest; Lessing, from Breslau, was the first to give it pictorial expression.