K. ROTTMANN.LAKE KOPAÏS.

Even in the twenties Koch’s classical heroic landscapes, executed with an ideal sweep of line, were contrasted with castle chapels, ruins, and cloister courts composed in a similarly arbitrary manner. Landscape was no longer to make its appeal to the understanding by lines, as in the work of the Classicists, but to touch the spirit by colour. The various hues of moonlight seemed specially made to awaken sombre emotions. But as yet the technique of painting was too inadequately trained to express this preconceived “mood” through nature itself. To make his intentions clearer, therefore, the painter showed the effect of natural scenery on the figures in his pictures, illustrating the “mood” of the landscape in the “accessories.” Lessing’s early works represent in art that self-consciously elegiac and melancholy sentimental rendering of a mood introduced into literature by Sternbald, in his knights, squires, noble maidens, and other romantic requisites. The melancholy lingers upon rocks savagely piled upon each other, tumble-down chapels and ruined castles, in swamps and sombre woods, in old, decaying trees, half-obliterated paths, and ghostly gravestones; it veils the sky with a dark grey cerement. Amid hills and glens with wayside crosses, mills, and charcoal-burners’ huts may be seen lonely wanderers, praying pilgrims, priests hurrying from the cloister to bring the last consolation to the dying, riders who have lost their way, and mercenary soldiers lying dead. His first picture of 1828 revealed a desolate churchyard beneath a dark and lowering heaven, from which a solitary sunbeam bursts forth to illumine a grave-stead. Then followed the castle by the sea standing upon strangely moulded cliffs heaped in confusion; the churchyard in the snow where the nuns in the cloisters are following a dead sister to the grave; the churchyard cloister, likewise in snow, where an old man has dug a fresh grave; the cloister in the light of evening with a priest visiting the sick; the landscape with the weary, grey-headed crusader, riding on a weary horse through a lonely mountain district, probably meant as an illustration to Uhland’s ballad Das Rosennest—

“Rühe hab ich nie gefunden, Als ein Jahr im finstern Thurm”;

and then came the desolate tableland with the robbers’ den burnt to ashes, and the landscape with the oak and the shrine of the Virgin, before which a knight and noble lady are making their devotions. As yet all these pictures were an arbitrary potpourri from Walter Scott, Tieck, and Uhland, and their ideal was the Wolf’s Glen in the Freischütz.

FRIEDRICH PRELLER.

The next step which Romanticism had to take was to discover such primæval woodland scenes in actual nature, and as Italian landscape seems, as it were, to have been made for Claude, nature, as she is in Germany, makes a peculiar appeal to this romantic temperament. In certain parts of Saxon Switzerland the rocks look as if giants of the prime had played ball with them or piled them one on top of the other in sport. Lessing found in 1832 a landscape corresponding to the romantic ideal of nature in the Eifel district, whither he had been induced to go by a book by Nöggerath, Das Gebirge im Rheinland und Westfalen nach Mineralogischem und Chemischem Bezuge. Up to that time he had only known the romantic ideal of nature through Scott, Tieck, and Uhland, just as the Classicists had taken their ideal from Homer, Theocritus, and Virgil: in the Eifel district it came before him in tangible form. Flat, swampy tracts of shrub and spruce alternated with dark woods, where gigantic firs, weird pines, and primæval oaks raised their branches to the sky. At the same time he beheld the rude and lonely sublimity of nature in union with a humanity which was as yet uncultivated, and for that reason all the simpler and the healthier, judged by the Romanticist’s distaste for civilisation. Defiant cones of rock and huge masses of mountain wildly piled upon each other overlooked valleys in which a stalwart race of peasants passed their days in patriarchal simplicity. Here, for the first time, a sense for actual landscape was developed in him; hitherto it had been alloyed by a taste for knights, robbers, and monks. “Oh, had I been born in the seventeenth century,” he wrote, “I would have wandered after the Thirty Years’ War throughout Germany, plundered, ruined, and run wild as she then was.” Hitherto only “composed” Italian landscapes had been painted, the soil of home ostensibly offering no sujets, or, in other words, not suiting those tendencies which subordinated everything to style: so Lessing was now the first painter of German landscape. His “Eifel Landscape” in the Berlin National Gallery, which was followed by a series of such pictures, introduces the first period of German landscape painting. The forms of the ground and of the rough sides of rock are rendered sharply and decisively, from geological knowledge. On principle he became an opponent of all artistic influence derived from Italy, and located himself in the Eifel district. The landscapes which he painted there are founded on immediate studies of nature, and are sustained by large and earnest insight. He draws the picture of this quarter in strong and simple lines: the sadness of the heath and the dark mist, the dull breath of which rises from swampy moorland. Still he painted only scenes in which nature had taken the trouble to be fantastic. The eye of the painter did not see her bright side, approaching her only when she looked gloomy or was in angry humour. Either he veils the sky with vast clouds or plunges into the darkness of an untrodden forest. Gnarled trees spread around, their branches stretching out fantastically twisted; the unfettered tumult of the powers of nature, the dull sultry atmosphere before the burst of the storm or its moaning subsidence, are the only moments which he represents. But the whole baggage of unseasonable Romanticism, the nuns and monks, pious knights and sentimental robbers, at first used to embody the mood of nature, were thrown overboard. A quieter and more melancholy though thoroughly manly seriousness, something strong and pithy, lies in the representations of Lessing. The Romanticists had lost all sense of the dumb silent life of nature. They only painted the changing adornment of the earth: heroes and the works of men, palaces, ruins, and classic temples. Nature served merely as a stage scene: the chief interest lay in the persons, the monuments, and the historical ideas associated with them. Even in the older pictures of Lessing the mood was exclusively given by the lyrical accessories. But now it was placed more and more in nature herself, and rings in power like an organ peal, from the cloudy sky, the dim lights, and the swaying tree-tops. For the first time it is really nature that speaks from the canvas, sombre and forceful. In this respect his landscapes show progress. They show the one-sidedness, but also the poetry of the Romantic view of nature. And they are no less of an advance in technique; for in making the discovery that his haunting ideal existed in reality, Lessing first began to study nature apart from preconceived and arbitrary rules of composition, and—learnt to paint.

Albert, Munich.
PRELLER.ULYSSES AND LEUCOTHEA.