CARL FRIEDRICH LESSING.

Up to 1840 there stood at his side a master no less powerful, the refractory, self-taught Karl Blechen, who only took up painting when he was five-and-twenty, and became one of the most original of German landscapists, in spite of a ruined life prematurely closing in mental darkness and suicide. He possessed a delicate feeling for nature, inspiration, boldness, and a spirited largeness of manner, although his technique was hard, awkward, and clumsy to the very end. He might be called the Alfred Rethel of landscape painting. He was not moved by what was kindly or formally beautiful in nature, but by loneliness, melancholy, and solitude. Many of his landscapes break away from peaceful melancholy, and are like the pictures in some horrible nightmare, ghastly and terrifying; on the other hand, he often surprises us by the pleasure he takes in homely everyday things, a characteristic hitherto of rare occurrence. Whereas Lessing never crossed the Alps for fear of losing his originality, Blechen was the first who saw even modern Italy without the spectacles of ideal style. From his Italian pictures it would not be supposed that he had previously studied the landscapes of the Classicists, or that beside him in Berlin Schinkel worked on the entirely abstract and ideal landscape. As a painter Blechen has even discovered the modern world. For Lessing landscape “with a purpose” was something hideous and insupportable. He cared exclusively for nature untouched by civilisation, painted the murmuring wood and the raging storm, here and there at most a shepherd who indicated the simplest and the oldest employment on the earth’s surface. But the Blechen Exhibition of 1881 contained an entirely singular phenomenon as regards the thirties, an evening landscape before the iron works in Eberswald: a long, monotonous plain with a sluggish river, behind which the dark outlines of vomiting manufactory chimneys rise sullenly into the bright evening sky. Even in that day Blechen painted what others scarcely ventured to draw: nature working in the service of man, and thereby—to use Tieck’s expression—“robbed of her austere dignity.”

Lessing’s most celebrated follower, Schirmer, appears in general as a weakened and sentimental Lessing. He began in 1828 with “A Primæval German Forest,” but a journey to Italy caused him in 1840 to turn aside from this more vigorous path. Henceforth his efforts were directed to nobility of form and line, to turning out Southern ideal landscapes with classically romantic accessories. The twenty-six Biblical landscapes drawn in charcoal, belonging to the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle, the four landscapes in oil with the history of the Good Samaritan in the Kunsthalle of Carlsruhe, and the twelve pictures on the history of Abraham in the Berlin National Gallery, are the principal results of this second period—his period of ideal style. They are tame efforts at a compromise between Lessing and Preller, and therefore of no consequence to the history of the development of landscape painting. Amongst the many who regarded him as a model, Valentin Ruths of Hamburg is one of the most natural and delicate. His pictures, however, did not display any new impulse to widen the boundary by proceeding more in the direction of healthy and honestly straightforward observation of nature, or by emancipating himself from the school of regular composition and the rendering of an arbitrary mood.

LESSING.THE WAYSIDE MADONNA.

Meanwhile this impulse came from another quarter. At the very time when the genre artists were painting their earliest pictures of rustic life under the influence of Teniers and Ostade, the landscapists also began to return to the old Dutch masters, following Everdingen in particular. Thus another strip of nature was conquered, another step made towards simplicity. The landscape ideal of the Classicists had been architecture, that of the Romanticists poetry; from this time forward it became pure painting. Little Denmark, which fifty years before had exercised through Carstens that fateful influence on Germany which led painters from the treatment of contemporary life and sent them in pursuit of the antique, now made recompense for the evil it had done. During the twenties and thirties it produced certain landscapists who guided the Germans to look with a fresh and unfettered gaze, undisturbed by the ideal, at nature in their own country, after the aberrations of Classicism and the one-sidedness of the Romanticists. Under Eckersberg the Academy of Copenhagen was the centre of a healthy realism founded on the Dutch, and some of the painters who received their training there and laboured in later years in Dresden, Düsseldorf, and Munich spread abroad the principles of this school.

SCHIRMER.AN ITALIAN LANDSCAPE.

J. C. Dahl taught as professor in the Academy of Dresden. At the present time his Norwegian landscapes seem exceedingly old-fashioned, but in the thirties they evidently must have been something absolutely new, for they raised a hue and cry amongst the German painters as “the most wild naturalism.” In 1788 Johann Christian Clausen Dahl was born in Bergen. He was the son of one of those Norwegian giants who are one day tillers of the soil and on the morrow fishers or herdsmen and hunters, who cross the sea in their youth as sailors and clear the waste land when they return home. As he wandered with his father through the dense, solitary pine forests, along abrupt precipices, sullen lakes, rushing waterfalls, silvery shining glaciers, the majesty of Northern nature was revealed to him, and he rendered them in little coloured drawings, which, in spite of their awkward technique, bear witness to an extraordinary freshness of observation. The course of study at the Copenhagen Academy, whither he proceeded in his twentieth year, enabled him to become acquainted with Everdingen and Ruysdael, and these two old masters, who had also painted Norwegian landscapes, stimulated him to further efforts.

Dahl became the first representative of Norwegian landscape painting, and remained true to his country even when in 1819 he undertook a professorship in Dresden. Italy and Germany occupied his brush as much as Norway, but he was only himself when he worked amongst the Norwegian cliffs. Breadth of painting and softness of atmosphere are wanting in all his pictures. They are hard and dry in their effect, and not seldom entirely conventional; especially the large works painted after 1830. In them he gave the impression of a bewildering, babbling personality. They have been swiftly conceived and swiftly painted, but without artistic love and fine feeling. In his later years Dahl did not allow himself the time to bury himself in nature quietly and with devotion, and finally—especially in his moonlight pictures—took to using a violet-blue, which has a very conventional effect. Everdingen sought by preference for what was forceful and violently agitated in nature; Ruysdael felt an enthusiasm for rushing mountain streams. But for Dahl even these romantic elements of Northern nature were not enough. He approached nature, not to interpret her simply, but to arrange his effects. In his picture the wild Norwegian landscape had to be wilder and more restless than in reality it is. Not patient enough to win all its secrets from the savage mountain torrent, he forced together his effects, made additions, brought confusion into his picture as a whole, and a crudeness into the particular incidents. His large pictures have a loud effect contrasted with the simple intuition of nature amongst the Netherlanders. Many of them are merely fantastically irrational compositions of motives which have been learned by heart.

But there were also years in which Dahl stood in the front rank of his age, and even showed it the way to new aims. He certainly held that position from 1820 to 1830 in those pictures in which, instead of making romantic adaptations of Ruysdael and Everdingen, he resembled them by rendering the weirdness and eeriness and the rough and wild features of Norwegian scenery: red-brown heaths and brownish green turf-moors, stunted oaks and dark pine forests, erratic blocks sown without design amid the roots of trees, branches snapped by the storm and hanging as they were broken, and trunks felled by the tempest and lying where they fell. In certain pictures in the Bergen and Copenhagen Galleries he pointed out the way to new aims. The tendency to gloom and seriousness which reigns in those Dutch Romanticists has here yielded to what is simple and familiar, to the homely joy of the people of the North in the crisp, bright day and the wayward sunbeams. He loves the glimmer of light upon the birch leaves and the peacefully rippling sea. Like Adrian van der Neer, he studied with delight the wintry sky, the snow-clad plains, and the night and the moonshine. He began to feel even the charm of spring. Poor peasant cots are brightly and pleasantly perched upon moist, green hills, as though he had quite forgotten what his age demanded in “artistic composition.” Or the summer day spreads opulent and real between the cliffs, and the warm air vibrates over the fields. Peasants and cattle, glimmering birches and village spires, stand vigorously forth in the landscape; even the execution is so simple that with all his richness of detail he succeeds in attaining a great effect. It is felt that this painting has developed amid a virgin nature, surrounded by the poetry of the fjord, the lofty cliff, and the torrent. In the same measure the Dutch had not the feeling for quietude and habitable, humble, and familiar places. And perhaps it was not by chance that this reformer came from the most virgin country of Europe, from a country that had had no share in any great artistic epoch of the past.