But this does not alter the fact that, when the development of German landscape painting is in question, the name of Andreas Achenbach will be always heard in connection with it. He united technical qualities of the higher order with the capacity of impressing the public, and therefore he completed the work that the Danes had begun. He was the reformer who gave evidence that it was not alone by cliffs and baronial castles and murmuring oaks that sentiment was to be awakened; he hated everything unhealthy, mawkish, and vague, and by showing the claws of the lion of realism in the very heart of the romantic period he came to have the significance of a hero in German landscape painting. He forced demure Lower German landscape to surrender to him its charms; he revealed the fascination of Dutch canal scenes, with their quaint architecture and their characteristic human figures; he went to the stormy, raging North Sea, and opposed the giant forces of boisterous, unfettered nature to the tame pictures of the school of Schirmer. Achenbach’s earliest North Sea pictures were exhibited at the very time when Heine’s North Sea series made its appearance, and they soon ousted the wrecks of the French painter Gudin, which, up to that time, had dominated the picture market. For the first time in the nineteenth century sea-pieces were so painted that the water really seemed a fluent, agitated element, the waves of which did not look as if they had been made of lead, and the froth and foam of cotton wool. The things which he was specially felicitous in painting were Rhine-land villages with red-tiled roofs, Dutch canals with yellow sandbanks and running waves breaking at the wooden buttresses of the harbour, Norwegian scenes with stubborn cliffs and dark pines, wild torrents and roaring waterfalls. He did not paint them better than Everdingen and Ruysdael had done, but he painted them better than any of his contemporaries had it in their power to do.

As Gurlitt is connected with the present by Achenbach, Morgenstern is connected with it by Eduard Schleich. The Munich picture rendering a mood took the place of Rottmann’s architectural pictures. Instead of the fair forms of the earth’s surface, artists began to study the play of sunlight on the plain and amid the flight of the clouds, and instead of the build of the landscape they turned to notice its atmospheric mood. Through Morgenstern Schleich was specially directed to Ruysdael and Goyen. In Ruysdael he was captivated by that profound seriousness and that sombre observation of nature which corresponded to something in his own humour; in Goyen by the pictorial harmony of sunlight, air, water, and earth. Schleich has visited France, Belgium, Hungary, and Italy, yet it is only by exception that he has painted anything but what the most immediate vicinity of Munich might offer. He chose the plainest spot in nature—a newly tilled field, a reedy pond, a stretch of brown moorland, a pair of cottages and trees; and under the guidance of Goyen he observed the changes of the sky with great care—the retreat of thunderclouds, the sun shrouded by thin veils of haze, the tremulous moonlight, or the hovering of the morning and evening mists. The Isar district and the mossy Dachauer soil were his favourite places of sojourn. He had a special preference for rain and moonlight and the mood of autumn, in rendering which he toned brown and grey hues to fine Dutch harmonies. His keynote was predominantly serious and elegiac, but he also loved scenes in which there was a restless and violent change of light. Over a wide plateau the sunlight spreads its radiance, whilst from the side an army of dense thunderclouds approaches, threatening storm and casting dark shadows. Over a monotonous plain, broken by solitary clumps of trees, the warm summer rain falls dripping down. Trees and shrubs throw light shadows, and the plain glistens in the beams of the sun. Or else there is a wide expanse of moor. Darkling the clouds advance, the rushes bend before the wind, and narrow strips of moonlight glitter amid the slender reeds. By such works Schleich became the head of the Munich school of landscape without having ever directed the study of pupils. Through him and through Achenbach capacity for the fresh observation of the life of nature was given to German painters.

ACHENBACH.FISHING BOATS IN THE NORTH SEA.

Undoubtedly amongst the younger group of artists there was a great difference in regard to choice of subject. The modern rendering of mood has only had its origin in Germany; it could not finally develop itself there. Just as figure painting, after making so vigorous a beginning with Bürkel, turned to genre painting in the hands of Enhuber and Knaus, until it returned to its old course in Leibl, landscape also went through the apprentice period of interesting subject, until it once more recognised the poetry of simpleness. The course of civilisation itself led it into these lines. When Morgenstern painted his first pictures the post-chaise still rattled from village to village, but now the whistle of the railway engine screams shrill as the first signal of a new age throughout Europe. Up to that time the possibility of travelling had been greatly circumscribed by the difficulties of traffic. But facilitated arrangements of traffic brought with them such a desire for travel as had never been before. In literature the revolution displayed itself by the rise of books of travels as a new branch of fiction. Hackländer sent many volumes of touring sketches into the market. Theodor Mügge made Norway, Sweden, and Denmark the scene of his tales. But America was the land where the Sesame was to be found, for Germany had been set upon the war-trail with Cooper’s Indians, it had Charles Sealsfield to describe the grotesque mountain land of Mexico, the magic of the prairie, and the landscapes of Susquehannah and the Mississippi, and read Gerstäcker’s, Balduin Möllhausen’s, and Otto Ruppius’ transatlantic sketches with unwearying excitement. The painters who found their greatest delight in seeing the world with the eyes of a tourist also became cosmopolitan.

CALAME.LANDSCAPE.

In Geneva Alexander Calame brought Germany to the knowledge of what is to be seen in Switzerland. Calame was, indeed, a dry, unpoetic landscapist. He began as a young tradesman by making little coloured views of Switzerland which foreigners were glad to bring away with them as mementoes of their visits, just as they now do photographs. Even his later pictures can only lay claim to the merit of such “mementoes of Switzerland.” His colour is insipid and monotonous, his atmosphere heavy, his technique laborious. By painting he understood the illumination of drawings, and his drawing was that of an engraver. An excellent drawing-master, he possessed an unusual mastery of perspective. On the other hand, all warmth and inward life are wanting in his works. Sentiment has been replaced by correct manipulation, and in the deep blue mirror of his Alpine lakes, as in the luminous red of his Alpine summits, there is always to be seen the illuminator who has first drawn the contours with a neat pencil and pedantic correctness. His pictures are grandiose scenes of nature felt in a petty way—in science too it is often the smallest spirit that seeks the greatest heroes. “The Ruins of Pæstum,” like “The Thunderstorm on the Handeck” and “The Range of Monte-Rosa at Sunrise,” merely attain an external, scenical effect which is not improved by crude and unnatural contrasts of light. And as, in later years, when orders accumulated, he fell a victim to an astounding fertility, many of his works give one the impression of a dexterous calligrapher incessantly repeating the same ornamental letters. “Un Calame, deux Calame, trois Calame—que de calamités,” ran the phrase every year in the Paris Salon.

FLAMM.   A SUMMER DAY.

But if France remained cool he found the more numerous admirers in Germany. When, in 1835, he exhibited his first pictures in Berlin, a view of the Lake of Geneva, his appearance was at once hailed with the warmest sympathy. The dexterity, the rounded form, the finish of his pictures, were exactly what gave pleasure, and the distinctness of his drawing made its impression. His lithograph studies of trees and his landscape copies attained the importance of canonical value, and for whole decades remained in use as a medium of instruction in drawing. Amongst German painters Carl Ludwig, Otto von Kameke, and Count Stanislaus Kalkreuth were specially incited by Calame to turn to the sublimity of Alpine nature. Desolate wastes of cliffs, still, clear blue lakes, wild, plunging torrents, and mountain summits covered with glaciers and glowing to rose colour in the reflection of the setting sun are the elements of their pictures as of those of the Genevan master.

After Achenbach there came a whole series of artists from the North who began to depict the mountains of their native Norway under the strong colour effects of the Northern sun. The majestic formations of the fjords, the emerald green walls of rock, the cloven valleys, the terrible forest wildernesses, and the mountains of Norway dazzlingly illuminated and reflecting themselves like glittering jewels in the quiet waters of sapphire blue lakes, were interesting enough to afford nourishment for more than one landscapist.

Knud Baade, who worked from 1842 in Munich, after a lengthy sojourn at the Copenhagen Academy and with Dahl in Dresden, delighted in moonlight scenes, gloomy fir forests, and midnight suns. The sea rises in waves mountain high, and tosses mighty vessels like withered leaves or dashes foaming against the cliffs of the shore. Fantastic clouds chase each other across the sky, and the wan moonlight rocks unsteadily upon the waves. More seldom he paints the sea lit up afar by the moon, or the fjord with its meadows and silver birches; and in such plain pictures he makes a far more attractive effect than in those which are wild and ambitious, for his diffident, petty execution is, as a rule, but little suited to restless and, as it were, dramatic scenes of nature.