Having come to Düsseldorf in 1841, Hans Gude became the Calame of the North. Achenbach taught him to approach the phenomena of nature boldly and realistically, and not to be afraid of a rich and soft scale of colour. Schirmer, the representative of Italian still landscape, guided him to the acquisition of a certain large harmony and sense for style in the structure of his pictures, to beauty of line and effective disposition of great masses of light and shade. This quiet, sure-footed, and robust realism, which had, at the same time, a gift of style, became the chief characteristic of his Northern landscapes, in which, however, the mutable and fleeting moods of nature were all the more neglected. Here are Norwegian mountain landscapes with lakes, rivers, and waterfalls, then pictures of the shore under the most varied phases of light, or grand cliff scenery with a sombre sky and a sea in commotion. Hans Gude, living from 1864 in Carlsruhe, and from 1880 in Berlin, is one of those painters whom one esteems, but for whom it is not possible to feel great enthusiasm—one of those conscientious workers who from their very solidity run the risk of becoming tedious. His landscapes are good gallery pictures, soberly and prosaically correct, and never irritating, though at the same time they seldom kindle any warm feeling.

Like Gude, Niels Björnson Möller devoted himself to pictures of the shore and the sea. Undisturbed by men in his sequestered retreat, August Capellen gave way to the melancholy charms of the Norwegian forest. He represented the tremulous clarity of the air above the cliffs, old, shattered tree-trunks and green water plants, sleepy ponds, and far prospects bounded by blue mountains; but he would have made an effect of greater originality had he thought less of Schirmer’s noble line and compositions arranged in the grand style. Morten-Müller became the specialist of the fir forest. His native woods where the valleys stretch towards the high mountain region offered him motives, which he worked up in large and excessively scenical pictures. His strong point was the contrast between sunlight playing on the mountain tops and mysterious darkness reigning in the forest depths, and his pictures have many admirers on account of “their elegiac melancholy, their minor key of touching sadness.” The Norwegian spring changing the earth into one carpet of moorland, broken by marshes, found its delineator in Erik Bodom. Ludwig Munthe became the painter of wintry landscape in thaw, when the snow is riddled with holes and a dirty brown crust of earth peeps from the dazzling mantle. A desolate field, a pair of crippled trees stretching their naked branches to the dark-grey sky, a swarm of crows and a drenched road marked with the tracks of wheels, a tawny yellow patch of light gleaming through the cloud-bank and reflected in the wayside puddles, such are the elements out of which one of Munthe’s landscapes is composed. Through Eilert Adelsten Normann representations of the fjords gained currency in the picture market. His specialty was the delineation of the steep and beetling rocky fastnesses of Lofodden with their various reflections of light and colour, the midnight sun glaring over the deep clear sea, the contrast between the blue-black masses of the mountains and the gleaming fields of snow.

BAADE.MOONLIGHT NIGHT ON THE COAST.

Others, such as Ludwig Willroider, Louis Douzette, and Hermann Eschke, set themselves to observe the German heath and the German forest from similar points of view; the one painted great masses of mountain and giant trees, the other the setting sun, and the third the sea. Oswald Achenbach, Albert Flamm, and Ascan Lutteroth set out once more on the pilgrimage to the South, where, in contrast to their predecessors, they studied no longer the classic lines of nature in Italy, but the splendour of varied effects of colour in the neighbourhood of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples. The most enterprising turned their backs on Europe altogether, and began to paint the primæval forests of South America, to which Alexander Humboldt had drawn attention, the azure and scarlet wonders of the tropics, and the gleam and sparkle of the icy world at the ultimate limits of the Polar regions. Ferdinand Bellermann was honoured as a new Columbus when in 1842 he returned home with his sketches, botanically accurate as they were, of the marvels of the virgin forest. Eduard Hildebrandt, who in 1843 had already gone through the Canary Islands, Italy, Sicily, North Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Sahara, and the Northern sea of ice, at the mandate of Frederich Wilhelm IV in 1862 undertook a voyage round the world “to learn from personal view the phenomena that the sea, the air, and the solid earth bring forth beneath the most various skies.” Eugen Bracht traversed Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, and returned with a multitude of studies from the sombre and majestic landscape of the desert, and from that world of ruins and mountains in the East, and developed them at home into as many pictures.

A modicum of praise is due to all these masters for having continually widened the circuit of subject-matter, and gradually disclosed the whole world; and if their works cannot be reckoned as the products of a delicate landscape painting, that is a result of the same taste which prescribed anecdotic and narrative subjects to the genre picture of those years. The landscape painters conquered the earth, but, above all, those parts of it which were geographically remarkable. This they did in the interest of the public. They went with a Baedeker in their pocket into every quarter of the globe, brought with them all the carmine necessary for sunsets, and set up their easels at every place marked with an asterisk in the guidebook. And in these fair regions they noted everything that was to be seen with the said Baedeker’s assistance. Through satisfying the interest of the tourist by a rendering, faithful to a hair’s breadth, of topographically instructive points, they could best reckon on the sale of their productions.

At the same time, their pictures betray that, during this generation, historical painting was throned on a summit whence it could dictate the æsthetic catechism. The historical picture represented a humanity that carried about with it the consciousness of its outward presence, draped itself in front of the glass, and made an artificial study of every gesture and every expression of emotion. Genre painting followed, and rendered the true spirit of life, illustrating it histrionically, but without surprising it in its unconstrained working. And so trees, mountains, and clouds also were forced to lay aside the innocence of unconscious being and wrap themselves in the cloak of affectation. Simple reality in its quiet, delicate beauty, the homely “mood” of nature, touching the forms of landscape with the play of light and air, had nothing to tell an age overstrained by the heroics of history and the grimaces of genre painting. A more powerful stimulus was necessary. So the landscapists also were forced to seek nature where she was histrionic and came forth in blustering magnificence; they were forced to send off brilliant pyrotechnics to fire out sun, moon, and stars in order to be heard, or, more literally, seen.

Instruction or theatrical effect—the aim of historical painting—had also to be that of the landscape painter. And as railroads are cosmopolitan arrangements, he was in a position to satisfy both demands with promptitude. As historical painters in the chase of striking subjects directed their gaze to the farthest historical horizon, and the genre painters sought to take their public captive principally through what was alien and strange, Oriental and Italian, the landscape painters, too, found their highest aim in the widest possible expansion of the geographical horizon. “Have these good people not been born anywhere in particular?” asked Courbet, when he contemplated the German landscapes in the Munich Exhibition of 1869. What would first strike the inhabitant of a Northern country in foreign lands was made the theme of the majority of the pictures. But as the historical painting, in illustrating all the great dramatic scenes from the Trojan War to the French Revolution, yielded at one time to a pædagogical doctrinaire tendency and at another to theatrical impassionedness, so landscape painting on its cosmopolitan excursions became partly a dry synopsis of famous regions, only justifiable as a memento of travel, partly a tricked-out piece of effect which, like everything obtrusive, soon lost its charm. Pictures of the first description which chiefly borrowed their motives from Alpine nature, so imposing in its impressiveness of form—grand masses of rock, glaciers, snow-fields, and abrupt precipices—only needed to have the fidelity of a portrait. Where that was given, the public, guided by the instinct for what is majestic and beautiful in nature, stood before them quite content, while Alpine travellers instructed the laity that the deep blue snow of the picture was no exaggeration, but a phenomenon of the mountain world which had been correctly reproduced. In all these cases there can be no possible doubt about geographical position, but there is seldom any need to make inquiries after the artist. The interest which they excite is purely of a topographical order; otherwise they bear the stamp of ordinary prose, of the aridity and unattractiveness which always creeps in as a consequence of pure objectivity. Works of the second description, which depict exotic regions, striking by the strangeness of various phenomena of light and the splendour and glow of colour, are generally irritating by their professional effort to display “mood.” The old masters revealed “mood” without intending to do so, because they approached nature piously and with a wealth of feeling. The new masters obtain a purely external effect, because they strain after a “mood” in their painting without feeling it; and though art does not exclude the choice of exotic subjects, it is not healthy when a tendency of this sort becomes universal. Really superior art will, from principle, never seek the charm of what is strange and distant, since it possesses the magical gift of bestowing the deepest interest on what lies nearest to it. In addition to this, such effects are as hard to seize as the moment of most intense excitement in the historical picture. As an historical painter Delacroix could render it, and Turner as a landscape painter, but geniuses like Delacroix and Turner are not born every day. As these phenomena were painted at the time in Germany, the right “mood” was not excited by them, but merely a frigid curiosity. Almost all landscapes of these years create an effect merely through their subject; they are entertaining, astonishing, instructive, but the poetry of nature has not yet been aroused. It could only reveal itself when the preponderance of interest in mere subject was no longer allowed. As the figure painters at last disdained through narrative and “points” to win the applause of those who had no sensitiveness for art, so the landscape painters were obliged to cease from giving geographical instruction by the representation of nature as beloved by tourists, and to give up forcing a “mood” in their pictures by a subterfuge. The necessary degree of artistic absorption could only go hand in hand with a revolt against purely objective interest of motive, and with a strenuous effort at the representation of familiar nature in the intimate charm of its moods of light and atmosphere. It was necessary for refinement of taste to follow on the expression of subject-matter; and this impulse had to bring artists back to the path struck by Dahl, Morgenstern, and Gurlitt. To unite the simple, moving, and tender observation of those older artists with richer and more complex methods of expression was the task given to the next generation in France, where paysage intime, the most refined and delicate issue of the century, grew to maturity in the very years when German landscape painting roamed through the world with the joy of an explorer.