ERHARD.A PEASANT SCENE.

Leech’s successor, George du Maurier, is less delicate—that is to say, not so entirely and loftily æsthetic. He is less exclusively poetic, but lives more in actual life, and suffers less from the raw breath of reality. At the same time, his drawing is pithier and more incisive; one discerns his French training. In 1857 du Maurier was a pupil of Gleyre, and returned straight to England when Leech’s place on Punch became vacant by his death. Since that time du Maurier has been the head of the English school of drawing—of the diarists of that society which is displayed in Hyde Park during the season, and found in London theatres and dining-rooms, and in well-kept English pleasure grounds, at garden parties and tennis meetings, the leaders of clubs and drawing-rooms. His snobs rival those of Thackeray, but he has also a special preference for the fair sex—for charming women and girls who race about the lawn at tennis in large hats and bright dresses, or sit by the fire in fashionable apartments, or hover through a ball-room waltzing in their airy skirts of tulle. The coquettishness of his little ones is entirely charming, and so too is the superior and comical exclusiveness of his æsthetically brought-up children, who will associate with no children not æsthetic.

ERHARD.A PEASANT FAMILY.

But the works of Charles Keene are the most English of all. Here the English reveal that complete singularity which distinguishes them from all other mortals. Both as a draughtsman and as a humorist Keene stands with the greatest of the century, on the same level as Daumier and Hokusai. An old bachelor, an original, a provincial living in the vast city, nothing pleased him better than to mix with the humbler class, to mount on the omnibus seat beside the driver, to visit a costermonger, or sit in a dingy suburban tavern. He led a Bohemian life, and was, nevertheless, a highly respectable, economical, and careful man. Trips into the country and little suppers with his friends constituted his greatest pleasures. He was a member of several glee clubs, and when he sat at home played the Scotch bagpipes, to the horror of all his neighbours. During his last years his only company was an old dog, to which he, like poor Tassaert, clung with a touching tenderness. All the less did he care about “the world.” Grace and beauty are not to be sought in his drawings. For him “Society” did not exist. As du Maurier is the chronicler of drawing-rooms, Keene was the fine and unsurpassed observer of the people and of humble London life, and he extended towards them a friendly optimism and a brotherly sympathy. An endless succession of the most various, the truest, and the most animated types is contained in his work: mighty guardsmen swagger, cane in hand, burly and solemn; cabmen and omnibus drivers, respectable middle-class citizens, servants, hairdressers, the City police, waiters, muscular Highlanders, corpulent self-made City men, the seething discontent of Whitechapel; and here and there amidst them all incomparable old tradesmen’s wives, and big, raw-boned village landladies in the Highlands. Keene has something so natural and self-evident in his whole manner of expression, that no one is conscious of the art implied by such drawing. Amongst those living in his time only Menzel could touch him as a draughtsman, and it was not through chance that each, in spite of their differences of temperament, greatly admired the other. Keene bought every drawing of Menzel’s that he could get, and Menzel at his death possessed a large collection of Keene’s sketches.

LUDWIG RICHTER.

In the beginning of the century Germany had no draughtsmen comparable for realistic impressiveness with Rowlandson. At a time when the great art lay so completely bound in the shackles of the Classic school, drawing, too, appeared only in traditional forms. The artist ventured to draw as he liked just as little as he ventured to paint anything at all as he saw it; for both there were rules and strait-waistcoats. Almost everything that was produced in those years looks weak and flat to-day, forced in composition and amateurish in drawing. Where Rowlandson with his brusque powerful strokes recalls Michael Angelo or Rembrandt, the Germans have something laboured, diffident, and washed out. Yet even here a couple of unpretentious etchers rise as welcome and surprising figures out of the tedious waste of academic production, though they were little honoured by their contemporaries. In their homely sketches, however, they have remained more classic than those who put on the classical garment as if for eternity. What the painter refused to paint, and the patrons of art who sought after ideas would not allow to count as a picture, because the subject seemed to them too poor, and the form too commonplace and undignified—military scenes at home and abroad, typical and soldierly figures from the great time of the war of Liberation, the life of the people, the events of the day—was what the Nuremberg friends, Johann Adam Klein and Johann Christoph Erhard, diligently engraved upon copper with sympathetic care, and so left posterity a picture of German life in the beginning of the century that seems the more sincere and earnest because it has paid toll neither to style in composition nor to idealism. This invaluable Klein was a healthy and sincere realist, from whom the æsthetic theories of the time recoiled without effect, and he had no other motive than to render faithfully whatever he saw. Even in Vienna, whither he came as a young man in 1811, it was not the picture galleries which roused him to his first studies, but the picturesque national costumes of the Wallachians, Poles, and Hungarians, and their horses and peculiar vehicles. A sojourn among the country manors of Styria gave him opportunity for making a number of pretty sketches of rural life. In the warlike years 1813 and 1814, with their marching and their bivouacs, he went about all day long drawing amongst the soldiers. Even in Rome it was not the statues that fascinated him, but the bright street scenes, the ecclesiastical solemnities, and the picturesque caravans of country people. And when he settled down in Nuremburg, and afterwards in Munich, he did not cease to be sensitive to all impressions that forced themselves on him in varying fulness. The basis of his art was faithful and loving observation of life as it was around him, the pure joy the genuine artist has in making a picture of everything he sees.

L. RICHTER.HOME.

L. RICHTER.   THE END OF THE DAY.

Poor Erhard, who at twenty-six ended his life by suicide, was a yet more delicate and sensitive nature. The marching of Russian troops through his native town roused him to his first works, and even in these early military and canteen scenes he shows himself an exceptionally sharp and positive observer. The costumes, the uniforms, the teams and waggons, are drawn with decision and accuracy. From Vienna he made walking tours to the picturesque regions of the Schneeberg, wandered through Salzburg and Pinzgau, and gazed with wonder at the idyllic loveliness of nature as she is in these regions, on the cosy rooms of the peasants with their great tiled stoves and the sun-burnt figures of the country people. He had a heart for nature, an intimate, poetic, and profound love for what is humble and familiar—for homely meadows, trees, and streams, for groves and hedgerows, for quiet gardens and sequestered spots. He approached everything with observation as direct as a child’s. Both Klein and he endeavoured to grasp a fragment of nature distinctly, and without any kind of transformation or generalisation; and this fresh, unvarnished, thoroughly German feeling for nature gives them, rather than Mengs and Carstens, the right to be counted as ancestors of the newer German art.