Klein and Erhard having set out in advance, others, such as Haller von Hallerstein, L. C. Wagner, F. Rechberger, F. Moessmer, K. Wagner, E. A. Lebschée, and August Geist, each after his own fashion, made little voyages of discovery into the world of nature belonging to their own country. But Erhard, who died in 1822, has found his greatest disciple in a young Dresden master, whose name makes the familiar appeal of an old lullaby which suddenly strikes the ear amid the bustle of the world—in Ludwig Richter, familiar to all Germans. Richter himself has designated Chodowiecki, Gessner, and Erhard as those whose contemplative love of nature guided him to his own path. What Leech, that charming draughtsman of the child-world, was to the English, Ludwig Richter became for the Germans. Not that he could be compared with Leech in artistic qualities. Beside those of the British artist his works are like the exercises of a gifted amateur: they have a petty correctness and a bourgeois neatness of line. But Germans are quite willing to forget the artistic point of view in relation to their Ludwig Richter. Sunny and childlike as he is, they love him too much to care to see his artistic failings. Here is really that renowned German “Gemüth” of which others make so great an abuse.

L. RICHTER.SPRING.

“I am certainly living here in a rather circumscribed fashion, but in a very cheerful situation outside the town, and I am writing you this letter (it is Sunday afternoon) in a shady arbour, with a long row of rose-bushes in bloom before me. Now and then they are ruffled by a pleasant breeze—which is also the cause of a big blot being on this sheet, as it blew the page over.” This one passage reveals the whole man. Can one think of Ludwig Richter living in any town except Dresden, or imagine him except in this dressing-gown, seated on a Sunday afternoon in his shady arbour with the rose-bushes, and surrounded by laughing children? That profound domestic sentiment which runs through his works with a biblical fidelity of heart is reflected in the homeliness of the artist, who has remained all his life a big, unsophisticated child; and his autobiography, in its patriarchal simplicity, is like a refreshing draught from a pure mountain spring. Richter survived into the present as an original type from a time long vanished. What old-world figures did he not see around him as a boy, when he went about, eager for novelty, with his grandfather, the copperplate printer, who in his leisure hours studied alchemy and the art of producing gold, and was surrounded by an innumerable quantity of clocks, ticking, striking, and making cuckoo notes in his dark workroom; or as he listened to his blind, garrulous grandmother, around whom the children and old wives of the neighbourhood used to gather to hear her tales. That was in 1810, and two generations later, as an old man surrounded by his grandsons, he found once more the old, merry child life of his own home. And it was once more a fragment of the good old times, when on Christmas Eve the little band came shouting round the house of gingerbread from Hansel and Gretel which grandfather had built out of real gingerbread after his own drawing.

L. RICHTER.AFTER WORK IT’S GOOD TO REST.WILHELM BUSCH.

“If my art never entered amongst the lilies and roses on the summit of Parnassus, it bloomed by the roads and banks, on the hedges and in the meadows, and travellers resting by the wayside were glad of it, and little children made wreaths and crowns of it, and the solitary lover of nature rejoiced in its colour and fragrance, which mounted like a prayer to Heaven.” Richter had the right to inscribe these words in his diary on his eightieth birthday.

Through his works there echoes a humming and chiming like the joyous cry of children and the twitter of birds. Even his landscapes are filled with that blissful and solemn feeling that Sunday and the spring produce together in a lonely walk over field and meadow. The “Gemüthlichkeit,” the cordiality, of German family-life, with a trait of contemplative romance, could find such a charming interpreter in none but him, the old man who went about in his long loose coat and had the face of an ordinary village schoolmaster. Only he who retained to his old age that childlike heart—to which the kingdom of heaven is given even in art—could really know the heart of the child’s world, which even at a later date in Germany was not drawn more simply or more graciously.

His illustrations present an almost exhaustive picture of the life of the German people at home and in the world, at work and in their pleasure, in suffering and in joy. He follows it through all grades and all seasons of the year. Everything is true and genuine, everything seized from life in its fulness: the child splashing in a tub; the lad shouting as he catches the first snowflake in his hat; the lovers seated whispering in their cosy little chamber, or wandering arm in arm on their “homeward way through the corn” amid the evening landscape touched with gold; the girl at her spinning-wheel and the hunter in the forest, the travelling journeyman, the beggar, the well-to-do Philistine. The scene is the sitting-room or the nursery, the porch twined with vine, the street with old-fashioned overhanging storeys and turrets, the forest and the field with splendid glimpses into the hazy distance. Children are playing round a great tree, labourers are coming back from the field, or the family is taking its rest in some hour of relaxation. A peaceful quietude and chaste purity spread over everything. Certainly Richter’s drawing has something pedantic and unemphatic, that weak, generalising roundness which, beside the sharp, powerful stroke of the old artists, has the spirit of a drawing-master. But what he has to give is always influenced by delicate and loving observation, and never stands in contradiction to truth. He does not give the whole of nature, but neither does he give what is unnatural. He is one of the first of Germans whose art did not spring from a negation of reality, produced by treating it on an arbitrary system, but rested instead upon tender reverie, transfigured into poetry. When in the fifties he stayed a summer in pleasant Loschwitz, he wrote in his diary: “O God, how magnificent is the wide country round, from my little place upon the hill! So divinely beautiful, and so sensuously beautiful! The deep blue heaven, the wide green world, the bright and fair May landscape alive with a thousand voices.”

In all that generation, to whom existence seemed so sad, Ludwig Richter is one of the few who really felt content with the earth, and held the life around them to be the best and healthiest material for the artist. And that is the substance of the plate to which he gave the title “Rules of Art.” A wide landscape stretches away with mighty oaks slanting down, and a purling spring from which a young girl is drawing water, whilst a high-road, enlivened by travellers young and old, runs over hill and dale into the sunny distance. In the midst of this free rejoicing world the artist is seated with his pencil. And above stands the motto written by Richter’s hand—

“Und die Sonne Homer’s, siehe sie lächelt auch uns.”

By the success of Richter certain disciples were inspired to tread the same ground, although none of them equalled him in his charming human qualities. And least of all Oskar Pletsch, whose self-sufficient smile is soon recognised in all its emptiness. Everything which in Richter was genuine and original is in him flat, laboured, and prearranged. His landscapes, which in part are very pretty, are derived from R. Schuster; what seems good in the children is Richter’s property, and what Pletsch contributed is the conventionality. Albert Hendschel also stood on Richter’s shoulders, but his popularity is more justifiable. Even in these days one takes pleasure in his sketch-books, in which he immortalised the joy and sorrow of youth in such a delicious way.