Braun, Munich.Braun, Munich.
VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.
OBERLÄNDER.RETHEL.OBERLÄNDER.GABRIEL MAX.

Eugen Neureuther worked in Munich, and as an etcher revelled in the charming play of arabesques and ornamental borders, and told of pleasant little scenes from the life of the Bavarian people in his pretty peasant quatrains.

The rise of caricature in Germany dates from the year 1848. Though there are extant from the first third of the century no more than a few topical papers of no artistic importance, periodical publications, which soon brought a large number of vigorous caricaturists into notice, began to appear from that time, owing to the political agitations of the period. Kladderadatsch was brought out in Berlin, and Fliegende Blätter was founded in Munich, and side by side with it Münchener Bilderbogen. But later generations will be referred par excellence to Fliegende Blätter for a picture of German life in the nineteenth century. What the painters of those years forgot to transmit is here stored up: a history of German manners which could not imaginably be more exact or more exhaustive. From the very first day it united on its staff of collaborators almost all the most important names in their own peculiar branch. Schwind, Spitzweg, that genial humorist, and many others whom the German people will not forget, won their spurs here, and were inexhaustible in pretty theatre scenes, satires on German and Italian singing, memorial sketches of Fanny Elsler, of the inventor of the dress coat, etc., which enlivened the whole civilized world at that time. This elder generation of draughtsmen on Fliegende Blätter were, indeed, not free from the guilt of producing stereotyped figures. The travelling Englishman, the Polish Jew, the counter-jumper, the young painter, the rich boor, the stepmother, the housemaid, and the nervous countess are everywhere the same in the first volumes. In caricature, just as in “great art,” they still worked a little in accordance with rules and conventions. To observe life with an objective unprejudiced glance, and to hold it fast in all its palpitating movement, was reserved for men of later date.

Braun, Munich.
OBERLÄNDER.VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME. HANS MAKART.
Hanfstaengl.Braun, Munich.
VARIATIONS ON THE KISSING THEME.
ADOLF OBERLÄNDER.OBERLÄNDER.GENELLI.
Braun, Munich.
OBERLÄNDER.
VARIATIONS ON THE
KISSING THEME.
ALMA TADEMA.

Two of the greatest humorists of the world in illustrative art, Wilhelm Busch and Adolf Oberländer, stand at the head of those who ushered in the flourishing period of German caricature. They are masters, and take in with their glance the entire social world of our time, and in their brilliant prints they have made a history of civilisation for the epoch which will be more vivid and instructive for posterity than the most voluminous works of the greatest historians. Their heads are known by Lenbach’s pictures. One has an exceptionally clever, expressive countenance—a thorough painter’s head. The humorist may be recognised by the curious narrowing of one eye, the well-known eye of the humorist that sees everything, proves everything, and holds fast every absurdity in the gestures, every eccentricity in the bearing of his neighbour. That is Wilhelm Busch.

In the large orbs of the other—orbs which seem to grow strangely wide by long gazing as at some fixed object—there is no smile of deliberate mischief, and it is not easy to associate the name of Oberländer with this Saturnian round face, with its curiously timid glance. One is reminded of the definition of humour as “smiling amid tears.”

Even in those days when he came every year to Munich and painted in Lenbach’s studio, Busch was a shy and moody man, who thawed only in the narrowest circle of his friends: now he has buried himself in a market-town in the province of Hanover, in Wiedensahl, which, according to Ritter’s Gazetteer, numbers eight hundred and twenty-eight inhabitants. He lives in the house of his brother-in-law, the clergyman of the parish, and gives himself up to the culture of bees. His laughter has fallen silent, and it is only a journal on bees that now receives contributions from his hand. But what works this hermit of Wiedensahl produced in the days when he migrated from Düsseldorf and Antwerp to Munich, and began in 1859 his series of sketches for Fliegende Blätter! The first were stiff and clumsy, the text in prose and not particularly witty. But the earliest work with a versified text, Der Bauer und der Windmüller, contains in the germ all the qualities which later found such brilliant expression in Max und Moritz, in Der Heilige Antonius, Die Fromme Helene, and Die Erlebnisse Knopps, des Junggesellen, and made Busch’s works an inexhaustible fountain of mirth and enjoyment.

Busch unites an uncommonly sharp eye with a marvellously flexible hand. Wild as his subjects generally are, he solves the greatest difficulties as easily as though they were child’s play. His heroes appear in situations of the most urgent kind, which place their bodily parts in violent and exceedingly uncomfortable positions: they thrash others or get thrashed themselves, they stumble or fall. And in what a masterly way are all these anomalies seized, the boldest foreshortenings and the most flying movements! Untrained eyes see only a scrawl, but for those who know how to look, a drawing by Busch is life itself, freed from all unnecessary detail, and marked down in its great characteristic lines. And amid all this simplification, what knowledge there is under the guise of carelessness, and what fine calculation! Busch is at once simpler and more inventive than the English. With a maze of flourishes run half-mad, and a few points and blotches, he forms a sparkling picture. With the fewest possible means he hits the essential point, and for that reason he is justly called by Grand Cartaret the classic of caricaturists, le roi de la charge et la bouffonnerie.