Hanfstaengl.
MENZEL.SUNDAY IN THE TUILERIES GARDENS.
Hanfstaengl.
MENZEL.   A LEVEE.

In Vienna August von Pettenkofen made a transition from the ossified, antediluvian genre painting to painting which was artistically delicate. While the successors of Gauermann and Danhauser indulged in heart-breaking scenes or humorous episodes, Pettenkofen was the first to observe the world from a purely pictorial point of view. Alfred Stevens had opened his eyes in Paris in 1851. Troyon’s pictures and Millet’s confirmed him in his efforts. He was brought up on a property belonging to his father in Galicia, and had been a cavalry officer before he turned to painting: horses, peasants, and oxen are the simple figures of his pictures. In the place of episodic, ill-painted stories he set the meagre plains of lonely Pusta, sooty forges, gloomy cobblers’ work shops, dirty courtyards with middens and rubbish-heaps, gipsy encampments, and desolate garrets. There is no pandering to sentimentality or the curiosity excited by genre painting. There are delicate chords of colour, and that is enough. The artist was in the habit of spending the summer months in the little town of Spolnok on the Theiss, to the east of Pesth. Here he wandered about amongst the little whitewashed houses, the booths of general dealers, and the fruit-sellers’ stalls. A lazily moving yoke of oxen with a lad asleep, dark-eyed girls fetching water, poor children playing on the ground, old men dreaming in the sun in a courtyard, are generally the only breathing beings in his pictures. Here is a sandy village-square with low, white-washed houses; there is a wain with oxen standing in the street, or a postilion trotting away on his tired nag. Like Menzel, Pettenkofen paints busy humanity absorbed in their toil, simple beings who do not dream of leaving off work for the sake of those who frequent picture galleries. What differentiates him from the Berlin painter is a more lyrical impulse, something tender, thoughtful, and contemplative. Menzel gives dramatic point to everything he touches; he sets masses in movement, depicts a busy, noisy crowd, pressing together and elbowing one another, forcing their way at the doors of theatres or the windows of cafés in a multifarious throng. Pettenkofen lingers with the petty artisan and the solitary sempstress. In Menzel’s “Iron Mill” the sparks are flying and the machines whirring, but everything is peaceful and quiet in the cobblers’ workshops and the sunny attics visited by Pettenkofen. Menzel delights in momentary impressions and quivering life; Pettenkofen in rest and solitude. In the former every one is thinking and talking and on the alert; in the latter every one is yawning or asleep. If Menzel paints a waggon, the driver cracks his whip and one hears the team rattling over the uneven pavement; in Pettenkofen the waggon stands quietly in a narrow lane, the driver enjoys a midday rest, and an enervating, sultry heat broods overhead. Menzel has a love for men and women with excitement written on their faces; Pettenkofen avoids painting character, contenting himself with the reproduction of simple actions at picturesque moments. The Berlin artist is epigrammatically sharp; the Viennese is elegiac and melancholy. Menzel’s pictures have the changing glitter of rockets; those of Pettenkofen are harmonised in the tone of a refined amateur. They have only one thing in common: neither has found disciples; they are not culminating peaks in Berlin or Vienna art so much as boulders wedged into another system.

Whilst the realistic movement in both towns was confined to particular masters, Munich had once again the mission of becoming a guiding influence. Here all the tendencies of modern art have left the most distinct traces, all movements were consummated with most consistency. The heroes of Piloty followed the divinities of Cornelius, and these were in turn succeeded by the Tyrolese peasants of Defregger, and amid all this difference of theme one bond connected these works: for interesting subject was the matter of chief importance in them, and the purely pictorial element was something subordinate. The efforts of the seventies had for their object the victory of this pictorial element. It was recognised that the talent for making humorous points and telling stories, which came in question as the determining quality in the pictures of monks and peasants of the school of Defregger and Grützner, was the expression of no real faculty for formative art—that it was merely technical incompleteness complacently supported by the lack of artistic sensibility in the public which had produced this narrative painting. It was felt that the task of formative art did not consist in narrative, but in representation, and in representation through the most sensuous and convincing means which stood at its disposal. A renewed study of the old masters made this recognition possible.

GÜSSOW.THE ARCHITECT.
(By permission of M. H. Salomonson, Esq., the owner of the picture.)