Up to this time the most miserable desolation had also reigned over the province of the artistic crafts. But, borne up by the rekindled sentiment of nationality, and favoured by the high tide of the milliards paid by France, since 1870, that eventful movement bearing the words “Old German” and “Fine Style” on its programme had become an accomplished fact. The German Renaissance, which research had been hitherto neglected, was discovered afresh. Lübke explored it thoroughly and systematically; Woltmann wrote on Hans Holbein, Thausing on Dürer; Eitelberger founded the Austrian Industrial Museum; Georg Hirth brought out his Deutsches Zimmer, and began the publication of the Formenschatz. The national form of art of the German Renaissance was taken up everywhere with a proud consciousness of patriotism: here, it was thought, was a panacea. Those who followed the artistic crafts declared open war against everything pedestrian and tedious. Lorenz Gedon in particular—in union with Franz and Rudolf Seitz—was the soul of the movement. With his black, curly hair, his little, fiery, dark eyes, his short beard, his negligent dress, and his two great hands expert in the exercise of every description of art, he had himself something of the character of an old German stone-cutter. His manner of expressing himself corresponded to this appearance. In every thing it was original, saturated with his own personal conception of the world. As the son of a dealer in old pictures and curiosities, he was familiar with the old masters from his childhood, and followed them in the method of his study. He was far from confining himself to one branch. The façades of houses, the architecture of interiors, tavern rooms and festal decorations, furniture and state carriages, statues and embellishments in stone, bronze, wood, and iron, portrait busts in wax, clay, and marble, models for ornaments, for iron lattices, for the adornment of ships and the fittings of cabins, all objects that were wayward, fantastic, quaint, and curious lay in his province; and for the execution of each in turn this remarkable man felt that he had in him an equal capacity. And, at the same time, the temperament of a collector was united in him with that of an artist in an entirely special way. In the bushy wilderness of a garden before his house in the Nymphenburger Strasse countless stone fragments of mediæval sculpture were strewn about, up to the very hedge dividing it from the street. Rusty old trellises of wrought iron slanted in front of the windows, and in the house itself the most precious objects, which artists ten years before had passed without heed, stood in masses together. As Gedon was taken from his work when he was forty his artistic endeavour never got beyond efforts of improvisation, but the impulse which he gave was very powerful. Through his initiative the whole province of the artistic crafts was brought under observation from a pictorial point of view. The bald Philistine style of decoration gave way and a blithe revel of colour was begun. The great carnival feasts arranged by him on the model of the Renaissance period are an important episode in the history of culture in Munich, and have contributed in no unessential manner to the refinement of taste in the toilette of women. The Munich Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts in 1876 (before the entrance of which he had erected that great portal made of old fragments of architecture, wood-carving, and splendid stuffs, and bearing the inscription “The Works of our Fathers”) indicated the zenith of that movement in the handicrafts which was flooding all Germany in those days.
The course which was run by this movement in the following years is well known, and it is well known how the imitation of the German Renaissance soon became as wearisome as in the beginning it had been attractive. After it had been a little overdone another step was taken, and from the Renaissance people went to the baroque period, and soon afterwards the rococo period followed. In these days sobriety has taken the place of this fever for ornamentation, and the mania for style has resulted in a surfeit, a weariness and a desire for simplicity and quietude. Nevertheless the beneficial influence of the movement on the general elevation of taste is undeniable, and indirectly it was of service to painting.
| Seeman, Leipzig. |
| AUGUST VON PETTENKOFEN. |
In rooms where the owner was the only article of the inventory repugnant to the conception of style, only those pictures were admitted which had been executed in the exact manner of the old masters. Works of art were regarded as tasteful furniture, and were obliged to harmonise correctly with the other appointments of the room; they had, moreover, to be themselves legitimate “imitations of the Works of our Fathers.” And, in this way, the movement in the handicrafts gave an impulse to a renewed study of the old masters, carried out with far more refinement than had hitherto been the case. Amongst the costume painters spread over all Germany, the experts in costume, working in Munich during the seventies, form a really artistic race of able painters who were peculiarly sensitive to colour. They were the historians of art, the connoisseurs of colour in the ranks of the painters. Piloty did not satisfy them; they buried themselves in the study of old masters with a delicately sensitive appreciation of them; they began to mix soft, luxuriant, and melting colours upon their palettes, and to feel the peculiar joy of painting. Whilst they imitated the exquisite “little masters” of former ages, in dimly lighted studios hung with Gobelins, imitating at the same time the beautifying rust of centuries, they gradually abandoned all their own tricks of art; and whilst they devoted themselves to detail they brought about the Renaissance of oil-painting. Compared with earlier works, their pictures are like rare dainties. They no longer recognised the end of their calling, as the genre painters had done, in a one-sided talent for characterisation, but tried once more to lay chief weight upon the pictorial and artistic appearance of their pictures. They were conscious of a presentiment that there were higher spheres of art than the commonplace humour of genre painting, and this recognition had a very wide bearing. Pictorial point took the place of narrative humour. If artists had previously painted thoughts they now began to paint things, and even if the things were bundles of straw, mediæval hose, and the old robes of cardinals, they were no longer “invented,” but something which had been seen as a whole. It was a transition towards ultimately painting what had actually taken place before the artist’s eyes.
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| Seemann, Leipzig. | |
| PETTENKOFEN. | A WOMAN SPINNING. |
| Seemann, Leipzig. |
| PETTENKOFEN. IN THE CONVENT YARD. |
That sumptuous, healthy artist of such pictorial ability, Diez, the Victor Scheffel of painting, stands at the head of the group. From his youth upwards his chief place of resort had been the cabinet of engravings where he studied Schongauer, Dürer, and Rembrandt, and all the boon-companions and vagabonds etched or cut in copper or wood, and on the model of these he painted his own marauders, robber-barons, peasants in revolt, old German weddings and fairs. His picture “To the Church Consecration” recalls Beham, his “Merry Riding” Schongauer, and his “Ambuscade” Dürer, whilst Teniers served as model for his fairs. Diez knows the period from Dürer and Holbein to Rubens, Rembrandt, Wouwerman, and Brouwer as thoroughly as an historian of art, and sometimes—for instance in his “Picnic in the Forest”—he has even drawn the eighteenth century into the circle of his studies. His pictures had an unrivalled delicacy of tone, and could certainly hang beside their Dutch models in the Pinakothek without losing anything by such proximity.
Something of Brouwer or Ostade revived once more in Harburger, the talented draughtsman of Fliegende Blätter, the undisputed monarch of the kingdom of slouching hats, old mugs, and Delft pipes. Pictures like “The Peasants’ Doctor,” “The Card-players,” “The Grandmother,” “By the Quiet Fireside,” “In the Armchair,” and “Easy-going Folk” were masterpieces of delicate Dutch painting: the tone of his pictures shows distinction and temperament; they have deep and fine chiaroscuro, and are soft and fluent in execution. Loefftz with his picture “Love and Avarice” appeared as Quentin Matsys redivivus, and then attached himself in turn to Holbein and Van Dyck; and exercised, like Diez, a great influence on the younger generation by his activity as a teacher.