Claus Meyer, who became one of the best known amongst the young Munich painters by his “Sewing School in the Nunnery” of 1883, is worthy of remark inasmuch as he acquired a method of painting which was full of nuances, through modelling himself upon Pieter de Hoogh and Van der Meer of Delft. Through the windows hung with thin curtains the warm, quiet daylight falls into the room, glancing on the clean boards of the floor, on the polished tops of the tables, the white pages of the books, and the blond and brown hair of the children, playing round it like a golden nimbus. Another sunbeam streams through the door, which is not entirely closed, and quivers over the floor in a bright and narrow strip of light. The intimate representation of peaceful scenes of modest life, the entirely pictorial representation of peaceful and congenial events, has taken the place of the adventures dear to genre painting. Old gentlemen with a glass of beer and a clay pipe, servant-girls peeling potatoes in the kitchen, pupils at the cloister sitting over their books in the library, drinkers, smokers, and dicers—such were the quiet, passive, and silent figures of his later pictures. The mild sunshine breaks in and plays over them. Light clouds of tobacco smoke float in the air. Everything is homely and pleasant, touched with a breath of pictorial charm, comfortable warmth, and poetic fragrance. A hundred years hence his works will be sold as flawlessly delicate and genuine old Dutch pictures. Holmberg became the historian of cardinals. A window, consisting of rounded, clumpy panes, with little glass pictures let in, forms the background of the room, and in the subdued oil-light which beams over splendid vessels and ornaments, chests and Gobelins, the white satin dresses of ladies in the mode of 1640, or the lilac and purple robes of cardinals from the artist’s rich wardrobe, are displayed, together with the appropriate models.

In Fritz August Kaulbach, the most versatile of the group in his adoption of various manners, the essence of this whole tendency is to be found. He did not belong to the specialists who restricted themselves, in a one-sided fashion, to the imitation of the Flemish or the Dutch masters, but appeared like old Diterici, Proteus-like, now in one and now in another mask; and, whether he assumed the features of Holbein, Carlo Dolci, Van Dyck, or Watteau, he had the secret of being invariably graceful and chic.

Seemann, Leipzig.
DIEZ.RETURNING FROM MARKET.

Hanfstaengl.
CLAUS MEYER.THE SMOKING PARTY.KAULBACH.THE LUTE PLAYER.

When the German Renaissance was at its zenith he painted in the Renaissance style: harmless genre pictures à la Beyschlag—the joys of love and of the family circle—but not being so banal as the latter he painted them with more delicate colouring and finer poetic charm. Certain single figures were found specially acceptable—for instance, the daughters of Nuremberg patricians, and noble ladies in the old German caps, dark velvet gowns, and long plaits like Gretchen’s, with their eyes sometimes uplifted and sometimes lowered, and their hands at one moment folded and at another carrying a shining covered goblet. Occasionally these single figures were portraits, but none the less were they transformed into “ladies in old German costume”; and Kaulbach understood how to paint, to the utmost satisfaction of his patrons, the black caps, no less well than the little veil and the net of pearls, and the greenish-yellow silk of the puffed sleeves, no less well than the plush border of the dark gown and the antique red Gretchen pocket. Many of them held a lute and stood amid a spring landscape, before a streamlet, or a silver-birch, such as Stevens delighted in painting ten years previously. At that time Fritz August Kaulbach, with greater softness in his treatment, occupied in Germany the place which Florent Willems had occupied in Belgium. Since then he has brought nearer to the public the most various old and modern masters, and he has done so with fine artistic feeling: in his “May Day” he has revived the pastoral scenes of Watteau with a felicitous cleverness; in his “St. Cecilia” he created a total effect of great grace by going arm in arm with Carlo Dolci and Gabriel Max; his “Pietà” he composed with “the best figures of Michael Angelo, Fra Bartolommeo, and Titian,” just as Gerard de Lairesse had once recommended to painters. Intermediately he painted frail flower-like girls à la Gabriel Max, charming little angels à la Thoma, children in Pierrot costume à la Vollon, and little landscapes à la Gainsborough. He did not find in himself the plan for a new edifice in erecting his palace of art, but built according to any plans that came in his way; he simply chose from all existing forms the most graceful, the most elegant, the most precious, culled from their beauties only the flowers, and bound them into a tasteful bouquet. In his modern portraits of women, which in recent years have been his chief successes, he placed himself between Van Dyck and the English. Of course, a really chic painter of women, like Sargent, is not to be thought of in this connection; but for Germany these portraits were in exceedingly fine taste, had an interesting Kaulbachian trace of indifferent health, and breathed an odeur de femme which found very wide approval. In his “Lieschen, the Waitress of the Shooting Festival” he risked a fresh attempt at treating popular life, and made of it such a graceful picture that it might almost have been painted by Piglhein; while in a series of spirited caricatures he even succeeded in being—Kaulbach. The history of art is wide, and since Fritz August Kaulbach knows it extremely well, he will certainly find much to paint that is pleasing and attractive, “s’il continue à laisser errer son imagination à travers les formes diverses créées par l’art de tous les temps,” as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts said of him on the occasion of the Vienna World Exhibition of 1878.

After all, these pictures will have little that is novel for an historian of the next century. “Être maître,” says W. Bürger, “c’est ne ressembler à personne.” But these were the works of painters who merely announced the dogma of the infallibility of universal eclecticism, as the Caracci had done in their familiar sonnets: they were spirited imitators, whose connection with the nineteenth century will be known in after years only by the dates of their pictures. As old masters called back to life, they have enriched the history of art, as such, by nothing novel. Yet, in replacing superficial imitations by imitations which were excellent and congenial, they have nevertheless advanced the history of art in the nineteenth century in another way.

Hanfstaengl.
FRANZ LENBACH.LENBACH.PORTRAIT OF WILHELM I.