Hanfstaengl.
HIRTH.THE HOP HARVEST.

After the sixties the influence of Courbet began to be directly felt. In the days when he worked in Couture’s studio Victor Müller had taken up some of the ideas of the master of Ornans, and when he settled in 1863 in Munich, Müller communicated to the painters there the first knowledge of the works of the great Frenchman. He did not follow Courbet, however, in his subjects. “The Man in the Heart of the Night lulled to Sleep by the Music of a Violin,” “Venus and Adonis,” “Hero and Leander,” “Hamlet in the Churchyard,” “Venus and Tannhäuser,” “Faust on the Promenade,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Ophelia by the Stream”—such are the titles of his principal works. But how far they are removed from the anæmic, empty painting of beauty which reigned in the school of Couture! Though a Romanticist of the purest water in his subjects, Müller appears, in the manner in which he handles them, as a Realist on whom there is no speck of the academical dust of the schools. The dominant features of Victor Müller’s pictures are the thirst for life and colour, full-blooded strength, haughty contempt for every species of hollow exaggeration and all outward pose, genuine human countenances and living human forms inspired with tameless passion, an audacious rejection of all the traditional rules of composition, and, even in colour, a veracity which in that age, given up to an ostentatious painting of material, must have had an effect that was absolutely novel. In 1863 the blooming flesh of his “Wood Nymph” excited the Munich public to indignation, just as the nude female figures of Courbet had roused indignation about the same time in Paris. Pictures painted with singular sureness of hand were executed by him during the few years that he yet had to live—portraits of dogs, landscapes of a flaming glow of colour, single figures of red-haired Bacchantes and laughing flower-girls, old men dying, and charming fairy pictures. The nearer he came to his death the more his powers of work seemed to increase. The most remarkable ideas came into his head. He drew, and painted without intermission designs which had occupied him for years. “I feel,” he said, “like an architect who has been commissioned to carry out a great building, and I cannot do it: I must die.”

But the impulse which he had given in more than one direction had further issues. As Hans Thoma in later years continued the work of the great Frankfort master in the province of fairy-tale, Wilhelm Leibl realised Müller’s realistic programme.

Kunst für Alle.
WILHELM LEIBL.Kunst für Alle.LEIBL.IN THE STUDIO.

Wilhelm Leibl, son of the conductor of music in the cathedral, was born at Cologne on 23rd October 1844. At Munich he entered the studio of Arthur van Ramberg, that unjustly forgotten master who, both by his own work and by his activity as a teacher, exercised upon the younger Munich school a far healthier influence than Piloty. Ramberg was a modern man, was always eager to come into immediate contact with life and break the fetters of tradition which hung everywhere upon that generation. He was an aristocrat and a dandy, and, having occupied himself in the beginning with romantic fairy subjects, he painted, soon after his migration to Munich, a series of pictures from modern life—“Dachau Girls on Sunday,” “The Return from the Masked Ball,” “A Walk with the Tutor,” “The Meeting on the Lake,” “The Invitation to Boat,” and others, which rose above the mass of contemporary productions by their great distinction, fragrance, and grace. At a time when others held nothing but the smock-frock fit for representation, Ramberg painted the fashionable modern costume of women. And when others devoted themselves to clumsy genre episodes, he created songs without words that were full of fine reserve, nobility, and delicate feeling.

Rudolf Hirth, who made a stir with his “Hop Harvest”; Albert Keller, the tasteful painter of fashionable life; Karl Haider, the sincere and conscientious miniature painter whose energy of manner had a suggestion of the old masters, together with Wilhelm Leibl, all issued from Ramberg’s school, not from Piloty’s.

The young student from Cologne was thus saved, in the beginning, from occupying himself with history, and he had no need to addict himself to narrative genre painting, since his entire organisation preordained him to painting pure and simple. Wilhelm Leibl was in those days a handsome fellow, with powerful limbs and shining brown eyes. He was realism incarnate—rather short, but strongly made, and with a frame almost suggesting a beast of burden, broad in the chest, high-shouldered, and bull-necked. His arms were thick and his feet large. His gait was slow, heavy, and energetic, and he made with his arms liberal gestures which took up a good deal of room. He had not the fiery spirit of Courbet, being more prosaic, sober, and deliberate, but he resembled him both in appearance and in the artistic faculty of eye and hand. “He had,” as a French critic wrote of him, “one of those organisations which are predestined for painting, as Courbet had amongst us Frenchmen. Such men extract the most remarkable things from painting.”

American Art Review.
LEIBL.THE VILLAGE POLITICIANS.