In many pictures, particularly those of his earlier period, the ground-tone given by the landscape finds merely a faint echo in small accessory figures. In such pictures he stands more or less on a level with Dreber, that master who died in Rome in 1875, and was forgotten in the history of German art more swiftly than ought to have been the case. Franz Dreber was not one of those Classicists dispersed over the face of Europe, men who were content with setting heroic actions in the midst of noble landscapes in the fashion of Preller; on the contrary, he was the lyricist of this movement, the first man who did not touch the epical material of old myths in a manner that was merely scholarly and illustrative, but developed his picture from the original note of landscape. In his pictures nature laughs with those who are glad, mourns with those who weep, sheds her light upon the joyful, and envelops tortured spirits in storm and the terror of thunder. If the golden age is to be represented, the scene is a soft summer landscape, where everything breathes peace and innocence and bliss. And the life of those who inhabit this happy region runs by in blissful peace also. Fair women and children rest upon the meadow, and gather fruits and pluck roses. If he paints Ulysses upon the shore of the sea, looking with yearning towards his distant home, a dull, sultry haze of noon broods over the district, wide and grey like the hero’s yearning. A spring landscape of sunny blitheness, with butterflies sipping at the blossoms of the trees and sunbeams sportively dallying on the sea, are the surroundings of the picture where Psyche is crowned by Eros. And if Prometheus is represented chained to the rock and striving to burst his fetters, all nature fights the fight of the Titan. Lurid clouds move swiftly through the sky, ghostly flashes of lightning quiver, and a wild tempest rakes the mountains.

In Boecklin’s earlier pictures the accessory figures are placed in close relation with the landscape in a manner entirely similar. The mysterious keynote of sentiment in nature gives the theme of the scene represented. In the picture called “The Penitent,” in the Schack Gallery, a hermit is kneeling half-naked before the cross of the Saviour upon the slope of a steep mountain. Troops of ravens fly screaming above his head, and a strip of blue sky shines with an unearthly aspect between the trees, which are bent into wild shapes. The character of the scene is terribly severe, and severe and heavy is the misery in the heart of the man chastising himself with the scourge in his hand as he kneels there in prayer. A deep melancholy rests over the picture named “The Villa by the Sea.” The failing waves break gently on the shore with a mournful whisper, the wind utters its complaint blowing through the cypresses, and a few sunbeams wander coyly over the deep grey of the sky. At the socle of a niche a young woman dressed in black stands, and, with her head resting upon her hand, looks out of deeply veiled eyes over the moving tide. In “The Spring of Love” the landscape vibrates in lyrically soft and flattering chords. The budding splendour of blossoms covers the trees luxuriantly, and a rivulet ripples over the laughing grassy balk. A young man touches the strings of a lyre and sings; and, joining in his song, a maiden stands beside him leaning against a bush laden with blossom. In “The Walk to Emmaus” the ground-tone is given by a grave evening landscape. The storm ruffles the tops of the great trees, and chases across the sky the heavy clouds, over which strange evening lights are flitting. All nature trembles in shivering apprehension. “Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.”

But Boecklin’s great creations reach a higher level. Having begun by extending the lyrical mood of a landscape to his figures, he finally succeeded in peopling nature with beings which seem the final condensation of the life of nature itself, the tangible embodiment of that spirit of nature whose cosmic action in the water, the earth, and the air, he had glorified in one of his youthful works, the frescoes of the Basle Museum. In such pictures he has no forerunners whatever in the more recent history of art. His principle of creation rests, it might be said, upon the same overwhelming feeling for nature which brought forth the figures of Greek myth. When the ancient Greek stood before a waterfall he gave human form to what he saw. His eye beheld the outlines of beautiful nude women, nymphs of the spot, in the descending volume of the cascade; its foam was their fluttering hair, and in the rippling of the water and spattering froth he heard their bold splashing and their laughter. The elemental sway of nature, the secret interweaving of her forces took shape in plastic forms—

“Alles wies den eingeweihten Blicken, Alles eines Gottes Spur ... Diese Höhen füllten Oreaden, Eine Dryas lebt in jedem Baum, Aus dem Urnen lieblicher Najaden Sprang der Ströme Silberschaum. Jener Lorbeer wand sich einst um Hilfe, Tantals Tochter schweigt in diesem Stein, Syrinx Klage tönt aus jenem Schilfe, Philomelas Schmerz aus diesem Hain.”

The beings which live in Boecklin’s pictures owe their origin to a similar action of the spirit. He hears trees, rivers, mountains, and universal nature whisper as with human speech. Every flower, every bush, every flame, the rocks, the waves, and the meadows, dead and without feeling as they are to the ordinary eye, have to his mind a vivid existence of their own; and in the same way the old poet conceived the lightning as a fiery bird and the clouds as the flocks of heaven. The stones have a voice, white walls lengthen like huge phantoms, the bright lights of the houses upon a mountain declivity at night change into the great eyes with which the spirit of the fell glares fixedly down; legions of strange beings circle and whir round in the fantastic region. In his imagination every impression of nature condenses itself into figures that may be seen. As a dragon issues from his lair to terrify travellers in the gloom of a mountain ravine, and as the avenging Furies rise in the waste before a murderer, so in the still brooding noon, when a shrill tone is heard suddenly and without a cause, the Grecian Pan lives once again for Boecklin—Pan, who startles the goat-herd from his dream by an eerie shout, and then whinnies in mockery at the terrified fugitive. The cool, wayward splashing element of water takes shape as a graceful nymph, shrouded in a transparent water-blue veil, leaning upon her welling urn as she listens dreamily to the song of a bird. The fine mists which rise from the fountain-head become embodied as a row of merry children, whose vaporous figures float hazily through the shining clouds of spring. The secret voices that live amid the silence of the wood press round him, and the phantom born of the excited senses becomes a ghostly unicorn advancing with noiseless step, and bearing upon his back a maiden of legendary story dressed in a white garment. In the thundercloud lying over the broad summit of a mountain and abundant in blessing rain he sees the huge body of the giant Prometheus, who brought fire from heaven and lies fettered to the mountain top, spreading over the landscape like a cloud. The form of Death stumbling past cloven trees in rain and tempest, as he rides his pale horse, appears to him in a waste and chill autumnal region, where stands a ruined castle in lurid illumination. A sacred grove, lying in insular seclusion and fringed with venerable old trees that rise straight into the air, rustling as they bend their heads towards each other, is peopled, as at a word of enchantment, with grave priestly figures robed in white, which approach in solemn procession and fling themselves down in prayer before the sacrificial fire. The lonely waste of the sea is not brought home to him with sufficient force by a wide floor of waves, with gulls indolently flying beneath a low and leaden sky; so he paints a flat crag emerging from the waves, and upon its crest, over which the billows sweep, the shy dwellers of the sea bathe in the light. Naiads and Tritons assembled for a gamesome ride over the sea typify the sportive hide-and-seek of the waves. Yet there is nothing forced, nothing merely ingenious, nothing literary in these inventions. The figures are not placed in nature with deliberate calculation: they are an embodied mood of nature; they are children of the landscape, and no mere accessories.

Albert, Munich.Albert, Munich.
BOECKLIN.PAN STARTLING A GOAT-HERD.BOECKLIN.THE HERD.

Boecklin’s power of creating types in embodying these beings of his imagination is a thing unheard of in the whole history of art. He has represented his Centaurs and Satyrs, and Fauns and Sirens and Cupids, so vividly and impressively that they have become ideas as currently acceptable as if they were simple incomposite beings. He has seen the awfulness of the sea at moments when the secret beings of the deep emerge, and he allows a glimpse into the fabulous reality of their heretofore unexplored existence. For all beings which hover swarming in the atmosphere around have their dwelling in the trees or their haunts in rocky deserts, he has found new and convincing figures. Everything which was created in this field before his time—the works of Dürer, Mantegna, and Salvator Rosa not excepted—was an adroit sport with forms already established by the Greeks, and a transposition of Greek statues into a pictorial medium. With Boecklin, who instead of illustrating mythology himself creates it, a new power of inventing myths was introduced. His creations are not the distant issue of nature, but corporeal beings, full of ebullient energy, individualised through and through, and stout, lusty, and natural; and in creating them he has been even more consistent than the Greeks. In their work there is something inorganic in the combination of a horse’s body with the head of Zeus or Laocoön grafted upon it. But in the presence of Boecklin’s Centaurs heaving great boulders around them and biting and worrying each other’s manes, the spectator has really the feeling which prompts him to exclaim, “Every inch a steed!” In him the nature of the sea is expressed through his cold, slimy women with the dripping hair clinging to their heads far more powerfully than it was by the sea-gods of Greece. How merciless is the look in their cold, black, soulless eyes! They are as terrible as the destroying sea that yesterday in its bellowing fury engulfed a hundred human creatures despairing in the anguish of death, and to-day stretches still and joyous in its blue infinity and its callous oblivion of all the evils it has wrought.

And only a slight alteration in the truths of nature has sufficed him for the creation of such chimerical beings. As a landscape painter he stands with all his fibres rooted in the earth, although he seems quite alienated from this world of ours, and his fabulous creatures make the same convincing impression because they have been created with all the inner logical congruity of nature, and delineated under close relationship to actual fact with the same numerous details as the real animals of the earth. For his Tritons, Sirens, and Mermaids, with their awkward bodies covered with bristly hair and their prominent eyes, he may have made studies from seals and walruses. As they stretch themselves upon a rocky coast, fondling and playing with their young, they have the look of sea-cows in human form, though, like men, they have around them all manner of beasts of prey and domestic pets which they caress,—in one place a sea-serpent, in another a seal. His obese and short-winded Tritons, with shining red faces and flaxen hair dripping with moisture, are good-humoured old gentlemen with a quantity of warm blood in their veins, who love and laugh and drink new wine. His Fauns may be met with amongst the shepherds of the Campagna, swarthy strapping fellows dressed in goat-skins after the fashion of Pan—lads with glowing eyes and two rows of white teeth gleaming like ivory. It is chiefly the colour lavished upon them which turns them into children of an unearthly world, where other suns are shining and other stars.

In the matter of colour also the endeavours of Romanticists of the nineteenth century reach a climax in Boecklin. When Schwind and his comrades set themselves to represent the romantic world of fairyland an interdict was still laid upon colour, and it was lightly washed over the drawing, which counted as the thing of prime importance. But Boecklin was the first Romanticist in Germany to reveal the marvellous power in colour for rendering moods of feeling and its inner depth of musical sentiment. Even in those years when the brown tone of the galleries prevailed everywhere, colour was allowed in his pictures to have its own independent existence, apart from its office of being a merely subordinate characteristic of form. For him green was thoroughly green, blue was divinely blue, and red was jubilantly red. At the very time when Richard Wagner lured the colours of sound from music, with a glow and light such as no master had kindled before, Boecklin’s symphonies of colour streamed forth like a crashing orchestra. The whole scale, from the most sombre depth to the most chromatic light, was at his command. In his pictures of spring the colour laughs, rejoices, and exults. In “The Isle of the Dead” it seems as though a veil of crape were spread over the sea, the sky, and the trees. And since that time Boecklin has grown even greater. His splendid sea-green, his transparent blue sky, his sunset flush tinged with violet haze, his yellow-brown rocks, his gleaming red sea-mosses, and the white bodies of his girls are always arranged in new glowing, sensuous harmonies. Many of his pictures have such an ensnaring brilliancy that the eye is never weary of feasting upon their floating splendour.

A master who died in Rome some nineteen years ago might have been in the province of mural painting for German art what Puvis de Chavannes has become for French. In the earlier histories of art his name is not mentioned. Seldom alluded to in life, dead as a German painter ten years before his death, he was summoned from the grave by the enthusiasm of a friend who was a refined connoisseur four years after the earth had closed over him. Such was Hans von Marées’ destiny as an artist.