KAUFMANN, CONSTANTINE PETROVICH (1818-1882), Russian general, was born at Maidani on the 3rd of March 1818. He entered the engineer branch in 1838, served in the campaigns in the Caucasus, rose to be colonel, and commanded the sappers and miners at the siege of Kars in 1855. On the capitulation of Kars he was deputed to settle the terms with General Sir W. Fenwick Williams. In 1861 he became director-general of engineers at the War Office, assisting General Milutin in the reorganization of the army. Promoted lieut.-general in 1864, he was nominated aide-de-camp-general and governor of the military conscription of Vilna. In 1867 he became governor of Turkestan, and held the post until his death, making himself a name in the expansion of the empire in central Asia. He accomplished a successful campaign in 1868 against Bokhara, capturing Samarkand and gradually subjugating the whole country. In 1873 he attacked Khiva, took the capital, and forced the khan to become a vassal of Russia. Then followed in 1875 the campaign against Khokand, in which Kaufmann defeated the khan, Nasr-ed-din. Khokand north of the Syrdaria was annexed to Russia, and the independence of the rest of the country became merely nominal. This rapid absorption of the khanates brought Russia into close proximity to Afghanistan, and the reception of Kaufmann’s emissaries by the Amir was a main cause of the British war with Afghanistan in 1878. Although Kaufmann was unable to induce his government to support all his ambitious schemes of further conquest, he sent Skobeleff in 1880 and 1881 against the Akhal Tekkés, and was arranging to add Merv to his annexations when he died suddenly at Tashkend on the 15th of May 1882.
KAUKAUNA, a city of Outagamie county, Wisconsin, U.S.A., on the Fox river 7 m. N.E. of Appleton and about 100 m. N. of Milwaukee. Pop. (1900), 5115, of whom 1044 were foreign-born (1905) 4991; (1910) 4717. Kaukauna is served by the Chicago & North-Western railway (which has car-shops here), by inter-urban electric railway lines connecting with other cities in the Fox river, valley, and by river steamboats. It has a Carnegie library, a hospital and manufactories of pulp, paper, lumber and woodenware. Dams on the Fox River furnish a good water-power. The city owns its waterworks. A small settlement of Indian traders was made here as early as 1820; in 1830 a Presbyterian mission was established, but the growth of the place was slow, and the city was not chartered until 1885.
KAULBACH, WILHELM VON (1805-1874), German painter, was born in Westphalia on the 15th of October 1805. His father, who was poor, combined painting with the goldsmith’s trade, but means were found to place Wilhelm, a youth of seventeen, in the art academy of Düsseldorf, then becoming renowned under the directorship of Peter von Cornelius. Young Kaulbach contended against hardships, even hunger. But his courage never failed; and, uniting genius with industry, he was ere long foremost among the young national party which sought to revive the arts of Germany. The ambitious work by which Louis I. sought to transform Munich into a German Athens afforded the young painter an appropriate sphere. Cornelius had been commissioned to execute the enormous frescoes in the Glyptothek, and his custom was in the winters, with the aid of Kaulbach and others, to complete the cartoons at Düsseldorf, and in the summers, accompanied by his best scholars, to carry out the designs in colour on the museum walls in Munich. But in 1824 Cornelius became director of the Bavarian academy. Kaulbach, not yet twenty, followed, took up his permanent residence in Munich, laboured hard on the public works, executed independent commissions, and in 1849, when Cornelius left for Berlin, succeeded to the directorship of the academy, an office which he held till his death on the 7th of April 1874. His son Hermann (1846-1909) also became a distinguished painter.
Kaulbach matured, after the example of the masters of the Middle Ages, the practice of mural or monumental decoration; he once more conjoined painting with architecture, and displayed a creative fertility and readiness of resource scarcely found since the era of Raphael and Michelangelo. Early in the series of his multitudinous works came the famous Narrenhaus, the appalling memories of a certain madhouse near Düsseldorf; the composition all the more deserves mention for points of contact with Hogarth. Somewhat to the same category belong the illustrations to Reineke Fuchs. These, together with occasional figures or passages in complex pictorial dramas, show how dominant and irrepressible were the artist’s sense of satire and enjoyment of fun; character in its breadth and sharpness is depicted with keenest relish, and at times the sardonic smile bursts into the loudest laugh. Thus occasionally the grotesque degenerates into the vulgar, the grand into the ridiculous, as in the satire on “the Pigtail Age” in a fresco outside the New Pinakothek. Yet these exceptional extravagances came not of weakness but from excess of power. Kaulbach tried hard to become Grecian and Italian; but he never reached Phidias or Raphael; in short the blood of Dürer, Holbein and Martin Schongauer ran strong in his veins. The art products in Munich during the middle of the 19th century were of a quantity to preclude first-rate quality, and Kaulbach contracted a fatal facility in covering wall and canvas by the acre. He painted in the Hofgarten, the Odeon, the Palace and on the external walls of the New Pinakothek. His perspicuous and showy manner also gained him abundant occupation as a book illustrator: in the pages of the poets his fancy revelled; he was glad to take inspiration from Wieland, Goethe, even Klopstock; among his engraved designs are the Shakespeare gallery, the Goethe gallery and a folio edition of the Gospels. With regard to these examples of “the Munich school,” it was asserted that Kaulbach had been unfortunate alike in having found Cornelius for a master and King Louis for a patron, that he attempted “subjects far beyond him, believing that his admiration for them was the same as inspiration”; and supplied the lack of real imagination by “a compound of intellect and fancy.”
Nevertheless in such compositions as the Destruction of Jerusalem and the Battle of the Huns Kaulbach shows creative imagination. As a dramatic poet he tells the story, depicts character, seizes on action and situation, and thus as it were takes the spectator by storm. The manner may be occasionally noisy and ranting, but the effect after its kind is tremendous. The cartoon, which, as usual in modern German art, is superior to the ultimate picture, was executed in the artist’s prime at the age of thirty. At this period, as here seen, the knowledge was little short of absolute; subtle is the sense of beauty; playful, delicate, firm the touch; the whole treatment artistic.
Ten or more years were devoted to what the Germans term a “cyclus”—a series of pictures depicting the Tower of Babel, the Age of Homer, the Destruction of Jerusalem, the Battle of the Huns, the Crusades and the Reformation. These major tableaux, severally 30 ft. long, and each comprising over one hundred figures above life-size, are surrounded by minor compositions making more than twenty in all. The idea is to congregate around the world’s historic dramas the prime agents of civilization; thus here are assembled allegoric figures of Architecture and other arts, of Science and other kingdoms of knowledge, together with lawgivers from the time of Moses, not forgetting Frederick the Great. The chosen situation for this imposing didactic and theatric display is the Treppenhaus or grand staircase in the new museum, Berlin; the surface is a granulated, absorbent wall, specially prepared; the technical method is that known as “water-glass,” or “liquid flint,” the infusion of silica securing permanence. The same medium was adopted in the later wall-pictures in the Houses of Parliament, Westminster.
The painter’s last period brings no new departure; his ultimate works stand conspicuous by exaggerations of early characteristics. The series of designs illustrative of Goethe, which had an immense success, were melodramatic and pandered to popular taste. The vast canvas, more than 30 ft. long, the Sea Fight at Salamis, painted for the Maximilianeum, Munich, evinces wonted imagination and facility in composition; the handling also retains its largeness and vigour; but in this astounding scenic uproar moderation and the simplicity of nature are thrown to the winds, and the whole atmosphere is hot and feverish.