tried to realize the most subtle shades of colour, and raised
himself from a painter of natural impressions to free and poetical
lyricism. Arthur Langhammer (b. 1855), Ludwig Herterich, Leo
Samberger (b. 1851), Hans von Bartels (b. 1856), Wilhelm Keller-Reutlinger
(b. 1854), Beno Becker, Louis Corinth (b. 1858),
Max Slevogt, are others that may be mentioned among the
later Munich artists.
Fritz von Uhde (b. 1848) occupies a peculiar position as being the first to apply the principles of naturalism to religious art. Immediately before him, Eduard von Gebhardt (b. 1838) had gone back to the angular style of the old northern masters, that of Roger van der Weyden and Albert Dürer, believing he could draw the old Biblical events closer to present times by relating them in Luther’s language and representing them as taking place in the most powerful epoch of German ecclesiastical history. Now that historical paintings had been dispossessed by modern and contemporary subjects, it followed also that scenes from the life of Christ had to be laid in modern times. “I do not assert that only the commonplace occurrences of everyday life can be painted. If the historical past be painted, it should be represented in human garb corresponding to the life we see about us, in the surroundings of our own country, peopled with the people moving before our very eyes, just as if the drama had only been enacted the previous evening.” Thus wrote Bastien-Lepage in 1879, when creating his “Jeanne d’Arc,” and in this sense did Uhde paint. But besides the charm of feeling expressed in the subtlest hues, there is also the charm of the noble line.
At the time when, in England, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and, in France, Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau, stepped into the foreground, in Germany Feuerbach (1829–1880), Marées (1837–1887), Thoma (b. 1839), and Böcklin (1827–1901) were discovered. Feuerbach’s life was one series of privations and disappointments. His “Banquet of Plato,” “Song of Spring,” “Iphigenia” and “Pietà,” and his “Medea” and “Battle of the Amazons,” met with but scant recognition on their appearance. To some they appeared to lack sentiment, to others they were “not sufficiently German.” When he died in Venice in 1880, he had become a stranger to his contemporaries. But posterity accorded him the laurel that his own age had denied him. Just those points in his pictures to which exception had been taken during his lifetime, the great solemn restfulness of his colouring and the calm dignity of his contours, made him appear contemporary.
Hans von Marées fulfilled a similar mission in the sphere of decorative art; his, likewise, was a talent that was not discovered until after his death. He is most in touch with Puvis de Chavannes. But the result was different. Puvis was recognized on his first appearance. Marées never had a chance of revealing his real strength. He was only 28 years of age when he first went to Rome; there in 1873, he was commissioned to paint some pictures for the walls of the Zoological Station at Naples. After that time, nothing more was heard of him until 1891, when four years after his death the works he had left behind him were exhibited and presented to the gallery of Schleissheim. The value of these works of art must not be sought in their technique. The art of Puvis rests on a firm realistic foundation, but Marées had finished his studies of nature too prematurely for the correctness of his drawing. In spite of this defect, they encourage as well as excite, owing to the principle which underlies them, and which they share in equal degree with those of Puvis. Like Puvis, Marées repudiated all illuminating efforts whereby forms might be brought into relief. He only retained what was intrinsically essential, the large lines in nature, as well as those of the human frame.
Next to these artists stands Hans Thoma, like one of the great masters of Dürer’s time. In Marées and Feuerbach’s works there is the solemn grandeur of the fresco; in those of Thoma there is nothing of Southern loveliness, but something of the homeliness of the old German art of woodcut; nay, something philistine, rustic, patriarchal—the simplicity of heart and childlike innocence that entrance us in German folklore. in the paintings of Moritz von Schwind (1804–1871) and Ludwig Richter (1803–1884). He had grown up at Bernau, a small village of the Black Forest. Blossoming fruit-trees and silver brooks, green meadows and solitary peasants’ cottages, silent valleys and warm summer evenings, grazing cattle and the cackle of the farmyard, all lived in his memory when he went to Weimar to study the painter’s art. This pious faithfulness to the home of his birth and touching affection for the scenes of his childhood pervade all his art and are its leading feature. Even when depicting classical subjects, the mythological marvels of the ocean and centaurs, Thoma still remains the simple-hearted German, who, like Cranach, conceives antiquity as a romantic fairy tale, as the legendary period of chivalry.
Whether it be correct to place Böcklin (q.v.) in the same category with these painters, or whether he has a right to a separate place, posterity may decide. The great art of the old masters has weighed heavily upon the development of that of our own age. Even the idealists, who have been mentioned, trace their pedigree back to the old masters. However modern in conception, they are to all intents and purposes “old” as regards the form they employed to express their modern ideas. Böcklin has no ancestor in the history of art; no stroke of his brush reminds us of a leader. No one can think of tracing him back to the Academy of Düsseldorf, to Lessing, or Schorner, as his first teacher. Even less can he be called an imitator of the old masters. His works are the result of nature in her different aspects; they have not their origin in literary or historical suggestion. The catalogue of his conceptions, of landscape in varying moods, is inexhaustible. But landscape does not suffice to express his resources. Knights on the quest for adventure, Saracens storming flaming citadels, Tritons chasing the daughters of Neptune in the billowy waves; such were the subjects which appealed to him. He endowed all fanciful beings that people the atmosphere, that live in the trees, on lonely rocks, or that move and have their being in the slimy bottom of the sea, with body and soul, and placed a second world at the side of the world of actuality. Yet this universe of phantasy was too narrow for the master mind. If it be asked who created on the continent of Europe the most fervid religious paintings of the 19th century; who alone exhausted the entire scale of sensations, from the placidity of repose to the sublimity of heroism, from the gayest laughter to tragedy; who possessed the most solemn and most serious language of form and, at the same time, the greatest poetry of colour—the name of Böcklin will most probably form the answer.
These masters were for their younger brethren the pioneers into a new world of art. It was momentous for the painter’s art that in Germany, no less than in England and France, a new movement at this time set in—the so-called “arts and crafts.” Hitherto the various branches of art had followed different courses. The most beautiful paintings were often hung in surroundings grievously lacking in taste. Now arose the ambition to make the room itself a work of art. The picture, as such, now no more stands in the foreground, but the different arts strive together to form a single piece of art. The picture is regarded as merely a decorative accessory.
Among the younger painters still to be mentioned. Max Klinger (b. 1857) is perhaps the most brilliant. He had begun with the etching-needle, and by its aid gave us entire novels, crisp little dramas of everyday life. But this realism was only a preliminary phase enabling him to pass on to a great independent art of form. His great picture, “Christ in Olympus,” combines beauty of form with deep philosophical meaning. Ibsen in 1873, in his Emperor and Galilean, talked of a “third realm,” combining heathen beauty with Christian profundity. Klinger’s “Christ in Olympus” strikes the beholder as the realization of this idea. Stuck (b. 1863) shares with him the Hellenic serenity of form, the classical simplicity. Apart from this, his pictures are thoroughly different. It might almost be said “Klinger is the Nazarene who stepped into Olympus”; the thoughtful, deep son of the North who carries profound physical
