THE PAINTING OF HUMOROUS ANECDOTE
At the very time when the East attracted the French Romanticists, the
German and Belgian painters discovered the rustic. Romanticism, driven
into strange and tropical regions by its disgust of a sluggish,
colourless and inglorious age, now planted a firm foot upon native soil.
Amid rustics there was to be found a conservative type of life which
perpetuated old usages and picturesque costume.
It is not easy for a dilettante to enter into sympathetic relationship
with these early pictures of peasant life. They are gaudy in tone,
smooth as metal, and the figures stand out hard against the atmosphere,
as if they had been cut from a picture-sheet. But the historian has no
right to be merely a dilettante. It would be unfair of him to make the
artistic conceptions of the present time the means of depreciating the
past. For, after all, works of the past are only to be measured with
those of their own age, and when one once remembers what an importance
these modest "little masters" had for their time it is no longer
difficult to treat them with justice. In an age when futile and aimless
intentions lost their way in theory and imitation of the "great
painting" there blossomed here, and for the first time, a certain
individuality of mind and temper. While Cornelius, Kaulbach, and their
fellows formed a style which was ideal in a purely conventional sense,
and epitomised the art of the great masters according to method, the
"_genre_ painters" seized upon the endless variety of nature, and, after
a long period of purely reproductive painting, made the first diffident
attempt to set art free from the curse of system and the servile
repetition of antiquated forms.
Even as regards colour they have the honour of preparing the way for a
restoration in the technique of painting. Their own defects in technique
were not their fault, but the consequence of that fatal interference of
Winckelmann through which art lost its technical traditions. They did
not enjoy the advantages of issuing from a long line of ancestors. In a
certain sense they had to make a beginning in the history of art by
themselves; for between them and the older German painting they only met
with men who held the ability to paint as a shame and a disgrace. With
the example of the old Dutch and Flemish masters before them, they had
to knit together the bonds which these men had cut; and considering the
æsthetic ideas of the age, this reference to Netherlandish models was an
event of revolutionary importance. In doing this they may have been
partially influenced by Wilkie, who made his tour in Germany in 1825,
and whose pictures had a wide circulation through the medium of
engraving. And from another side attention was directed to the old Dutch
masters by Schnaase's letters of 1834. While the entire artistic school
which took its rise from Winckelmann gave the reverence of an empty,
formal idealism to classical antiquity and the Cinquecento, applying
their standards to all other periods, Schnaase was the first to give an
impulse to the historical consideration of art. In this way he revealed
wide and hitherto neglected regions to the creative activity of modern
times. The result of his book was that the Netherlandish masters were no
longer held to be "the apes of vulgar nature," but took their place as
exquisite artists from whom the modern painter had a great deal to
learn.
[Illustration: KOBELL. A MEETING.]
In Munich the conditions of a popular, national art were supplied by the
very site of the town. Since the beginning of the century Munich had
been peculiarly the type of a peasant city, the capital of a peasant
province; it had a peasantry abounding in old-fashioned singularities,
gay and motley in costume as in their ways of life, full of bright and
easy-going good-humour, and gifted with the Bavarian force of character.
Here it was, then, that "the resort to national traits" was first made.
And if, in the event, this painting of rustic life produced many
monstrosities, it remained throughout the whole century an unfailing
source from which the art of Munich drew fresh and vivid power.
Even in the twenties there was an art in Munich which was native to the
soil, and in later years shot up all the more vigorously through being
for a time cramped in its development by the exotic growths of the
school of Cornelius. It was as different from the dominant historical
painting as the "_magots_" of Teniers from the mythological machinery of
Lebrun, and it was treated by official criticism with the same contempt.
Cornelius and his school directed the attention of educated people so
exclusively to themselves, and so entirely proscribed the literature of
the day, that what took place outside their own circle in Munich was
but little discussed. The vigorous group of naturalists had not much to
offer critics who wished to display their knowledge by picking to pieces
historical pictures, interpreting philosophical cartoons, and pointing
to similarities of style between Cornelius and Michael Angelo. But for
the historian, seeking the seeds of the present in the past, they are
figures worthy of respect. Setting their own straightforward conception
of nature against the eclecticism of the great painters, they laid the
foundation of an independent modern art.
The courtly, academic painting of Cornelius derived its inspiration from
the Sistine Chapel; the naturalism of these "_genre_ painters" was
rooted in the life of the Bavarian people. The "great painters" dwelt
alone in huge monumental buildings; the naturalists, who sought their
inspiration in the life of peasants, in the life of camps, and in
landscape, without troubling themselves about antique or romantic
subjects, furnished the material for the first collections of modern
art. Both as artists and as men they were totally different beings.
Cornelius and his school stand on the one side, cultured, imperious,
fancying themselves in the possession of all true art, and abruptly
turning from all who are not sworn to their flag; on the other side
stand the naturalists, brisk and cheery, rough it may be, but sound to
the core, and with a sharp eye for life and nature.
[Illustration: PETER HESS. A MORNING AT PARTENKIRCHE.]
Painting in the grand style owed its origin to the personal tastes of
the king and to the great tasks to which it was occasionally set;
independent of princely favour, realistic art found its patrons amongst
the South German nobility and, at a later date, in the circle of the
Munich Art Union, and seems the logical continuation of that military
painting which, at the opening of the century, had its representatives
in Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Munich. The motley swarm of foreign soldiers
which overran the soil of Germany incited Albrecht Adam, Peter Hess,
Johann Adam Klein, and others, to represent what they saw in a fashion
which was sincere and simple if it was also prosy. And when the warlike
times were over it was quite natural that some of the masters who had
learnt their art in camps should turn to the representation of peasant
life, where they were likewise able to find gay, pictorial costumes.
_Wilhelm Kobell_, whose etchings of the life of the Bavarian people are
more valuable than his battle-pieces, was one of the first to make this
transition. In 1820 sturdy _Peter Hess_ painted his "Morning at
Partenkirche," in which he depicted a simple scene of mountain
life--girls at a well in the midst of a sunny landscape--in a homely but
poetic manner. When this breach had been made, Bürkel was able to take
the lead of the Munich painters of rustic subjects.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ HEINRICH BÜRKEL.]
_Heinrich Bürkel's_ portrait reveals a square-built giant, whose
appearance contrasts strangely with that of his celebrated
contemporaries. The academic artists sweep back their long hair and look
upwards with an inspired glance. Bürkel looks down with a keen eye at
the hard, rough, and stony earth. The academic artists had a mantle--the
mantle of Rauch's statues--picturesquely draped about their shoulders;
Bürkel dressed like anybody else. No attribute is added which could
indicate that he was a painter; neither palette, nor brush, nor picture;
beside him on the table there is--a mug of beer. There he sits without
any sort of pose, with his hand resting on his knee--rough, athletic,
and pugnacious--for all the world as if he were quite conscious of his
peculiarities. Even the photographer's demand for "a pleasant smile" had
no effect upon him. This portrait is itself an explanation of Bürkel's
art. His was a healthy, self-reliant nature, without a trace of romance,
sentimentality, affected humour, or sugary optimism. Amongst all his
Munich contemporaries he was the least academic in his whole manner of
feeling and thinking.
Sprung from the people, he became their painter. He was born, 29th May
1802, in Pirmasens, where his father combined a small farm with a
public-house and his mother kept a shop; and he had been first a
tradesman's apprentice, and then assistant clerk in a court of justice,
before he came to Munich in 1822. Here the Academy rejected him as
without talent; but while it shut the door against the pupil, life
revealed itself to the master. He went to the Schleissheimer Gallery,
and sat there copying the pictures of Wouwerman, Ostade, Brouwer, and
Berghem, and developed his powers, by the study of these Netherlandish
masters, with extraordinary rapidity. His first works--battles,
skirmishes, and other martial scenes--are amateurish and diffident
attempts; it is evident that he was without any kind of guidance or
direction. All the more astonishing is the swiftness with which he
acquired firm command of abilities, admirable for that age, and the
defiant spirit of independence with which he went straight from pictures
to nature, though hardly yet in possession of the necessary means of
expression. He painted and drew the whole new world which opened itself
before him: far prospects over the landscape, mossy stones in the
sunlight, numbers of cloud-pictures, peasants' houses with their
surroundings, forest paths, mountain tracks, horses, and figures of
every description. The life of men and animals gave him everywhere some
opportunity for depicting it in characteristic situations. And later,
when he had settled down again in Munich, he did not cease from
wandering in the South German mountains with a fresh mind. Up to old age
he made little summer and winter tours in the Bavarian highlands.
Tegernsee, Rottach, Prien, Berchtesgaden, South Tyrol, and Partenkirche
were visited again and again, on excursions for the week or the day; and
he returned from them all with energetic studies, from which were
developed pictures that were not less energetic.
[Illustration: BÜRKEL. BRIGANDS RETURNING.]
[Illustration: BÜRKEL. A DOWNPOUR IN THE MOUNTAINS.]
For, as every artist is the result of two factors, of which one lies in
himself and the other in his age and surroundings, the performances of
Bürkel are to be judged, not only according to the requirements of the
present day, but according to the conditions under which they were
produced. What is weak in him he shares with his contemporaries; what is
novel is his own most peculiar and incontestable merit. In a period of
false idealism worked up in a museum--false idealism which had aped from
the true the way in which one clears one's throat, as Schiller has it,
but nothing more indicative of genius--in a period of this
accomplishment Bürkel preferred to expose his own insufficiency rather
than adorn himself with other people's feathers; at a time which prided
itself on representing with brush and pigment things for which pen and
ink are the better medium, he looked vividly into life; at a time when
all Germany lost itself aimlessly in distant latitudes, he brought to
everything an honest and objective fidelity which knew no trace of
romantic sentimentalism; and by these fresh and realistic qualities he
has become the father of that art which rose in Munich in a later day.
Positive and exact in style, and far too sincere to pretend to raise
himself to the level of the old masters by superficial imitation, he
was the more industrious in penetrating the spirit of nature and showing
his love for everything down to its minutest feature; weak in the
sentiment for colour, he was great in his feeling for nature. That was
Heinrich Bürkel, and his successors had to supplement what was wanting
in him, but not to wage war against his influence.
[Illustration: BÜRKEL. A SMITHY IN UPPER BAVARIA.]
The peculiarity of all his works, as of those of the early Dutch and
Flemish artists, is the equal weight which he lays on figures and on
landscape. In his eyes the life of man is part of a greater whole;
animals and their scenic surroundings are studied with the same love,
and in his most felicitous pictures these elements are so blended that
no one feature predominates at the expense of another. Seldom does he
paint interiors, almost always preferring to move in free and open
nature. But here his field is extraordinarily wide.
Those works in which he handled Italian subjects form a group by
themselves. Bürkel was in Rome from 1829 to 1832, the very years in
which Leopold Robert celebrated his triumphs there; but curious is the
difference between the works of the Munich and those of the Swiss
painter. In the latter are beautiful postures, poetic ideas, and all
the academical formulas; in the former unvarnished, naturalistic
bluntness of expression. Even in Italy he kept romantic and academic art
at a distance. They had no power over the rough, healthy, and sincere
nature of the artist. He saw nothing in Italy that he had not met with
at home, and he painted things as he saw them, honestly and without
beatification.
To find material Bürkel did not need to go far. Picture to yourself a
man wandering along the banks of the Isar, and gazing about him with a
still and thoughtful look. A healthy peasant lass with a basket, or a
plough moving slowly in the distance behind a sweating yoke of horses,
is quite enough to fill him with feelings and ideas.
His peculiar domain was the high-road, which in the thirties and the
forties, before the railways had usurped its traffic, was filled with a
much more manifold life than it is to-day. Waggons and mail-carts passed
along before the old gateways; in every village there were taverns
inviting the wayfarer to rest, and blacksmiths sought for custom on the
road. There were vehicles of every description, horses at the forge,
posting-stages, change of teams, the departure of marketing folk, and
passengers taking their seats or alighting. Here horses were being
watered, and an occasion was given for brief dialogues between the
coachman and his fares. There travellers surprised by a shower were
hurrying under their umbrellas into an inn; or, in wintry weather, they
were waiting impatiently, wrapped up in furs, whilst a horse was being
shod.
[Illustration: CARL SPITZWEG.]
The beaten tracks through field and forest offered much of the same
sort. Peasants were driving to market with a cart-load of wood. Horses
stood unyoked at a drinking-trough whilst the driver, a muscular fellow
with great sinews, quietly enjoyed his pipe. Along some shadowy woodland
path a team drew near to a forge or a lonely charcoal-burner's hut,
where the light flickered, and over which there soared a bare and snowy
mountain peak.
Such pictures of snow-clad landscape were a specialty of Bürkel's art,
and in their simplicity and harmony are to be ranked with the best that
he has done. Heavily freighted wood-carts passing through a drift,
waggons brought to a standstill in the snow, raw-boned woodmen
perspiring as they load them in a wintry forest, are the accessory
objects and figures.
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
SPITZWEG. AT THE GARRET WINDOW.]
But life in the fields attracted him also. Having a love of representing
animals, he kept out of the way of mowers, reapers, and gleaners. His
favourite theme is the hay, corn, or potato harvest, which he paints
with much detail and a great display of accessory incidents. Maids and
labourers, old and young, are feverishly active in the construction of
hay-cocks, or, in threatening weather, pile up waggons, loaded as high
as a house, with fresh trusses.
In this enumeration all the rustic life of Bavaria has been described.
It is only the Sunday and holiday themes, the peculiar motives of the
_genre_ painter, that are wanting. And in itself this is an indication
of what gives Bürkel his peculiar position.
By their conception his works are out of keeping with everything which
the contemporary generation of "great painters" and the younger _genre_
painters were attempting. The great painters had their home in museums;
Bürkel lived in the world of nature. The _genre_ painters, under the
influence of Wilkie, were fond of giving their motive a touch of
narrative interest, like the English. Cheerful or mournful news, country
funerals, baptisms, and public dinners offered an excuse for
representing the same sentiment in varying keys. Their starting-point
was that of an illustrator; it might be very pretty in itself, but it
was too jovial or whimpering for a picture. Bürkel's works have no
literary background; they are not composed of stories with a humorous or
sentimental tinge, but depict with an intimate grasp of the subject the
simplest events of life. He neither offered the public lollipops, nor
tried to move them and play upon their sensibilities by subjects which
could be spun out into a novel. He approached his men, his animals, and
his landscapes as a strenuous character painter, without gush,
sentimentality, or romanticism. In contradistinction from all the
younger painters of rustic subjects, he sternly avoided what was
striking, peculiar, or in any way extraordinary, endeavouring to paint
everyday life in the house or the farmyard, in the field or upon the
highway, in all plainness and simplicity.
At first, indeed, he thought it necessary to satisfy the demands of the
age by, at any rate, painting in a broad and epical manner. The public
collections chiefly possess pictures of his which contain many figures:
"The Return from the Mountain Pasture," "Coming Back from the Bear
Hunt," "The Cattle Show," and "From the Fair"; scenes before an inn at
festivals, or waggoners setting out, and the like. But in these works
the scheme of composition and the multitude of figures have a somewhat
overladen and old-fashioned effect. On the other hand, there are
pictures scattered about in private collections which are of a
simplicity which was unknown at the time: dusty roads with toiling
horses, lonely charcoal burners' huts in the dimness of the forest,
villages in rain or snow, with little figures shivering from frost or
damp as they flit along the street. From the very beginning, free from
the vices of _genre_ and narrative painting and the search after
interesting subjects, he has, in these pictures, renounced the epical
manner of representing a complicated event. Like the moderns, he paints
things which can be grasped and understood at a glance.
[Illustration: SPITZWEG. A MORNING CONCERT.]
But, after all, Bürkel occupies a position which is curiously
intermediate. His colour relegates him altogether to the beginning of
the century. He was himself conscious of the weakness of his age in this
respect, and stands considerably above the school of Cornelius, even
where its colouring is best. Yet, in spite of the most diligent study of
the Dutch masters, he remained, as a colourist, hard and inartistic to
the end. Having far too much regard for outline, he is not light enough
with what should be lightly touched, nor fugitive enough with what is
fleeting. What the moderns leave to be indistinctly divined he renders
sharp and palpable in his drawing. He trims and rounds off objects which
have a fleeting form, like clouds. But although inept in technique, his
works are more modern in substance than anything that the next
generation produced. They have an intimacy of feeling beyond the reach
of the traditional _genre_ painting. In his unusually fresh, simple, and
direct studies of landscape he did not snatch at dazzling and
sensational effects, but tried to be just to external nature in her
work-a-day mood; and, in the very same way, in his figures he aimed at
the plain reproduction of what is given in nature.
The hands of his peasants are the real hands of toil--weather-stained,
heavy, and awkward. There are no movements that are not simple and
actual. Others have told droller stories; Bürkel unrolls a true picture
of the surroundings of the peasant's life. Others have made their
rustics persons suitable for the drawing-room, and cleaned their nails;
Bürkel preaches the strict, austere, and pious study of nature. An
entirely new age casts its shadow upon this close devotion to life. In
their intimacy and simplicity his pictures contain the germ of what
afterwards became the task of the moderns. All who came after him in
Germany were the sons of Wilkie until Wilhelm Leibl, furnished with a
better technical equipment, started in spirit from the point at which
Bürkel had left off.
_Carl Spitzweg_, in whose charming little pictures tender and discreet
sentiment is united with realistic care for detail, must likewise be
reckoned with the few who strove and laboured in quiet, apart from the
ruling tendency, until their hour came. Thrown entirely on his own
resources, without a teacher, he worked his way upwards under the
influence of the older painters. By dint of copying he discovered their
secrets of colour, and gave his works, which are full of poetry, a
remarkable impress of sympathetic delicacy, suggestive of the old
masters. One turns over the leaves of the album of Spitzweg's sketches
as though it were a story-book from the age of romance, and at the same
time one is astonished at the master's ability in painting. He was a
genius who united in himself three qualities which seem to be
contradictory--realism, fancy, and humour. He might be most readily
compared with Schwind, except that the latter was more of a romanticist
than a realist, and Spitzweg is more of a realist than a romanticist.
The artists' yearning carries Schwind to distant ages and regions far
from the world, and a positive sense of fact holds Spitzweg firmly to
the earth.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
SPITZWEG. THE POSTMAN.]
Like Jean Paul, he has the boundless fancy which revels in airy dreams,
but he is also like Jean Paul in having a cheery, provincial
satisfaction in the sights of his own narrow world. He has all Schwind's
delight in hermits and anchorites, and witches and magic and nixies, and
he plays with dragons and goblins like Boecklin; but, for all that, he
is at home and entirely at his ease in the society of honest little
schoolmasters and poor sempstresses, and gives shape to his own small
joys and sorrows in a spirit of contemplation. His dragons are only
comfortable, Philistine dragons, and his troglodytes, who chastise
themselves in rocky solitudes, perform their penance with a kindly
irony. In Spitzweg a fine humour is the causeway between fancy and
reality. His tender little pictures represent the Germany of the
forties, and lie apart from the rushing life of our time, like an
idyllic hamlet slumbering in Sunday quietude. Indeed, his pictures come
to us like a greeting from a time long past.
There they are: his poor poet, a little, lean old man, with a sharp nose
and a night-cap, sits at his garret window scanning verses on his frozen
fingers, enveloped in a blanket drawn up to his chin, and protected from
the inclemency of the weather by a great red umbrella; his clerk, grown
grey in the dust of parchments, sharpens his quill with dim-sighted
eyes, and feels himself part of a bureaucracy which rules the world; his
book-worm stands on the highest ladder in the library, with books in his
hand, books in his pockets, books under his arms, and books jammed
between his legs, and neglects the dinner-hour in his peaceful
enjoyment, until an angry torrent of scolding is poured over his devoted
head by the housekeeper; there is his old gentleman devoutly sniffing
the perfume of a cactus blossom which has been looked forward to for
years; there is his little man enticing his bird with a lump of sugar;
the widower glancing aside from the miniature of his better half at a
pair of pretty maidens walking in the park; the constable whiling away
the time at the town-gate in catching flies; the old-fashioned bachelor,
solemnly presenting a bouquet to a kitchen-maid who is busied at the
market-well, to the amusement of all the gossips watching him from the
windows; the lovers who in happy oblivion pass down a narrow street by
the stall of a second-hand dealer, where amidst antiquated household
goods a gilded statuette of Venus reposes in a rickety cradle; the
children holding up their pinafores as they beg the stork flying by to
bring them a little brother.
Spitzweg, like Jean Paul, makes an effect which is at once joyous and
tender, _bourgeois_ and idyllic. The postillion gives the signal on his
horn that the moment for starting has arrived; milk-maids look down from
the green mountain summit into the far country; hermits sit before their
cells forgotten by the world; old friends greet each other after years
of separation; Dachau girls in their holiday best pray in woodland
chapels; school children pass singing through a still mountain valley;
maidens chatter of an evening as they fetch water from the moss-grown
well, or the arrival of the postman in his yellow uniform brings to
their windows the entire population of an old country town.
The little man with the miserable figure of a tailor had been an
apothecary until he was thirty years of age, but he had an independent
and distinctive artistic nature which impresses itself on the memory in
a way that is unforgettable. It is only necessary to see his portrait as
he sits at his easel in his dressing-gown with his meagre beard, his
long nose, and the droll look about the corners of his eyes, to feel
attracted by him before one knows his works. Spitzweg reveals in them
his own life: the man and the painter are one in him. There is a pretty
little picture of him as an elderly bachelor, looking out of the window
in the early morning and nodding across the roofs to an old sempstress
who had worked the whole night through without noticing that the day had
broken; that is the world he lived in, and the world which he has
painted. As a kind-hearted, inflexible Benedick, full of droll
eccentricities, he lived in the oldest quarter of Munich in a
fourth-storey attic. His only visitor was his friend Moritz Schwind, who
now and then climbed the staircase to the little room that looked over
the roofs and gables and pinnacles to distant, smoky towers. His studio
was an untidy confusion of prosaic discomfort and poetic cosiness.
[Illustration: KAUFFMANN. WOODCUTTERS RETURNING.]
Here he sat, an ossified hermit, _bourgeois_, and book-worm, as if he
were in a spider's nest, and here at a little window he painted his
delightful pictures. Here he took his homely meal at the rickety little
table where he sat alone in the evening buried in his books. A pair of
heavy silver spectacles with keen glasses sparkled on his thick nose,
and the great head with its ironically twinkling eyes rested upon a huge
cravat attached to a pointed stand-up collar. When disturbed by
strangers he spoke slowly and with embarrassment, though in the society
of Schwind he was brilliant and satirical. Then he became as mobile as
quicksilver, and paced up and down the studio with great strides,
gesticulating and sometimes going through a dramatic performance in
vivid mimicry of those of whom he happened to be talking.
His character has the same mixture of Philistine contentment and genial
comedy which gleams from his works with the freshness of dew. A touch of
the sturdy Philistinism of Eichendorf is in these provincial idylls of
Germany; but at the same time they display an ability which even at the
present day must compel respect. The whole of Romanticism chirps and
twitters in the Spitzweg Album, as from behind the wires of a birdcage.
Everything is here united: the fragrance of the woods and the song of
birds, the pleasures of travelling and the sleepy life of provincial
towns, moonshine and Sunday quiet, vagabonds, roving musicians, and the
guardians of law, learned professors and students singing catches,
burgomasters and town-councillors, long-haired painters and strolling
players, red dressing-gowns, green slippers, night-caps, and pipes with
long stems, serenades and watchmen, rushing streams and the trill of
nightingales, rippling summer breezes and comely lasses, stroking back
their hair of a morning, and looking down from projecting windows to
greet the passers-by. In common with Schwind he shows a remarkable
capacity for placing his figures in their right surroundings. All these
squares, alleys, and corners, in which his provincial pictures are
framed, seem--minutely and faithfully executed as they are--to be
localities predestined for the action, though they are painted freely
from memory. Just as he forgot none of the characteristic figures which
he had seen in his youth, so he held in his memory the whimsical and
marvellous architecture of the country towns of Swabia and Upper Bavaria
which he had visited for his studies, with such a firm grip that it was
always at his command; and he used it as a setting for his figures as a
musician composes an harmonious accompaniment for a melody.
[Illustration: KAUFFMANN. A SANDY ROAD.]
[Illustration: KAUFFMANN. RETURNING FROM THE FIELDS.]
To look at his pictures is like wandering on a bright Sunday morning
through the gardens and crooked, uneven alleys of an old German town. At
the same time one feels that Spitzweg belonged to the present and not
to the period of the ingenuous Philistines. It was only after he had
studied at the university and passed his pharmaceutical examination that
he turned to painting. Nevertheless he succeeded in acquiring a
sensitiveness to colour to which nothing in the period can be compared.
He worked through Burnett's _Treatise on Painting_, visited Italy, and
in 1851 made a tour, for the sake of study, to Paris, London, and
Antwerp, in company with Eduard Schleich. In the gallery of
Pommersfelden he made masterly copies from Berghem, Gonzales Coquez,
Ostade, and Poelenburg, and lived to see the appearance of Piloty. But
much as he profited by the principles of colour which then became
dominant, he is like none of his contemporaries, and stands as far from
Piloty's brown sauce as from the frigid hardness of the old _genre_
painters. He was one of the first in Germany to feel the really sensuous
joy of painting, and to mix soft, luxuriant, melting colours. There are
landscapes of his which, in their charming freshness, border directly on
the school of Fontainebleau. Spitzweg has painted bright green meadows
in which, as in the pictures of Daubigny, the little red figures of
peasant women appear as bright and luminous patches of colour. His
woodland glades penetrated by the sun have a pungent piquancy of colour
such as is only to be found elsewhere in Diaz. And where he diversified
his desolate mountain glens and steeply rising cliffs with the fantastic
lairs of dragons and with eccentric anchorites, he sometimes produced
such bold colour symphonies of sapphire blue, emerald green, and red,
that his pictures seem like anticipations of Boecklin. Spitzweg was a
painter for connoisseurs. His refined cabinet pieces are amongst the
few German productions of their time which it is a delight to possess,
and they have the savour of rare delicacies when one comes across them
in the dismal wilderness of public galleries.
Bürkel's realistic programme was taken up with even greater energy by
_Hermann Kauffmann_, who belonged to the Munich circle from 1827 to
1833, and then painted until his death in 1888 in his native Hamburg.
His province was for the most part that of Bürkel: peasants in the
field, waggoners on the road, woodmen at their labour, and hunters in
the snowy forest. For the first few years after his return home he used
for his pictures the well-remembered motives taken from the South German
mountain district. A tour in Norway, undertaken in 1843, gave him the
impulse for a series of Norwegian landscapes which were simple and
direct, and of more than common freshness. In the deanery at Holstein he
studied the life of fishers. Otherwise the neighbourhood of Hamburg is
almost always the background of his pictures: Harburg, Kellinghusen,
Wandsbeck, and the Alster Valley. Concerning him Lichtwark is right in
insisting upon the correctness of intuition, the innate soundness of
perception which one meets with in all his works.
[Illustration: FRIEDRICH EDUARD MEYERHEIM.]
In Berlin the excellent _Eduard Meyerheim_ went on parallel lines with
these masters. An old tradition gives him the credit of having
introduced the painting of peasants and children into German art. But in
artistic power he is not to be compared with Bürkel or Kauffmann. They
were energetic realists, teeming with health, and in everything they
drew they were merely inspired by the earnest purpose of grasping life
in its characteristic moments. But Meyerheim, good-humoured and
childlike, is decidedly inclined to a sentimentally pathetic compromise
with reality. At the same time his importance for Berlin is
incontestable. Hitherto gipsies, smugglers, and robbers were the only
classes of human society, with the exception of knights, monks, noble
ladies, and Italian women, which, upon the banks of the Spree, were
thought suitable for artistic representation. Friedrich Eduard
Meyerheim sought out the rustic before literature had taken this step,
and in 1836 he began with his "King of the Shooting Match," a series of
modest pictures in which he was never weary of representing in an honest
and sound-hearted way the little festivals of the peasant, the happiness
of parents, and the games of children.
He had grown up in Dantzic, and played as a child in the tortuous lanes
of the old free imperial city, amid trumpery shops, general dealers, and
artisans. Later, when he settled down in Berlin, he painted the things
which had delighted him in his youth. The travels which he made for
study were not extensive: they hardly led him farther beyond the
boundaries of the Mark than Hesse, the Harz district, Thüringen,
Altenburg, and Westphalia. Here he drew with indefatigable diligence the
pleasant village houses and the churches shadowed by trees; the cots,
yards, and alleys; the weather-beaten town ramparts, with their
crumbling walls; the unobtrusive landscapes of North Germany, lovely
valleys, bushy hills, and bleaching fields, traversed by quiet streams
fringed with willows, and enlivened by the figures of peasants, who
still clung to so much of their old costume. His pictures certainly do
not give an idea of the life of the German people at the time. For the
peasantry have sat to Meyerheim only in their most pious mood, in Sunday
toilette, and with their souls washed clean. Clearness, neatness, and
prettiness are to be found everywhere in his pictures. But little as
they correspond to the truth, they are just as little untrue through
affectation, for their idealism sprang from the harmless and cheerful
temperament of the painter, and from no convention of the schools.
[Illustration: MEYERHEIM. CHILDREN AT PLAY.]
A homely, idyllic poetry is to be found in his figures and his
interiors. His women and girls are chaste and gracious. It is evident
that Meyerheim had a warm sympathy for the sorrows and joys of humble
people; that he had an understanding for this happy family life, and
liked himself to take part in these merry popular festivals; that he did
not idealise the world according to rules of beauty, but because in his
own eyes it really was so beautiful. His "King of the Shooting Match"
of 1836 (Berlin National Gallery) has as a background a wide and
pleasant landscape, with blue heights in the distance and the cheerful
summer sunshine resting upon them. In the foreground are a crowd of
figures, neatly composed after studies. The crowned king of the match,
adorned for a festival, stands proudly on the road by which the
procession of marksmen is advancing, accompanied by village music. An
old peasant is congratulating him, and the pretty village girls and
peasant women, in their gay rustic costumes, titter as they look on,
while the neighbours are merrily drinking his health. Then there is the
"Morning Lesson," representing a carpenter's house, where an old man is
hearing his grandson repeat a school task; "Children at Play," a picture
of a game of hide-and-seek amongst the trees; "The Knitting Lesson," and
the picture of a young wife by the bed of a naked boy who has thrown off
the bedclothes and is holding up one of his rosy feet; and "The Road to
Church," where the market-place is shadowed with lime trees and the
fresh young girlish figures adorned in their Sunday best. These are all
pictures which in lithograph and copperplate engraving once flooded all
Germany and enraptured the public at exhibitions.
[Illustration: MEYERHEIM. THE KING OF THE SHOOTING MATCH.]
But the German _genre_ picture of peasant life only became universally
popular after the village novel came into vogue at the end of the
thirties. Walter Scott was not only a Romanticist, but the founder of
the peasant novel: he was the first to study the life and the human
character of the peasantry of his native land, their rough and healthy
merriment, their humorous peculiarities, and their hot-headed love of
quarrelling; and he led the Romanticists from their idyllic or sombre
world of dreams nearer to the reality and its poetry. A generation later
Immermann created this department of literature in Germany by the
Oberhof-Episode of his _Münchhausen_. "The Village Magistrate" was soon
one of those typical figures which in literature became the model of a
hundred others. In 1837 Jeremias Gotthelf began in his _Bauernspiegel_
those descriptions of Bernese rustic life which found general favour
through their downright common sense. Berthold Auerbach, Otto Ludwig,
and Gottfried Keller were then active, and Fritz Reuter lit upon a more
clear-cut form for his tales in dialect.
[Illustration: MEYERHEIM. THE MORNING HOUR.]
The influence which these writers had upon painting was enormous. It now
turned everywhere to the life of the people, and took its joy and
pleasure in devoting itself to reality. And the rustic was soon a
popular figure much sought after in the picture market. Yet this
reliance on poetry and fiction had its disadvantage. For in Germany,
also, a vogue was given to that "_genre_ painting" which, instead of
starting with a simple, straightforward representation of what the
artist had seen, offered an artistically correct composition of what he
had invented, and indulged in a rambling display of humorous narrative
and pathetic pieces.
In Carlsruhe _Johann Kirner_ was the first to work on these lines,
adapting the life of the Swabian peasantry to the purposes of humorous
anecdote. In Munich _Carl Enhuber_ was especially fertile in the
invention of comic episodes amongst the rustics of the Bavarian
highlands, and his ponderous humour made him one of the favourite heroes
of the Art Union. Every one was in raptures over his "Partenkirche
Fair," over the charlatan in front of the village inn, who (like a
figure after Gerhard Dow) is bringing home to the multitude by his
lofty eloquence the fabulous qualities of his soap for removing spots;
over that assembly of peasants which gave the painter an opportunity for
making clearly recognisable people to be found everywhere in any little
town, from the judge of the county court and the local doctor down to
the watchmen. His second hit was "The Interrupted Card Party": the
blacksmith, the miller, the tailor, and other dignitaries of the village
are so painfully disturbed in their social reunion by the unamiable wife
of the tailor that her happy spouse makes his escape under the table.
The house servant holds out his blue apron to protect his master, whilst
the miller and the blacksmith try to look unconcerned; but a small boy
who has accompanied his mother with a mug discovers the concealed sinner
by his slipper, which has come off. The "Session Day" contains a still
greater wealth of comical types: here is the yard of a country assize
court, filled with people, some of them waiting their turn, some issuing
in contentment or dejection. Most contented, of course, are a bridal
pair from the mountains--a stout peasant lad and a buxom maiden--who
have just received official consent to their marriage. Disastrous
country excursions--townspeople overtaken by rain on their arrival in
the mountains--were also a source of highly comical situations.
[Illustration: MEYERHEIM. THE KNITTING LESSON.]
In Düsseldorf the reaction against the prevailing sentimentality
necessarily gave an impulse to art on these humorous lines. When it
seemed as if the mournfulness of the thirties would never be ended,
_Adolf Schroedter_, the satirist of the band of Düsseldorf artists in
those times, broke the spell when he began to parody the works of the
"great painters." When Lessing painted "The Sorrowing Royal Pair,"
Schroedter painted "The Triumphal Procession of King Bacchus"; when
Hermann Stilke produced his knights and crusaders, Schroedter
illustrated _Don Quixote_ as a warning; and when Bendemann gave the
world "The Lamentation of Jeremiah" and "The Lamentation of the Jews,"
Schroedter executed his droll picture "The Sorrowful Tanners," in which
the tanners are mournfully regarding a hide carried away by the stream.
Since he was a humorist, and humour is rather an affair for drawing than
painting, the charming lithographs, "The Deeds and Opinions of Piepmeyer
the Delegate," published in conjunction with Detmold, the Hanoverian
barrister, and author of the _Guide to Connoisseurship_, are perhaps to
be reckoned as his best performances. _Hasenclever_ followed the
dilettante Schroedter as a delineator of the "stolid Peter" type, and
painted the "Study" and similar pictures for Kortum's _Jobsiade_ with
great technical skill, and, at the same time, with little humour and
much complacency. By the roundabout route of illustration artists were
gradually brought more directly into touch with life, and painted side
by side with melodramatic brigands, rustic folk, or a student at a
tavern on the Rhine, absurd people reading the newspapers, comic men
sneezing, or the smirking Philistine tasting wine.
[Illustration: KIRNER. THE FORTUNE TELLER.]
[Illustration: ENHUBER. THE PENSIONER AND HIS GRANDSON.]
[Illustration: JACOB BECKER. A TEMPEST.]
_Jacob Becker_ went to the Westerwald to sketch little village
tragedies, and won such popularity with his "Shepherd Struck by
Lightning" that for a long time the interest of the public was often
concentrated on this picture in the collection of the Staedel Institute.
_Rudolf Jordan_ of Berlin settled on Heligoland, and became by his
"Proposal of Marriage in Heligoland" one of the most esteemed painters
of Düsseldorf. And in 1852 _Henry Ritter_, his pupil, who died young,
enjoyed a like success with his "Middy's Sermon," which represents a
tiny midshipman with comical zeal endeavouring to convert to temperance
three tars who are staggering against him. A Norwegian, _Adolf
Tidemand_, became the Leopold Robert of the North, and, like Robert,
attained an international success when, after 1845, he began to present
his compatriots, the peasants, fishers, and sailors of the shores of the
North Sea, to the public of Europe. There was no doubt that a true
ethnographical course of instruction in the life of a distant race, as
yet unknown to the rest of Europe, was to be gathered from his pictures,
as from those of Robert, or from the Oriental representations of Vernet.
In Tidemand's pictures the Germans learnt the Norwegian usage of
Christmas, accompanied the son of the North on his fishing of a night,
joined the bridal party on the Hardanger Fjord, or listened to the
sexton giving religious instruction; sailed with fishing girls in a
skiff to visit the neighbouring village, or beheld grandmother and the
children dance on Sunday afternoon to father's fiddle. Norwegian peasant
life was such an unknown world of romance, and the costume so novel,
that Tidemand's art was greeted as a new discovery. That the truth of
his pictures went no further than costume was only known at a later
time. Tidemand saw his native land with the eyes of a Romanticist, as
Robert saw Italy, and, in the same one-sided way, he only visited the
people on festive occasions. Though a born Norwegian, he, too, was a
foreigner, a man who was never familiar with the life of his country
people, who never lived at home through the raw autumn and the long
winter, but came only as a summer visitor, when nature had donned her
bridal garb, and naturally took away with him the mere impressions of a
tourist. As he only went to Norway for recreation, it is always
holiday-tide and Sabbath peace in his pictures. He represents the same
idyllic optimism and the same kindly view of "the people" as did
Björnson in his earliest works; and it is significant that the latter
felt himself at the time so entirely in sympathy with Tidemand that he
wrote one of his tales, _The Bridal March_, as text to Tidemand's
picture "Adorning the Bride."
To seek the intimate poetry in the monotonous life of the peasant, and
to go with him into the struggle for existence, was what did not lie in
Tidemand's method of presentation; he did not live amongst the people
sufficiently long to penetrate to their depths. The sketches that
resulted from his summer journeys often reveal a keen eye for the
picturesque, as well as for the spiritual life of this peasantry; but
later in Düsseldorf, when he composed his studies for pictures with the
help of German models, all the sharp characterisation was watered down.
What ought to have been said in Norwegian was expressed in a German
translation, where the emphasis was lost. His art is Düsseldorf art with
Norwegian landscapes and costumes; a course of lectures on the manners
and customs of Norwegian villages composed for Germans. The only thing
which distinguishes Tidemand to his advantage from the German
Düsseldorfers is that he is less humorously and sentimentally disposed.
Pictures of his, such as "The Lonely Old People," "The Catechism," "The
Wounded Bear Hunter," "The Grandfather's Blessing," "The Sectarians,"
etc., create a really pleasant and healthy effect by a certain actual
simplicity which they undoubtedly have. Other men would have made a
melodrama out of "The Emigrant's Departure" (National Gallery in
Christiania). Tidemand portrays the event without any sort of emphasis,
and feels his way with tact on the boundary between sentiment and
sentimentality. There is nothing false or hysterical in the behaviour of
the man who is going away for life, nor in those who have come to see
him off.
In Vienna the _genre_ painters seem to owe their inspiration especially
to the theatre. What was produced there in the province of grand art
during the first half of the century was neither better nor worse than
elsewhere. The Classicism of Mengs and David was represented by
_Heinrich Füger_, who had a more decided leaning towards the operatic.
The representative-in-chief of Nazarenism was _Josef Führich_, whose
frescoes in the Altlerchenfeld Church are, perhaps, better in point of
colour than the corresponding efforts of the Munich artists, though they
are likewise in a formal way derivative from the Italians. Vienna had
its Wilhelm Kaulbach in _Carl Rahl_, its Piloty in _Christian Ruben_,
who, like the Munich artist, had a preference for painting Columbus, and
was meritorious as a teacher. It was only through portrait painting
that Classicism and Romanticism were brought into some sort of relation
with life; and the Vienna portraitists of this older régime are even
better than their German contemporaries, as they made fewer concessions
to the ruling idealism. Amongst the portrait painters was _Lampi_, after
whom followed _Moritz Daffinger_ with his delicate miniatures; but the
most important of them all was _Friedrich Amerling_, who had studied
under Lawrence in London and under Horace Vernet in Paris, and brought
back with him great acquisitions in the science of colour. In the first
half of the century these assured him a decided advantage over his
German colleagues. It was only later, when he was sought after as the
fashionable painter of all the crowned heads, that his art degenerated
into mawkishness.
[Illustration: TIDEMAND. THE SECTARIANS.]
_Genre_ painting was developed here as elsewhere from the military
picture. As early as 1813 _Peter Krafft_, an academician of the school
of David, had exhibited a great oil-painting, "The Soldier's
Farewell"--the interior of a village room with a group of life-size
figures. The son of the family, in grey uniform, with a musket in his
hand, is tearing himself from his young wife, who has a baby on her arm
and is trying in tears to hold him back. His old father sits in a corner
with folded hands beside his mother, who is also crying, and has hid her
face. In 1820 Krafft added "The Soldier's Return" as a pendant to this
picture. It represents the changes which have taken place in the family
during the warrior's absence: his old mother is at rest in her grave;
his grey-headed father has become visibly older, his little sister has
grown up, and the baby in arms is carrying the musket after his father.
They are both exceedingly tiresome pictures; the colour is cold and
grey, the figures are pseudo-classical in modern costume, and the pathos
of the subject seems artificial and forced. Nevertheless a new principle
of art is declared in them. Krafft was the first in Austria to recognise
what a rich province had been hitherto ignored by painting. He warned
his pupils against the themes of the Romanticists. These, as he said,
were worked out, since no one would do anything better than the "Last
Supper of Leonardo da Vinci or the Madonnas of Raphael." And he warmly
advocated the conviction "that nothing could be done for historical
painting so long as it refused to choose subjects from modern life."
Krafft was an admirable teacher with a sober and clear understanding,
and he invariably directed his pupils to the immediate study of life and
nature. The consequence of his career was that _Carl Schindler_,
_Friedrich Treml_, _Fritz L'Allemand_, and others set themselves to
treat in episodic pictures the military life of Austria, from the
recruiting stage to the battle, and from the soldier's farewell to his
return to his father's house. A further result was that the Viennese
_genre_ painting parted company with the academical and historic art.
Just at this time Tschischka and Schottky began to collect the popular
songs of the Viennese. Castelli gave a poetic representation of
_bourgeois_ life, and Ferdinand Raimund brought it upon the stage in his
dramas. Bauernfeld's types from the life of the people enjoyed a rapid
popularity. Josef Danhauser, Peter Fendi, and Ferdinand Waldmüller went
on parallel lines with these authors. In their _genre_ pictures they
represented the Austrian people in their joys and sorrows, in their
merriment and heartiness and good-humour; the people, be it understood,
of Raimund's popular farces, not those of the pavement of Vienna.
_Josef Danhauser_, the son of a Viennese carpenter, occupied himself
with the artisan and _bourgeois_ classes. David Wilkie gave him the form
for his work and Ferdinand Raimund his ideas. His studio scenes, with
boisterous art students caught by their surly teacher at the moment when
they are playing their worst pranks, gave pleasure to the class of
people who, at a later date, took so much delight in Emanuel Spitzer.
His "Gormandizer" is a counterpart to Raimund's _Verschwender_; and
when, in a companion picture, the gluttonous liver is supping up the
"monastery broth" amongst beggars, and his former valet remains true to
him even in misfortune, Grillparzer's _Treuer Diener seines Herrn_
serves as a model for this type. Girls confessing their frailty to their
parents had been previously painted by Greuze. Amongst those of his
pictures which had done most to amuse the public was the representation
of the havoc caused by a butcher's dog storming into a studio. In his
last period he turned with Collins to the nursery, or wandered through
the suburbs with a sketch-book, immortalising the doings of children in
the streets, and drawing "character heads" of the school-teacher tavern
_habitués_ and the lottery adventurer.
[Illustration: TIDEMAND. ADORNING THE BRIDE.]
And this was likewise the province to which _Waldmüller_ devoted
himself. Chubby peasant children are the heroes of almost all his
pictures. A baby is sprawling with joy on its mother's lap, while it is
contemplated with proud satisfaction by its father, or it is sleeping
under the guardianship of a little sister; a boy is despatched upon the
rough path which leads to school, and brings the reward of his conduct
home with rapturous or dejected mien, or he stammers "Many happy returns
of the day" to grandpapa. Waldmüller paints "The First Step," the joys
of "Christmas Presents," and "The Distribution of Prizes to Poor School
Children"; he follows eager juveniles to the peep-show; he is to be met
at "The Departure of the Bride" and at "The Wedding"; he is our guide to
the simple "Peasant's Room," and shows the benefit of "Almsgiving."
Though his pictures may seem old-fashioned in subject nowadays, their
artistic qualities convey an entirely modern impression. Born in 1793,
he anticipated the best artists of later days in his choice of material.
Both in his portraits and in his country scenes there is a freshness
and transparency of tone which was something rare among the painters of
that time.
[Illustration: PETER KRAFFT. THE SOLDIER'S RETURN.]
_Friedrich Gauermann_ wandered in the Austrian Alps, in Steiermark, and
Salzkammergut, making studies of nature, the inhabitants, and the animal
world. In contradistinction from Waldmüller, painter of idylls, and the
humorist Danhauser, he aimed above all at ethnographical exactness. With
sincere and unadorned observation Gauermann represents the local
peculiarities of the peasantry, differentiated according to their
peculiar valleys; life on the pasture and at the market, when some
ceremonial occasion--a shooting match, a Sunday observance, or a church
consecration--has gathered together the scattered inhabitants.
_Genre_ painting in other countries worked with the same types. The
costume was different, but the substance of the pictures was the same.
In Belgium Leys had already worked in the direction of painting everyday
life; for although he had painted figures from the sixteenth century,
they were not idealised, but as rough and homely as in reality. When the
passion for truthfulness increased, as it did in the following years,
there came a moment when the old German tradition, under the shelter of
which Leys yet took refuge, was shaken off, and artists went directly to
nature without seeking the mediation of antiquated style. At that time
Belgium was one of the most rising and thriving countries in Europe. It
had private collections by the hundred. Wealthy merchants rivalled one
another in the pride of owning works by their celebrated painters. This
necessarily exerted an influence on production. Pretty _genre_ pictures
of peasant life soon became the most popular wares; as for their
artistic sanction, it was possible to point to Brouwer and Teniers, the
great national exemplars.
At first, then, the painters worked with the same elements as Teniers.
The common themes of their pictures were the ale-house with its thatched
roof, the old musician with his violin, the mountebank standing in the
midst of a circle of people, lovers, or drinkers brawling. Only the
costume was changed, and everything coarse, indecorous, or unrestrained
was scrupulously excluded _ad usum Delphini_. That the deep colouring of
the old masters became meagre and motley was in Belgium also an
inevitable result of the helplessness in regard to colour which had been
brought on by Classicism. The pictorial _furia_ of Adriaen Brouwer gave
way to a polished porcelain painting which hardly bore a trace of the
work of the hand. Harsh and gaudy reds and greens were especially
popular.
[Illustration: WALDMÜLLER. THE FIRST STEP.]
The first who began a modest career on these lines was _Ignatius van
Regemorter_. As one recognises the pictures of Wouwerman by the
dappled-grey horse, Regemorter's may be recognised by the violin. Every
year he turned out one picture at least in which music was being played,
and people were dancing with a rather forced gaiety. Then came
_Ferdinand de Braekeleer_, who painted the jubilees of old people, or
children and old women amusing themselves at public festivities. Teniers
was his principal model, but his large joviality was transformed into a
chastened merriment, and his broad laughter into a discreet smile.
Braekeleer's peasantry and proletariat are of an idyllic mildness;
honest, pious souls who, with all their poverty, are as moral as they
are happy. _Henri Coene_ elaborated such themes as "Oh, what beautiful
Grapes!" or "A Pinch of Snuff for the Parson!"
[Illustration: MADOU. IN THE ALE-HOUSE.]
Madou's merit lies in having extended Belgian _genre_ painting somewhat
beyond these narrow bounds; he introduced a greater variety of types
verging more on reality than that everlasting honest man painted by
Ferdinand de Braekeleer. _Madou_ was a native of Brussels. There he was
born in 1796, and he died there in 1877. When he began his career
Wappers had just made his appearance. Madou witnessed his successes, but
did not feel tempted to follow him. Whilst the latter in his large
pictures in the grand style aimed at being Rubens _redivivus_, Madou
embodied his ideas in fleeting pencil sketches. A great number of
lithographs of scenes from the past bore witness to his conception of
history. There was nothing in them that was dignified, nothing that was
stilted, no idealism and no beauty; in their tabards and helmets the
figures moved with the natural gestures of ordinary human beings. By the
side of great seigneurs, princes, and knights, and amid helmets and
hose, drunken scoundrels, tavern politicians, and village cretins
started into view, and grimaced and danced and scuffled. In Belgium his
plates occupy a position similar to that of the first lithographs of
Menzel in Germany. But Madou lingered for a still briefer period in the
Pantheon of history; the tavern had for him a yet greater attraction.
The humorous books which he published in Paris and Brussels first showed
him in his true light. Having busied himself for several years
exclusively with drawings, he made his _début_ in 1842 as a painter. It
is difficult to decide how much Madou produced after that date. The long
period between 1842 and 1877 yields a crowded chronicle of his works.
Even in the seventies he was just as vigorous as at the beginning, and
though he was regarded as a jester during his lifetime he was honoured
as a great painter after his death. At the auction of his unsold works,
pictures fetched 22,000 francs, sketches reached 3200, water-colours
2150, and drawings 750. The present generation has reduced this
over-estimation to its right measure, but it has not shaken Madou's
historical importance. He has a firm position as the man who conquered
modern life in the interests of Belgian art, and he is the more
significant for the _genre_ painting of his age, as he eclipsed all his
contemporaries, even in Germany and England, in the inexhaustible fund
of his invention.
[Illustration: MADOU. THE DRUNKARD.]
A merry world is reflected in his pictures. One of his most popular
figures is the ranger, a sly old fox with a furrowed, rubicund visage
and huge ears, who roves about more to the terror of love-making couples
than of poachers, and never aims at any one except for fun at the rural
justice, a portly gentleman in a gaudy waistcoat, emerging quietly at
the far end of the road. He introduces a varied succession of braggarts,
poor fellows, down-at-heel and out-at-elbows, old grenadiers joking with
servant girls, old marquesses taking snuff with affected dignity,
charlatans at their booth, deaf and dumb flute-players, performing dogs,
and boys sick over their first pipe. Here and there are fatuous or
over-wise politicians solemnly opening a newly printed paper, with their
legs astraddle and their spectacles resting on their noses. Rascals with
huge paunches and blue noses fall asleep on their table in the
ale-house, and enliven the rest of the company by their snoring. At
times the door is opened and a scolding woman appears with a broom in
her hand. On these occasions the countenance of the toper is a comical
sight. At the sound of the beloved voice he endeavours to raise
himself, and anxiously follows the movements of his better half as he
clings reeling to the table, or plants himself more firmly in his chair
with a resigned and courageous "_J'y suis, j'y reste_."
Being less disposed to appear humorous, _Adolf Dillens_ makes a more
sympathetic impression. He, too, had begun with forced anecdotes, but
after a tour to Zealand opened his eyes to nature; he laid burlesque on
one side, and depicted what he had seen in unhackneyed pictures: sound
and healthy men of patriarchal habits. Even his method of painting
became simpler and more natural; his colouring, hitherto borrowed from
the old masters, became fresher and brighter. He emancipated himself
from Rembrandt's _chiaroscuro_, and began to look at nature without
spectacles. There is something poetic in his method of observation: he
really loved these good people and painted them in the unadorned
simplicity of their life--cheery old age that knows no wrinkles and
laughing youth that knows no sorrows. He is indeed one-sided, for a good
fairy has banished all trouble from his happy world; but his pictures
are the product of a fresh and amiable temperament. His usual themes are
a friendly gathering at the ale-house, a conversation beneath the porch,
skating, scenes in cobblers' workshops, a gust of wind blowing an
umbrella inside out; and if he embellishes them with little episodic
details, this tendency is so innocent that nobody can quarrel with him.
In France it was _François Biard_, the Paul de Kock of French painting,
who attained most success in the thirties by humorous anecdote. He
devoted his whole life to the comical representation of the minor
trespasses and misfortunes of the commonplace _bourgeoisie_. He had the
secret of displaying his comicalities with great aptitude, and of
mocking at the ridiculous eccentricities of the Philistine in an obvious
and downright fashion. Strolling players made fools of themselves at
their toilette; lads were bathing whilst a gendarme carried off their
clothes; a sentry saluted a decorated veteran, whose wife gratefully
acknowledged the attention with a curtsey; the village grandee held a
review of volunteers with the most pompous gravity; a child was
exhibited at the piano to the admiration of its yawning relatives. One
of his chief pictures was called "Posada Espagnol." The hero was a monk
winking at a beauty of forty who was passing by while he was being
shaved. Women were sitting and standing about, when a herd of swine
dashing in threw everything over and put the ladies to flight, and so
called forth one of those comic effects of terror in which Paul de Kock
took such delight.
Biard was inexhaustible in these expedients for provoking laughter; and
as he had travelled far he had always in reserve a slave-market, a
primeval forest, or an ice-field to appease the curiosity of his
admirers when there was nothing more to laugh at. From the German
standpoint he had importance as an artist whose flow of ideas would have
furnished ten _genre_ painters; and if he is the only representative of
the humorously anecdotic picture in France, the reason is that there
earlier than elsewhere art was led into a more earnest course by the
tumult of ideas on social politics.