THE VILLAGE TALE
During the decade following the year 1848 _genre_ painting in Germany
threw off the shackles of the anecdotic style, and continued a
development similar to that of history, which, in the same country,
flourished long after it was moribund elsewhere. After the elder
artists, who showed so much zeal in producing perfectly ineffective
little pictures, executed with incredible pains and a desperate veracity
of detail, there followed, from 1850, a generation who were technically
better equipped. They no longer confined themselves to making tentative
efforts in the manner of the old masters, but either borrowed their
lights directly from the historical painters in Paris, or were
indirectly made familiar with the results of French technique through
Piloty. Subjects of greater refinement were united with a treatment of
colour which was less offensive.
The childlike innocence which had given pleasure in Meyerheim and
Waldmüller was now thought to be too childlike by far. The merriment
which radiated from the pictures of Schroedter or Enhuber found no echo
amidst a generation which was tired of such cheap humour: the works of
Carl Hübner were put aside as lachrymose and sentimental efforts. When
the world had issued from the period of Romanticism there was no
temptation to be funny over modern life nor to make socialistic
propaganda; for after the Revolution of 1848 people had become
reconciled to the changed order of affairs and to life as it actually
was--its cares and its worries, its mistakes and its sins. It was the
time when Berthold Auerbach's village tales ran through so many
editions; and, hand in hand with these literary productions, painting
also set itself to tell little stories from the life of sundry classes
of the people, amongst which rustics were always the most preferable
from their picturesqueness of costume.
At the head of this group of artists stands _Louis Knaus_, and if it is
difficult to hymn his praises at the present day, that is chiefly
because Knaus mostly drew upon that sarcastic and ironical
characteristic which is such an unpleasant moral note in the pictures of
Hogarth, Schroedter, and Madou. The figures of the old Dutch masters
behave as if the glance of no stranger were resting upon them: it is
possible to share their joys and sorrows, which are not merely acted. We
feel at our ease with them because they regard us as one of themselves.
In Knaus there is always an artificial bond between the figures and the
frequenters of the exhibition. They plunge into the greatest
extravagances to excite attention, tickle the spectator to make him
laugh, or cry out to move him to tears. With the exception of Wilkie, no
_genre_ painter has explained his purpose more obtrusively or in greater
detail. Even when he paints a portrait, by way of variation, he stands
behind with a pointer to explain it. On this account the portraits of
Mommsen and Helmholtz in the Berlin National Gallery are made too
official. Each of them is visibly conscious that he is being painted for
the National Gallery, and by emphasis and the accumulation of external
characteristics Knaus took the greatest pains to lift these
personalities into types of the nineteenth-century scholar.
[Illustration: L. Knaus.]
Since popular opinion is wont to represent the philologist as one
careless of outward appearance, and the investigator of natural
philosophy as an elegant man of the world,--Mommsen must wear boots
which have seen much service, and those of Helmholtz must be of polished
leather; the shirt of the one must be genially rumpled, and that of the
other must fit him to perfection. By such obvious characterisation the
Sunday public was satisfied, but those who were represented were really
deprived of character. It is not to be supposed that in Mommsen's room
the manuscripts of all his principal works would lie so openly upon the
writing-table and beneath it, so that every one might see them: it is
not probable that his famous white locks would flutter so as he sat at
the writing-table. Even the momentary gesture of the hand has in both
pictures something obtrusively demonstrative. "Behold, with this pen I
have written the history of Rome," says Mommsen. "Behold, there is the
famous ophthalmometer which I invented," says Helmholtz.
But as a _genre_ painter Knaus has fallen still more often into such
intolerable stage gesticulation. The picture "His Highness upon his
Travels" is usually mentioned as that in which he reached his zenith in
characterisation. Yet is not this characterisation in the highest degree
exaggerated? Is not the expression apportioned to every figure, like
parts to a theatrical company, and does not the result seem to be
strained beyond all measure? Just look at the children, see how each
plays a part to catch your eye. A little girl is leaning shyly on her
elder sister, who has bashfully thrust her finger into her mouth: some
are looking on with rustic simplicity, others with attention: a child
smaller than the others is puckering up its face and crying miserably.
The prince, in whose honour the children are drawn up, passes the group
with complete indifference, while his companion regards "the people"
haughtily through his eyeglass. The schoolmaster bows low, in the hope
that his salary may be raised, whilst the stupid churchwarden looks
towards the prince with a jovial smile, as though he were awaiting his
colleague from the neighbouring village. Of course, they are all very
intelligible types; but they are no more than types. For the painter the
mere accident of the moment is the source of all life. Would that
six-year-old peasant child who stands with the greatest dignity in
Knaus's picture as "The Village Prince" have ever stood in that fashion,
with a flower between his teeth and his legs thrust apart, unless he had
been carefully taught this self-conscious pose by the painter himself?
So that there may not be the slightest doubt as to which of the
shoemaker's apprentices is winning and which is losing, one of them has
to have a knowing smirk, whilst the other is looking helplessly at his
cards. And how that little Maccabee is acting to the public in "The
First Profit!" The old man in threadbare clothes, who stands in an
ante-chamber rubbing his hands in the picture "I can Wait"; the
frightened little girl who sees her bit of bread-and-butter imperilled
by geese in "In Great Distress,"--they have all the same deliberate
comicality, they are all treated with the same palpable carefulness, the
same pointed and impertinently satirical sharpness. Even in "The
Funeral" he is not deserted by the humorous proclivity of the
anecdotist, and the schoolmaster has to brandish the bâton with which he
is conducting the choir of boys and girls as comically as possible.
Knaus uses too many italics, and underlines as if he expected his public
to be very dull of understanding. In this way he appeals to
simple-minded people, and irritates those of more delicate taste. The
peasant sits in his pictures like a model; he knows that he must keep
quiet, and neither alter his pose nor his grimace, because otherwise
Knaus will be angry. All his pictures show signs of the superior and
celebrated city gentleman, who has only gone into the country to
interest himself in the study of civilisation: there he hunts after
effectively comical features, and, having arranged his little world in
_tableaux vivants_, he coolly surrenders it to the derision of the
cultivated spectator.
[Illustration: KNAUS. IN GREAT DISTRESS.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
[Illustration: KNAUS. THE CARD PLAYERS.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
But such a judgment, which seems like a condemnation, could not be
maintained from the historical standpoint. Germany could not forget
Knaus, if it were only for the fact that in the fifties he sided with
those who first spread the unusual opinion that painting was
incomprehensible without sound ability in the matter of colour. He was
not content, like the elder generation, to arrange the individual
characters in his pictures in well-disposed groups. He took care to make
his works faultless in colouring, so that in the fifties he not only
roused the enthusiasm of the great public by his "poetic invention," but
made even the Parisian painters enthusiastic by his easy mastery of
technique.
To the following effect wrote Edmond About in 1855: "I do not know
whether Herr Knaus has long nails; but even if they were as long as
those of Mephistopheles, I should still say that he was an artist to his
fingers' ends. His pictures please the Sunday public and the Friday
public, the critics, the _bourgeois_, and (God forgive me!) the
painters. What is seductive to the great multitude is the clearly
expressed dramatic idea, while artists and connoisseurs are won by his
knowledge and thorough ability. Herr Knaus has the capacity of
satisfying every one. His pictures attract the most incompetent eyes,
because they tell pleasant anecdotes; but they likewise fascinate the
most jaded by perfect execution of detail. The whole talent of Germany
is contained in the person of Herr Knaus. So Germany lives in the Rue de
l'Arcade in Paris."
In the fifties all the technical ability which was to be gained from the
study of the old Dutch masters and from constant commerce with the
modern French reached its highest point in Knaus. Even in his youth the
great Netherlandish painters, Ostade, Brouwer, and Teniers, must have
had more effect upon him than his teachers, Sohn and Schadow, since his
very first pictures, "The Peasants' Dance" of 1850 and "The Card
Sharpers" of 1850, had little in common with the Düsseldorf school, and
therefore so much the more with the Netherlandish _chiaroscuro_. "The
Card Sharpers" is precisely like an Ostade modernised. By his migration
to Paris in 1852 he sought to acquire the utmost perfection of finish;
and when he returned home, after a sojourn of eight years, he had at his
command such a sense for effect and fine harmony of tone, such a
knowledge of colour, and such a disciplined and refined taste, that his
works indicate an immeasurable advance on the motley harshness of his
predecessors. His "Golden Wedding" of 1858--perhaps his finest
picture--had nothing of the antiquated technique of the older type of
Düsseldorf pictures of peasant life; technically it stood on a level
with the works of the French.
[Illustration: KNAUS. THE GOLDEN WEDDING.
(_By permission of Messrs. Goupil & Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
And Knaus has remained the same ever since: a separate personality which
belongs to history. He painted peasant pictures of tragic import and
rustic gaiety; he recognised a number of graceful traits in child-life,
and, having seen a great deal of the world, he made a transition, after
he had settled in Berlin, from the character picture of the Black Forest
to such as may be painted from the life of cities. He even ventured to
touch on religious subjects, and taught the world the limitations of his
talent by his "Holy Families," composed out of reminiscences of all
times and all schools, and by his "Daniel in the Lions' Den." Knaus is
whole-heartedly a _genre_ painter; though that, indeed, is what he has
in common with many other people. But thirty years ago he had a genius
for colour amid a crowd of narrative and character painters, and this
makes him unique. He is a man whose significance does not merely lie in
his talent for narrative, but one who did much for German art. It may be
said that in giving the _genre_ picture unsuspected subtleties of colour
he helped German art to pass from mere _genre_ painting to painting pure
and simple. In this sense he filled an artistic mission, and won for
himself in the history of modern painting a firm and sure place, which
even the opponent of the illustrative vignette cannot take from him.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
KNAUS. BEHIND THE SCENES.]
_Vautier_, who must always be named in the same breath with Knaus, is in
truth the exact opposite of the Berlin master. He also is essentially a
_genre_ painter, and his pictures should not be merely seen but studied
in detail; but where Knaus has merits Vautier is defective, and where
Knaus is jarring Vautier has merits. In technique he cannot boast of
similar qualities. He is always merely a draughtsman who tints, but has
never been a colourist. As a painter he has less value, but as a _genre_
painter he is more sympathetic. In the pictures of Knaus one is annoyed
by the deliberate smirk, by his exaggerated and heartlessly frigid
observation. Vautier gives pleasure by characterisation, more delicately
reserved in its adjustment of means, and profound as it is simple, by
his wealth of individual motives and their charm, and by the
sensitiveness with which he renders the feelings and relationship of his
figures. A naïve, good-humoured, and amiable temperament is betrayed in
his works. He is genially idyllic where Knaus creates a pungently
satirical effect, and a glance at the portraits of the two men explains
this difference.
[Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._
BENJAMIN VAUTIER.]
Knaus with his puckered forehead, and his searching look shooting from
under heavy brows, is like a judge or a public prosecutor. Vautier, with
his thoughtful blue eyes, resembles a prosperous banker with a turn for
idealism, or a writer of village tales _à la_ Berthold Auerbach. Knaus
worried himself over many things, brooded much and made many
experiments; Vautier was content with the acquisition of a plain and
simple method of painting, which appeared to him a perfectly sufficient
medium for the expression of that which he had realised with profound
emotion. The one is a reflective and the other a dreamy nature. Vautier
was a man of a happy temperament, one with whom the world went well from
his youth upwards, who enjoyed an existence free from care, and who had
accustomed himself as a painter to see the world in a rosy light. There
is something sound and pure in his characters, in his pictures something
peaceful and cordial; it does not, indeed, make his paltry pedantic
style of painting any the better, but from the human standpoint it
touches one sympathetically. His countrymen may be ashamed of Vautier as
a painter when they come across him amongst aliens in foreign
exhibitions, but they rejoice in him none the less as a _genre_ painter.
It is as if they had been met by the quiet, faithful gaze of a German
eye amid the fiery glances of the Latin nations. It is as if they
suddenly heard a simple German song, rendered without training, and yet
with a great deal of feeling. A generation ago Knaus could exhibit
everywhere as a painter; as such Vautier was only possible in Germany
during the sixties. But in Knaus it is impossible to get rid of the
impress of the Berlin professor, while from Vautier's pictures there
smiles the kindly sentiment of German home-life. Vautier's world, no
doubt, is as one-sided as that of old Meyerheim. His talkative Paul
Prys, his brides with their modest shyness, his smart young fellows
throwing amorous glances, his proud fathers, and his sorrow-stricken
mothers are, it may be, types rather than beings breathing positive and
individual life. Such a golden radiance of grace surrounds the pretty
figures of his bare-footed rustic maidens as never pertained to those of
the real world, but belongs rather to the shepherdess of a fairy tale
who marries the prince. His figures must not be measured by the standard
of realistic truth to nature. But they are the inhabitants of a dear,
familiar world in which everything breathes of prettiness and lovable
good-humour. It is almost touching to see with what purity and beauty
life is reflected in Vautier's mind.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
VAUTIER. THE CONJURER.]
How dainty are these brown-eyed Swabian peasant girls, how tender and
sympathetic the women, and how clean and well-behaved the children! You
could believe that Vautier mixed with his peasants like a friend or a
benevolent god-father, that he delighted in their harmless pleasures,
that he took part in their griefs and cares. In his pictures he does not
give an account of his impressions with severity or any deliberate
attempt to amuse, but with indulgence and cordiality. It is not his
design to excite or to thrill, to waken comedy through whimsicalities or
mournfulness by anything tragical. Life reveals to him "merely pleasant
things," as it did to Goethe during his tour in Italy, and even in its
tragedies only people "who bear the inevitable with dignity." He never
expressed boisterous grief: everything is subdued, and has that
tenderness which is associated with the mere sound of his Christian
name, Benjamin. Knaus has something of Menzel, Vautier of Memlinc: he
has it even in the loving familiarity with which he penetrates minute
detail. In their religious pictures the old German and Netherlandish
masters painted everything, down to the lilies worked on the Virgin's
loom, or the dust lying on the old service-book; and this thoroughly
German delight in still life, this complacent rendering of minutiæ, is
found again in Vautier.
Men and their dwellings, animated nature and atmosphere, combine to make
a pleasant world in his pictures. Vautier was one of the first to
discover the magic of environment, the secret influence which unites a
man to the soil from which he sprang, the thousand unknown, magnetic
associations existing between outward things and the spirit, between the
intuitions and the actions of man. The environment is not there like a
stage scene in front of which the personages come and go; it lives and
moves in the man himself. One feels at home in these snug and cosy
rooms, where the Black Forest clock is ticking, where little, tasteless
photographs look down from the wall with an honest, patriarchal air,
where the floor is scoured so clean, and greasy green hats hang on
splendid antlers. There is the great family bed with the flowered
curtains, the massive immovable bench by the stove, the solid old table,
around which young and old assemble at meal-times. There are the great
cupboards for the treasures of the house, the prayer-book given to
grandmother at her confirmation, the filigree ornaments, the glasses and
coffee-cups, which are kept for show, not for daily use. Over the
bedstead are hung the little pictures of saints painted on glass, and
the consecrated tokens. From the window one overlooks other
appurtenances of the house; gaudy scarlet runners clamber in from the
little garden, blossoming fruit-trees stand in its midst, and the gable
of the well-filled barn rises above it. Everything has an air of peace
and prosperity, the mood of a Sunday forenoon; one almost fancies that
one can catch the chime of the distant church bells through the blissful
stillness. But completeness of effect and pictorial harmony are not to
be demanded: the illustrated paper is better suited to his style than
the exhibition.
[Illustration: VAUTIER. THE DANCING LESSON.
(_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
copyright._)]
The third member of the alliance is _Franz Defregger_, a man of splendid
talent; of all the masters of the great Munich school of Piloty, he is
at once the simplest and the healthiest. True it is, no doubt, that when
posterity sifts and weighs his works, much of him, also, will be found
too light. Defregger's art has suffered from his fame and from the
temptations of the picture market. Moreover, he had not Vautier's fine
sense of the limitations of his ability, but often represented things
which he did not understand. He was less of a painter than any of the
artists of Piloty's school, and more completely tethered by the size of
his picture. He could not go beyond a certain space of canvas without
suffering for it; and he bound his talent on the bed of Procrustes when
he attempted to paint Madonnas, or placed himself with his Hofer
pictures in the rank of historical painters. But as a _genre_ painter he
stands beside Vautier, in the first line; and by these little _genre_
pictures--the simpler and quieter the better--and some of his genially
conceived and charming portrait studies, he will survive. Those are
things which he understood and felt. He had himself lived amid the life
he depicted, and so it was that what he depicted made such a powerful
appeal to the heart.
[Illustration: VAUTIER. NOVEMBER.]
The year 1869 made him known. The Munich Exhibition had in that year a
picture on a subject from the history of the Hofer rising of 1809. It
represented how the little son of Speckbacher, one of the Tyrolese
leaders, had come after his father, armed with a musket; and at the side
of an old forester he is entering the room in which Speckbacher is just
holding a council of war. The father springs up angry at his
disobedience, but also proud of the little fellow's pluck. From this
time Defregger's art was almost entirely devoted to the Tyrolese people.
To paint the smart lads and neat lasses of Tyrol in joy and sorrow, love
and hate, at work and merry-making, at home or outside on the mountain
pasture, in all their beauty, strength, and robust health, was the
life-long task for which he more than any other man had been created. He
had, over Knaus and most other painters of village tales, the enormous
advantage of not standing personally outside or above the people, and
not regarding them with the superficial curiosity of a tourist--for he
belonged to them himself. Others, if ironically disposed, saw in the
rustic the stupid, comic peasant; or, if inclined to sentimentalism,
introduced into the rural world the moods and feelings of "society,"
traits of drawing-room sensitiveness, the heavy air of the town. Models
in national costume were grouped for pictures of Upper Bavarian rustic
life. But Defregger, who up to the age of fifteen had kept his father's
cattle on the pastures of the Ederhof, had shared the joys and sorrows
of the peasantry long enough to know that they are neither comic nor
sentimental people.
The roomy old farmhouse where he was born in 1835 lay isolated amid the
wild mountains. He went about bare-footed and bare-headed, waded through
deep snow when he made his way to school in winter, and wandered about
amid the highland pastures with the flocks in summer. Milkmaids and
wood-cutters, hunters and cowherds, were his only companions. At fifteen
he was the head labourer of the estate, helped to thresh the corn, and
worked on the arable land and in the stable and the barn like others.
When he was twenty-three he lost his father and took over the farm
himself: he was thus a man in the full sense of the word before his
artistic calling was revealed to him. And this explains his qualities
and defects. When he came to Piloty after the sale of his farm and his
aimless sojourn in Innsbruck and Paris he was mature in mind; he was
haunted by the impressions of his youth, and he wanted to represent the
land and the people of Tyrol. But he was too old to become a good
"painter." On the other hand, he possessed the great advantage of
knowing what he wanted. The heroes of history did not interest him; it
was only the Tyrolese woodmen who persisted in his brain. He left
Piloty's studio almost as he had entered it--awkward, and painting
heavily and laboriously, and but very little impressed by Piloty's
theatrical sentiment. His youth and his recollections were rooted in the
life of the people; and with a faithful eye he caught earnest or
cheerful phases of that life, and represented them simply and cordially:
and if he had had the strength to offer a yet more effectual resistance
to the prevalent ideal of beauty, there is no doubt that his stories
would seem even more fresh and vigorous.
[Illustration: FRANZ DEFREGGER.]
"The Dance" was the first picture which followed that of "Speckbacher,"
and it was circulated through the world in thousands of reproductions.
There are two delightful figures in it: the pretty milkmaid who looks
around her, radiant with pleasure, and the wiry old Tyrolese who is
lifting his foot, cased in a rough hobnail shoe, to dance to the
_Schuhplattler_. At the same time he painted "The Prize Horse"
returning to his native village from the show decked and garlanded and
greeted exultantly by old and young as the pride of the place. "The Last
Summons" was again a scene from the Tyrolese popular rising of 1809. All
who can still carry a rifle, a scythe, or a pitchfork have enrolled
themselves beneath the banners, and are marching out to battle over the
rough village street. The wives and children are looking earnestly at
the departing figures, whilst a little old woman is pressing her
husband's hand. Everything was simply and genially rendered without
sentimentality or emphasis, and the picture even makes an appeal by its
colouring. As a sequel "The Return of the Victors" was produced in 1876:
a troop of the Tyrolese levy is marching through its native mountain
village, with a young peasant in advance, slightly wounded, and looking
boldly round. Tyrolese banners are waving, and the fifes and drums and
clarionet players bring up the rear. The faces of the men beam with the
joy of victory, and women and children stand around to welcome those
returning home. Joy, however, is harder to paint faithfully than sorrow.
It is so easy to see that it has been artificially worked up from the
model; nor is Defregger's picture entirely innocent on this charge.
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
DEFREGGER. SPECKBACHER AND HIS SON.]
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
DEFREGGER. THE WRESTLERS.]
"Andreas Hofer going to his Death" was his first concession to Piloty.
Defregger had become professor at the Munich Academy, and was entered in
the directory as "historical painter." The figures were therefore
painted life size; and in the grouping and the choice of the "psychic
moment" the style aimed at "grand painting." The result was the same
emptiness which blusters through the historical pictures of the school
of Delaroche, Gallait, and Piloty. The familiar stage effect and stilted
passion has taken the place of simple and easy naturalism. Nor was he
able to give life to the great figures of a large canvas as he had done
in the smaller picture of the "Return of the Victors." This is true of
"The Peasant Muster" of 1883--which represented the Tyrolese, assembled
in an arms manufactory, learning that the moment for striking had
arrived--and of the last picture of the series, "Andreas Hofer receiving
the Presents of the Emperor Francis in the Fortress of Innsbruck." All
the great Hofer pictures, which in earlier days were honoured as his
best performances, have done less for his memory than for that of the
sturdy hero. The _genre_ picture was Defregger's vocation. There lay his
strength, and as soon as he left that province he renounced his fine
qualities.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
DEFREGGER. SISTER AND BROTHERS.]
[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
DEFREGGER. THE PRIZE HORSE.]
And a holiday humour, a tendency to beautify what he saw, is spread over
even his _genre_ pictures. They make one suppose that there is always
sunshine in the happy land of Tyrol, that all the people are chaste and
beautiful, all the young fellows fine and handsome, all the girls smart,
every household cleanly and well-ordered, all married folk and children
honest and kind; whereas in reality these milk-maids and woodmen are far
less romantic in their conduct; and so many a townsman who avoids
contact with the living people goes into raptures over them as they are
pictures. With Vautier he shares this one-sidedness as well as his
defective colour. Almost all his pictures are hard, dry, and diffident
in colouring, but, as with Vautier, the man atones for the painter. From
Defregger one asks for no qualities of colour and no realistic Tyrolese,
since he has rendered himself in his pictures, and gives one a glimpse
into his own heart; and a healthy, genial, and kindly heart it is. His
idealism is not born of laboriously acquired principles of beauty; it
expresses the temperament of a painter--a temperament which
unconsciously sees the people through a medium whereby they are
glorified. A rosy glow obscures sadness, ugliness, wretchedness, and
misery, and shows only strength and health, tenderness and beauty,
fidelity and courage. He treasured sunny memories of the cheerful
radiance which rested on his home in the hour of his return; he painted
the joy which swelled in his own breast as he beheld again the rocks of
his native country, heard once more the peaceful chime of its Sabbath
bells. And this is what gives his works their human, inward truth,
little as they may be authentic documents as to the population of Tyrol.
Later this will be more impartially recognised than it possibly can be
at present. The larger the school of any artist, the more it will make
his art trivial; and thus for a time the originality of the master
himself seems to be mere trifling. The Tyrolese were depreciated in the
market by Defregger's imitators; only too many have aped his painting of
stiff leather breeches and woollen bodices, without putting inside them
the vivid humanity which is so charming in a genuine Defregger. But his
position in the history of art is not injured by this. He has done
enough for his age; he has touched the hearts of many by his cheerful,
fresh, and healthy art, and he would be certain of immortality had he
thrown aside his brush altogether from the time when the progress of
painting left him in the rear.
With Defregger, the head of the Tyrolese school, Gabl and Mathias
Schmidt, standing at a measurable distance from him, may find a
well-merited place. _Mathias Schmidt_, born in the Tyrolese Alps in the
same year as Defregger, began with satirical representations of the
local priesthood. A poor image-carver has arrived with his waggon at an
inn, on the terrace of which are sitting a couple of well-fed
ecclesiastics, and by them he is ironically called to account as he
offers a crucifix for sale. A young priest, as an austere judge of
morals, reproves a pair of lovers who are standing before him, or asks a
young girl such insidious questions at the bridal examination that she
lowers her eyes, blushing. His greatest picture was "The Emigration of
the Zillerthal Protestants." Amongst later works, without controversial
tendencies, "The Hunter's Greeting" and "The Lathered Parson" may be
named. The latter is surprised by two pretty girls while shaving. To
these may be added "The Parson's Patch," a picture of a robust
housekeeper hastily mending a weak spot in the pastor's inexpressibles
just before service.
Shortly after Defregger had painted his picture of "Speckbacher," _Alois
Gabl_ came forward with his "Haspinger preaching Revolt," and followed
it up by smaller pictures with a humorous touch, representing a levy of
recruits in Tyrol, the dance at the inn interrupted by the entrance of
the parson, magnates umpiring at the shooting butts, a bar with laughing
girls, and the like.
In 1870, _Eduard Kurzbauer_, who died young, in his "Fugitives
Overtaken" executed a work representing an entire class of painted
illustrations. A young man who has eloped with a girl is discovered with
her by her mother in a village inn. The old lady is looking
reproachfully at her daughter, who is overwhelmed by shame and
penitence; the young man is much moved, the old servant grave and
respectful, the young landlady curious, and the postilion who has driven
the eloping pair has a sly smirk. Elsewhere Kurzbauer, who is a fresh
and lively anecdotist, painted principally episodes, arraying his
figures in the peasant garb of the Black Forest: a rejected suitor takes
a sad farewell of a perverse blonde who disdains his love; or the
engagement of two lovers is hindered by the interference of the father.
[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
DEFREGGER. ANDREAS HOFER APPOINTED GOVERNOR OF THE TYROL.]
_Hugo Kauffmann_, the son of Hermann Kauffmann, planted himself in the
interior of village taverns or in front of them, and made his dressed-up
models figure as hunters, telling incredible tales, dancing to the
fiddle, or quarrelling over cards.
Another North German, _Wilhelm Riefstahl_, showed how the peasants in
Appenzell or Bregenz conduct themselves at mournful gatherings, at their
devotions in the open air, and at All Souls' Day Celebrations, and
afterwards extended his artistic dominion over Rügen, Westphalia, and
the Rhine country with true Mecklenburg thoroughness. He was a careful,
conscientious worker, with a discontent at his own efforts in his
composition, a certain ponderousness in his attempts at _genre_; but his
diligently executed pictures--full of colour and painted in a peculiarly
German manner--are highly prized in public galleries on account of their
instructive soundness.
After the various classes of the German peasantry had been naturalised
in the picture market by these narrative painters, _Eduard Grützner_,
when religious controversy raged in the seventies, turned aside to
discover drolleries in monastic life. This he did with the assistance of
brown and yellowish white cowls, and the obese and copper-nosed models
thereto pertaining. He depicts how the cellarer tastes a new wine, and
the rest of the company await his verdict with anxiety; how the entire
monastery is employed at the vintage, at the broaching of a wine cask or
the brewing of the beer; how they tipple; how bored they are over their
chess or their dice, their cards or their dominoes; how they whitewash
old frescoes or search after forbidden books in the monastery library.
This, according to Grützner, is the routine in which the life of monks
revolves. At times amidst these figures appear foresters who tell of
their adventures in the chase, or deliver hares at the cloister kitchen.
And the more Grützner was forced year after year to make up for his
decline as a colourist, by cramming his pictures with so-called humour,
the greater was his success.
It was only long afterwards that _genre_ painting in broad-cloth came
into vogue by the side of this _genre_ in peasant blouse and monastic
cowl, and stories of the exchange and the manufactory by the side of
village and monastic tales. Here Düsseldorf plays a part once more in
the development of art. The neighbourhood of the great manufacturing
towns on the Rhine could not but lead painters to these subjects.
_Ludwig Bokelmann_, who began by painting tragical domestic scenes--card
players, and smoking shop-boys, in the style of Knaus--made the pawnshop
a theme for art in 1875, and dexterously crowded into his picture all
the types which popular fancy brings into association with the
conception: business-like indifference, poverty ashamed, fallen
prosperity, bitter need, avarice, and the love of pleasure. In 1877,
when the failure of the house of Spitzeder made a sensation in the
papers, he painted his picture "The Savings Bank before the Announcement
of Failure," which gave him another opportunity for ranging in front of
the splendid building an assembly of deluded creditors of all classes,
and of showing how they expressed their emotion according to temperament
and education, by excited speeches, embittered countenances, gloomy
resignation, or vivid gesticulation. Much attention was likewise excited
by "The Arrest." In this picture a woman was being watched for by a
policeman, whilst the neighbours--male and female--loitered round with
the requisite expression of horror, indignation, sympathy, or
indifferent curiosity. The opening of a will, the last moments of an
electioneering struggle, scenes in the entrance hall of a court of
justice, the emigrants' farewell, the gaming-table at Monte Carlo, and a
village fire, were other newspaper episodes from the life of great towns
which he rendered in paint.
His earlier associate in Düsseldorf, _Ferdinand Brütt_, after first
painting _rococo_ pictures, owed his finest successes to the Stock
Exchange. It, too, had its types: the great patrician merchants and
bankers of solid reputation, the jobbers, break-neck speculators, and
decayed old stagers; and, as Brütt rendered these current figures in a
very intelligible manner, his pictures excited a great deal of
attention. Acquittals and condemnations, acts of mortgage, emigration
agents, comic electors, and prison visits, as further episodes from the
social, political, and commercial life of great towns, fill up the odd
corners of his little local chronicle.
Thus the German _genre_ painting ran approximately the same course as
the English had done at the beginning of the century. At that time the
kingdom of German art was not of this world. Classicism taught men to
turn their eyes on the art of a past age. Art in Germany had progressed
slowly, and at first with an uncertain and hesitating step, before it
learnt that what blossoms here, and thrives and fades, should be the
subject of its labours. Gradually it brought one sphere of reality after
the other into its domain. Observation took the place of abstraction,
and the discoverer that of the inventor. The painter went amongst his
fellow-creatures, opened his eyes and his heart to share their fortunes
and misfortunes, and to reproduce them in his own creation. He
discovered the peculiarities of grades of life and professional classes.
Every one of the beautiful German landscapes with its peasantry, every
one of the monastic orders and every manufacturing town found its
representative in _genre_ painting. The country was mapped out. Each one
took over his plot, which he superintended, conscientiously, like an
ethnographical museum. And just as fifty years before, Germany had been
fertilised by England, so it now gave in its turn the principles of
_genre_ painting to the powers of the second rank in art.
Even France was in some degree influenced. As if to indicate that Alsace
would soon become German once more, after 1850 there appeared in that
province certain painters who busied themselves with the narration of
anecdote from rustic life quite in the manner of Knaus and Vautier.
_Gustave Brion_, the grand-nephew of Frederica of Sesenheim, settled in
the Vosges, and there gave intelligence of a little world whose life
flowed by, without toil, in gentle, patriarchal quietude, interrupted
only by marriage feasts, birthdays, and funeral solemnities. He appears
to have been rather fond of melancholy and solemn subjects. His
interiors, with their sturdy and honest people, bulky old furniture, and
large green faïence stoves, which are so dear to him, are delightful in
their familiar homeliness and their cordial Alsatian and German
character, and recall Vautier; in fact, he might well be termed the
French Vautier. He lives in them himself--the quiet old man, who in his
last years occupied himself solely with the management of his garden and
the culture of flowers, or sat by the hour in an easy-chair at the
window telling stories to his old dog Putz. But pictorial unity of
effect must be asked from him as little as from Vautier.
_Charles Marchal_, too, was no painter, but an anecdotist, with a bias
towards the humorous or sentimental; and so very refined and superior
was he that he saw none but pretty peasant girls, who might easily be
mistaken for "young ladies," if they exchanged their kerchiefs and
bodices for a Parisian toilette. His chief picture was "The Hiring Fair"
of 1864: pretty peasant girls are standing in a row along the street,
bargaining with prospective masters before hiring themselves out.
[Illustration: GRÜTZNER. TWELFTH NIGHT.]
The most famous of this group of artists is _Jules Breton_, who after
various humorous and sentimental pieces placed himself in 1853 in the
front rank of the French painters of rustics by his "Return of the
Reapers" (Musée Luxembourg). His "Gleaners" in 1855, "Blessing the
Fields" in 1857, and "The Erection of the Picture of Christ in the
Churchyard" were pretty enough to please the public, and sufficiently
sound in technique not to be a stumbling-block to artists. After 1861 he
conceived an enthusiasm for sunsets, and was never weary of depicting
the hour when the fair forms of peasant maidens stand gracefully out
against the quiet golden horizon. Jules Breton wrote many poems, and a
vein of poetry runs through his pictures. They tell of the sadness of
the land when the fields sleep dreamily beneath the shadows of the
evening, touched by the last ray of the departing sun; but they tell of
it in verses where the same rhymes are repeated with wearisome monotony.
Breton is a charming and sympathetic figure, but he never quite
conquered Classicism. His gleaners moving across the field in the
evening twilight bear witness to an attentive, deliberate study of the
works of Leopold Robert; and unfortunately much of the emphasis and
classical style of Robert has been transmitted to Breton's rustic
maidens. They have most decidedly a lingering weakness for pose, and a
sharp touch of the formula of the schools. There is an affectation of
style in their garb, and their hands are those of _bonnes_ who have
never even handled a rake. Breton, as Millet said of him, paints girls
who are too beautiful to remain in the country. His art is a well-bred,
idyllic painting, with gilt edges; it is pleasing and full of delicate
figures which are always elegant and always correct, but it is a little
like flat lemonade; it is monotonous and only too carefully composed,
destitute of all masculinity and seldom avoiding the reef of
affectation.
Norway and Sweden were fructified from Düsseldorf immediately. When
Tidemand had shown the way, the academy on the Rhine was the high school
for all the sons of the North during the fifties. They set to
translating Knaus and Vautier into Swedish and Norwegian, and caught the
tone of their originals so exactly that they almost seem more
Düsseldorfian than the Düsseldorfers themselves.
_Karl D'Uncker_, who arrived in 1851 and died in 1866, was led by the
influence of Vautier to turn to little humorous incidents. After "The
Two Deaf Friends" (two old people very hard of hearing, who are making
comical efforts to understand each other) and "The Vagabond Musician and
his Daughter before the Village Magistrates" there followed in 1858 the
scene in "The Pawnshop," which divided the honours of the year with
Knaus's "Golden Wedding." He is an artistic compromise between Knaus and
Schroedter, a keen observer and a humorous narrator, who takes special
pleasure in the sharp opposition of characteristic figures. In his
"Pawnshop" and his "Third Class Waiting Room" vagabonds mingle in the
crowd beside honest people, beggars beside retired tradesmen, old
procuresses beside pure and innocent girls, and heartless misers beside
warm-hearted philanthropists. In these satirically humorous little
comedies Swedish costume has been rightly left out of sight. This
ethnographical element was the _forte of Bengt Nordenberg_, who as a
copyist of Tidemand gradually became the Riefstahl of the North. His
"Golden Wedding in Blekingen," his "Bridal Procession," his "Collection
of Tithes," "The Pietists," and "The Promenade at the Well," are of the
same ethnographical fidelity and the same anecdotic dryness. He gets his
best effects when he strikes an idyllic, childlike note or one of
patriarchal geniality. The "Bridal Procession" received in the village
with salvoes and music, "The Newly Married Pair" making a first visit to
the parents of one of them, the picture of schoolboys playing tricks
upon an old organist, that of children mourning over a lamb slain by a
wolf, are, in the style of the sixties, the works of a modest and
amiable anecdotist, who had a fine sense for the peaceful, familiar side
of everyday life in town and country.
[Illustration: BRION. JEAN VALJEAN.]
In _Wilhelm Wallander_, as in Madou, noise and frolic and jest have the
upper hand. His pictures are like saucy street ditties sung to a
barrel-organ. The crowd at the market-place, the gossip in the
spinning-room on a holiday evening, hop-pickings, dances, auctions on
old estates, weddings, and the guard turning out, are his favourite
scenes. Even when he came to Düsseldorf he was preceded by his fame as a
jolly fellow and a clever draughtsman, and when he exhibited his "Market
in Vingaker" he was greeted as another Teniers. His "Hop-Harvest" is
like a waxwork show of teasing lads and laughing lasses. He was an
incisive humorist and a spirited narrator, who under all circumstances
was more inclined to jest than to touch idyllic and elegiac chords. In
his pictures peasant girls never wander solitary across the country, for
some lad who is passing by always has a joke to crack with them; it
never happens that girls sit lonely by the hearth, there is always a
lover to peep out laughing from behind the cupboard door.
_Anders Koskull_ cultivated the _genre_ picture of children in a more
elegiac fashion; he has poor people sitting in the sun, or peasant
families in the Sunday stillness laying wreaths upon the graves of their
dear ones in the churchyard. _Kilian Zoll_, like Meyer of Bremen,
painted very childish pictures of women spinning, children with cats,
the joys of grandmother, and the like. _Peter Eskilson_ turned to the
representation of an idyllic age of honest yeomen, and has given in his
best known work, "A Game of Skittles in Faggens," a pleasant picture
from peasant life in the age of pig-tails. The object of _August
Jernberg's_ study was the Westphalian peasant with his slouching hat,
long white coat, flowered waistcoat, and large silver buttons. He was
specially fond of painting dancing bears surrounded by a crowd of amused
spectators, or annual fairs, for which a picturesque part of old
Düsseldorf served as a background. _Ferdinand Fagerlin_ has something
attractive in his simplicity and good-humour. If he laughs, as he
delights in doing, his laughter is cordial and kind-hearted, and if he
touches an elegiac chord he can guard against sentimentalism. In
contrast with D'Uncker and Wallander, who always hunted after character
pieces, he devotes himself to expression with much feeling, and
interprets it delicately even in its finer _nuances_. Henry Ritter, who
influenced him powerfully in the beginning of his career, drew his
attention to Holland, and Fagerlin's quiet art harmonises with the Dutch
phlegm. Within the four walls of his fishermen's huts there are none but
honest grey-beards and quiet women, active wives and busy maidens,
vigorous sailors and lively peasant lads. But his pictures are
sympathetic in spite of this one-sided optimism, since the sentiment is
not too affected nor the anecdotic points too heavily underlined.
Amongst the Norwegians belonging to this group is _V.
Stoltenberg-Lerche_, who with the aid of appropriate accessories adapted
the interiors of cloisters and churches to _genre_ pictures, such as
"Tithe Day in the Cloister," "The Cloister Library," and "The Visit of a
Cardinal to the Cloister," and so forth. _Hans Dahl_, a _juste-milieu_
between Tidemand and Emanuel Spitzer, carried the Düsseldorf village
idyll down to the present time. "Knitting the Stocking" (girls knitting
on the edge of a lake), "Feminine Attraction" (a lad with three peasant
maidens who are dragging a boat to shore in spite of his resistance), "A
Child of Nature" (a little girl engaged to sit as model to a painter
amongst the mountains, and running away in alarm), "The Ladies' Boarding
School on the Ice," "First Pay Duty," etc., are some of the witty titles
of his wares, which are scattered over Europe and America. Everything is
sunny, everything laughs, the landscapes as well as the figures; and if
Dahl had painted fifty years ago, his fair maidens with heavy blond
plaits, well-bred carriage, and delicate hands that have never been
disfigured by work, would undoubtedly have assured him no unimportant
place beside old Meyerheim in the history of the development of the
_genre_ picture.
An offshoot from the Munich painting of rustics shot up into a vigorous
sapling in Hungary. The process of refining the raw talents of the
Magyar race had been perfected on the shores of the Isar, and the
Hungarians showed gratitude to their masters by applying the principles
of the Munich _genre_ to Magyar subjects when they returned home. The
Hungarian rooms of modern exhibitions have consequently a very local
impress. Everything seems aboriginal, Magyar to the core, and purely
national. Gipsies are playing the fiddle and Hungarian national songs
ring forth, acrobats exhibit, slender sons of Pusta sit in Hungarian
village taverns over their tokay, muscular peasant lads jest with buxom,
black-eyed girls, smart hussars parade their irresistible charms before
lively damsels, and recruits endeavour to imbibe a potent enthusiasm for
the business of war from the juice of the grape. Stiff peasants, limber
gipsies, old people dancing, smart youths, the laughing faces of girls
and bold fellows with flashing eyes, quarrelsome heroes quick with the
knife, tipsy soldiers and swearing sergeants, drunkards, suffering women
and poor orphans, pawnshops and vagabonds, legal suits, electioneering
scenes, village tragedies and comic proposals, artful shop-boys, and
criminals condemned to death, the gay confusion of fairs and the merry
return from the harvest and the vintage, waxed moustaches, green and red
caps and short pipes, tokay, Banat wheat, Alfoeld tobacco, and Sarkad
cattle,--such are the elements worked up, as the occasion demanded,
either into little tales or great and thrilling romances. And the names
of the painters are as thoroughly Magyar as are the figures. Beside
_Ludwig Ebner_, _Paul Boehm_, and _Otto von Baditz_, which have a German
sound, one comes across such names as _Koloman Déry_, _Julius Aggházi_,
_Alexander Bihari_, _Ignaz Ruskovics_, _Johann Jankó_, _Tihamér
Margitay_, _Paul Vagó_, _Arpad Fessty_, _Otto Koroknyai_, _D.
Skuteczky_, etc.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
MARCHAL. THE HIRING FAIR.]
But setting aside the altered names and the altered locality and garb,
the substance of these pictures is precisely the same as that of the
Munich pictures of twenty years before: dance and play, maternal
happiness, wooing, and the invitation to the wedding. Instead of the
_Schuhplattler_ they paint the Czarda, instead of the drover's cottage
the taverns of Pesth, instead of the blue Bavarian uniform the green of
the Magyar Hussars. Their painting is tokay adulterated with Isar
water, or Isar water with a flavour of tokay. What seems national is at
bottom only their antiquated standpoint. It is a typical development
repeating itself in the nineteenth century through all branches of art;
the sun rises in the West and sets in the East. Any other progress than
that of the gradual expansion of subject-matter cannot be established in
favour of the productions of all this _genre_ painting. In colour and in
substance they represent a phase of art which the leading countries of
Europe had already left behind about the middle of the century, and
which had to be overcome elsewhere, if painting was again to be what it
had been in the old, good periods.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
PETTENKOFEN. A HUNGARIAN VILLAGE (PENCIL DRAWING).]
For as yet all these _genre_ painters were the children of Hogarth;
their productions were the outcome of the same spirit, plebeian and
alien to art, which had come into painting when the middle classes began
to hold a more important position in society. Yet their artistic
significance ought not to be and cannot be contested. In an age which
was prouder of its antiquarian knowledge than of its own achievements,
which recognised the faithful imitation of the method of all past
periods, the mere performance of a delicate task, as the highest aim of
art, these _genre_ painters were the first to portray the actual man of
the nineteenth century; the first to desert museums and appeal to
nature, and thus to lay the foundation of modern painting. They wandered
in the country, looked at reality, sought to imitate it, and often
displayed in their studies a marvellous directness of insight. But these
vigorous initial studies were too modest to find favour and esteem with
a public as yet insufficiently educated for the appreciation of art.
Whilst in England the exhibitions of the Royal Academy and in France
those of the Paris Salon created, comparatively early, a certain ground
for the comprehension of art, the _genre_ painters of other countries
worked up to and into the sixties without the appropriate social
combinations. After 1828 the Art Unions began to usurp the position of
that refined society which had formerly played the Mæcenas as the
leading dictators of taste.
[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
BRETON. THE RETURN OF THE REAPERS.]
Albrecht Adam, who was chiefly responsible for the foundation of the
Munich Union, has himself spoken clearly in his autobiography of the
advantages and disadvantages of this step. "Often," he writes, "often
have I asked myself whether I have done good or not by this scheme, and
to this hour I have not been able to make up my mind. The cultivation of
art clearly received an entirely different bias from that which it had
in earlier days. What was formerly done by artistic and judicious
connoisseurs was now placed for the most part in the hands of the
people. Like so much else in the world, that had its advantages, but in
practice the shady side of the matter became very obvious." The
disadvantages were specially these: "the people" for a long time could
only understand such paintings as represented a story in a broad and
easy fashion; paintings which in the narrative cohesion of the subject
represented might be read off at a glance, since the mere art of reading
had been learnt at school, rather than those which deserved and required
careful study. The demand for anecdotic subject was only waived in the
case of ethnographical painting, in Italian and Oriental _genre_; for
here the singular types, pictorial costumes, and peculiar customs of
foreign countries were in themselves enough to provoke curiosity. What
was prized in the picture was merely something external, the subject of
representation, not the representation itself, the matter and not the
manner, that which concerned the theme, that which fell entirely beyond
the province of art. The illustrated periodicals which had been making
their appearance since the forties gave a further impetus to this phase
of taste. The more inducement there was to guess charades, the more
injury was done to the sensuous enjoyment of art; for the accompanying
text of the author merely translated the pictures back into their
natural element. Painters, however, were not unwilling to reconcile
themselves to the circumstances, because, as a result of their technical
insufficiency, they were forced, on their side, to try to lend their
pictures the adjunct of superficial interest by anecdotic additions.
Literary humour had to serve the purpose of pictorial humour, and the
talent of the narrator was necessary to make up for their inadequate
artistic qualities. As the historical painters conveyed the knowledge of
history in a popular style, the _genre_ painters set up as agreeable
tattlers, excellent anecdotists: they were in turn droll, meditative,
sentimental, and pathetic, but they were not painters.
[Illustration: _L'Art._
BRETON. THE GLEANER.]
And painters, under these conditions, they could not possibly become.
For though it is often urged in older books on the history of art that
modern _genre_ painting far outstripped the old Dutch _genre_ in
incisiveness of characterisation, depth of psychological conception, and
opulence of invention, these merits are bought at the expense of all
pictorial harmony. In the days of Rembrandt the Dutch were painters to
their fingers' ends, and they were able to be so because they appealed
to a public whose taste was adequately trained to take a refined
pleasure in the contemplation of works of art which had sterling merits
of colour. Mieris painted the voluptuous ruffling of silken stuffs; Van
der Meer, the mild light stealing through little windows into quiet
chambers, and playing upon burnished vessels of copper and pewter, on
majolica dishes and silver chattels, on chests and coverings; De Hoogh,
the sunbeam streaming like a golden shaft of dust from some bright
lateral space into a darker ante-chamber. Each one set before himself
different problems, and each ran through an artistic course of
development.
[Illustration: WALLENDER. THE RETURN.]
The more recent masters are mature from their first appearance; the
Hungarians paint exactly like the Swedes and the Germans, and their
pictures have ideas for the theme, but never such as are purely
artistic. Like simple woodland birds, they sing melodies which are, in
some ways, exceedingly pretty; but their plumage is not equal to their
song. No man can be painter and _genre_ painter at the same time. The
principal difference between them is this: a painter sees his picture,
rather than what may be extracted from it by thought; the _genre_
painter, on the other hand, has an idea in his mind, an "invention," and
plans out a picture for its expression. The painter does not trouble his
head about the subject and the narrative contents; his poetry lies in
the kingdom of colour. There reigns in his works--take Brouwer, for
example--an authentic, uniformly plastic, and penetrative life welling
from the artist's soul. But the leading motive for the _genre_ painter
is the subject as such. For example, he will paint a children's festival
precisely because it is a children's festival. But one must be a Jan
Steen to accomplish such a task in a soundly artistic manner. The
observation of these more recent painters meanwhile ventured no further
than detail, and did not know what to do with the picture as a whole.
They got over their difficulties because they "invented" the scene, made
the children pose in the places required by the situation, and then
composed these studies. The end was accomplished when the leading heroes
of the piece had been characterised and the others well traced. The
colouring was merely an unessential adjunct, and in a purely artistic
sense not at all possible. For a picture which has come into being
through a piecing together from separate copies of set models, and of
costumes, vessels, interiors, etc., may be ever so true to nature in
details, but this mosaic work is bound systematically to destroy the
pictorial appearance, unity, and quietude of the whole. Knaus is
perhaps the only one who, as a fine connoisseur of colour, concealed
this scrap-book drudgery, and achieved a certain congruity of colour in
a really artistic manner by a subtilised method of harmony. But as
regards the pictures of all the others, it is clear at once that, as
Heine wrote, "they have been rather edited than painted." The
effectiveness of the picture was lost in the detail, and even the truth
of detail was lost in the end in the opulence of subject, seductive as
that was upon the first glance. For, as it was held that the incident
subjected to treatment--the more circumstantial the better--ought to be
mirrored through all grades and variations of emotion in the faces, in
the gestures of a family, of the gossips, of the neighbours, of the
public in the street, the inevitable consequence was that the artist, to
make himself understood, was invariably driven to exaggerate the
characterisation, and to set in the place of the unconstrained
expression of nature that which has been histrionically drilled into the
model. Not less did the attempt to unite these set figures as a
composition in one frame lead to an intolerable stencilling. The rules
derived from historical painting in a time dominated by that form of art
were applied to our chequered and many-sided modern life. Since the
structure of this composition prescribed laws from which the undesigned
manifestation of individual objects is free, the studies after nature
had to be readjusted in the picture according to necessity. There were
attitudes in a conventional sense beautiful, but unnatural and strained,
and therefore creating an unpleasing effect. An arbitrary construction,
a forced method of composition, usurped the place of what was flexible,
various, and apparently casual. The painters did not fit the separate
part as it really was into the totality which the coherence of life
demands: they arranged scenes of comedy out of realistic elements just
as a stage manager would put them together.
And this indicates the further course which development was obliged to
take. When Hogarth was left behind, painting had once more gained the
independence which it had had in the great periods of art. The painter
was forced to cease from treating secondary qualities--such as humour
and narrative power--as though they were of the first account; and the
public had to begin to understand pictures as paintings and not as
painted stories. An "empty subject" well painted is to be preferred to
an "interesting theme" badly painted. Pictures of life must drive out
_tableaux vivants_, and human beings dislodge character types which
curiosity renders attractive. Rather let there be a moment of breathing
reality rendered by purely artistic means of expression than the most
complete village tale defectively narrated; rather the simplest figure
rendered with actuality and no thought of self than the most suggestive
and ingenious characterisation. A conception, coloured by the
temperament of the artist, of what was simple and inartificial,
expressing nature at every step, had to take the place of laborious
composition crowded with figures, the plainness and truth of sterling
art to overcome what was overloaded and arbitrary, and the fragment of
nature seized with spontaneous freshness to supplant episodes put
together out of fragmentary observations. Only such painting as confined
itself, like that of the Dutch, "to the bare empirical observation of
surrounding reality," renouncing literary byplay, spirited anecdotic
fancies, and all those rules of beauty which enslave nature, could
really become the basis of modern art: and this the landscape painters
created. When once these masters resolved to paint from nature, and no
longer from their inner consciousness, there inevitably came a day when
some one amongst them wished to place in the field or the forest, which
he had painted after nature, a figure, and then felt the necessity of
bringing that figure into his picture just as he had seen it, without
giving it an anecdote mission or forcing it arbitrarily into his
compositions. The landscapist found the woodcutter in the forest, and
the woodcutter seemed to him the ideal he was seeking; the peasant
seemed to him to have the right to stand amid the furrows he had traced
with his plough. He no longer drove the fisher and the sailor from their
barks, and had no scruple in representing the good peasant woman, laden
with wood, striding forwards in his picture just as she strode through
the forest. And so entry was made into the way of simplicity; the
top-heavy burden of interesting subject-matter was thrown aside, and the
truth of figures and environments was gained. The age contained all the
conditions for bringing landscape painting such as this to maturity.