LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN GERMANY
That landscape would become for the nineteenth century even more
important than it was for the Holland of the seventeenth century had
been clearly announced since the days of Watteau and Gainsborough, and
since this tendency, in spite of all coercive rules, could be only
momentarily delayed by Classicism, it came to pass that the era which
began with Winckelmann's conception of "vulgar nature" ended a
generation later with her apotheosis. The thirty years from 1780 to 1810
denoted no more than a brief imprisonment for modern landscape, the
luxuriantly blooming child being arbitrarily confined meanwhile in the
strait-waistcoat of history. At first the phrase of Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing, which declared that landscape was no subject for painting
because it had no soul, held painters altogether back from injuring
their reputation by such pictures. And when, after the close of the
century, some amongst them overcame this dread, Poussin the Classicist
was of course set up as the only model. For an age which did not paint
men but only statues, nature was too natural. As the figure painter
subordinated everything to style and moulded the human body accordingly,
landscape became mannered to suit an historical idea, and was used
merely as a theatrical background for Greek tragedies. As the
draughtsmen of the age freed the human figure from all "individual
blemishes," and thereby abandoned the most essential points of life and
credibility which are bound up with personality, the landscapists wished
to purify nature from everything "accidental," with the result that
dreary commonplaces were produced from her, the infinitely manifold. As
the former sought the chief merit of their works in "well-balanced
composition," the latter regarded trees and mountains, temples and
palaces, clouds and rivers, merely as counters which only needed to be
changed in their mutual position according to acquired rules of
composition to make new pictures. They did not reflect that nature
possesses a more original force than the most able self-conscious work
of man, or, as Ludwig Richter has so well expressed it, that "what God
Almighty has made is always more beautiful than what men can invent."
There were summary rules for landscapes in the Poussin style, the beauty
of which was sought above all in an opulent play of noble lines,
corresponding to the fine and flowing lines of Carstens' figures. But
the conception was all the more pedantic whilst the drawing was hard and
dry and the colour feeble and vitreous. The most familiar of the group
is the old Tyrolese _Josef Anton Koch_, who came to Rome in 1796, and,
during two years, had an opportunity of allying himself with Carstens.
His pictures are usually composed with motives taken from the Sabine
Mountains. A landscape with "The Rape of Hylas" is possessed by the
Staedel Institute in Frankfort, a "Sacrifice of Noah" by the Museum in
Leipzig, and a landscape from the Sabine Mountains by the New Pinakothek
in Munich. All three show little promise in technique; it was only in
water-colour that he painted with more freedom.
[Illustration: JOSEF ANTON KOCH.]
Without a doubt nature in Italy is favourable to this "heroic" style of
landscape. In South Italy the country is at once magnificent and
peaceful. The naked walls of rock display their majestic lines with a
sharp contour; the sea is blue, and there is no cloud in the sky. As far
as the eye reaches everything is dead and nugatory in its colour, and
rigid and inanimate in form: a plastic landscape, full of style but
apparently devoid of soul. Nowhere is there anything either stupendous
or familiar, though, at the same time, there is no country on the earth
where there is such a sweep of proud majestic lines. It was not the
composition of Poussin, but the classic art of Claude--which aimed at
being nothing but the transparent mirror of sunny and transparent
nature--that gave perfect expression to this classic landscape; and in
the nineteenth century _Karl Rottmann_, according to what one reads, has
most completely represented this same classical form of art. His
twenty-eight Italian landscapes in the arcades of the Munich Hofgarten
are said to display a sense of the beauty of line and a greatness of
conception paralleled by few other landscape works of the century. And
those who draw their critical appreciations from books will probably
continue to make this statement, with all the greater right since the
world has been assured that the Arcade pictures are but a shadow of
earlier splendour. To a spectator who has not been primed and merely
judges with his own eyes without knowing anything about Rottmann's
celebrity, these pictures with their hard, inept colouring and their
pompous "synthetic" composition seem in the majority of cases to be
excessively childish, though it is not contested that before their
restoration by Leopold Rottmann and their present state of decay they
may very possibly have been good. Rottmann's Grecian landscapes in the
New Pinakothek are not ranked high even by his admirers. Standing in the
beginning entirely upon Koch's ground, he was led in these pictures to
give more importance to colour and light, and even to introduce unusual
phenomena, such as lowering skies, with rainbows, sunsets, moonlight
scenes, thunderstorms, and the like. This mixture of classical
principles of drawing with effect-painting in the style of Eduard
Hildebrandt brought a certain confusion into his compositions, to say
nothing of the fact that he never got rid of his harsh and heavy colour,
Bengal lights, and a crudeness of execution suggestive of tapestry. His
water-colours, probably, contain the only evidence from which it may be
gathered that Rottmann really had an eminent feeling for great
characteristic lines, and did not unsuccessfully go through the school
of Claude with his finely moulded, rhythmically perfected, and yet
simple conception of nature.
[Illustration: _Gräphische Künst._
KARL ROTTMANN.]
Otherwise _Friedrich Preller_ is the only one of all the stylists
deriving from Koch who rose to works consistent in execution. To him
only was it granted to assure his name a lasting importance by
exhaustively working out a felicitous subject. The _Odyssey_ landscapes
extend through his whole life. During a sojourn in Naples in 1830 he was
struck by the first idea. After his return home he composed for Doctor
Härtel in Leipzig the first series as wall decoration in tempera in
1832-34. Then there followed his journeys to Rügen and Norway, where he
painted wild strand and fell landscapes of a sombre austerity. After
this interruption, so profitably extending his feeling for nature, he
returned to the _Odyssey_. The series grew from seven to sixteen
cartoons, which were to be found in 1858 at the Munich International
Exhibition. The Grand Duke of Weimar then commissioned him to paint the
complete sequence for a hall in the Weimar Museum. In 1859-60 Preller
prepared himself afresh in Italy, and as an old man completed the work
which he had planned in youth. This Weimar series, executed in encaustic
painting, is artistically the maturest that he ever did. Of the entire
school he only had the secret of giving his figures a semblance of life,
and concealed the artificiality of his compositions. Nature in his
pictures has an austere, impressive sublimity, and is the worthy home of
gods and heroes. During his long life he had made so many and such
incessant studies of nature in North and South--even at seventy-eight he
was seen daily with his sketch-book in the Campagna--that he could
venture to work with great, simple lines without the danger of becoming
empty.
At the time when these pictures were painted the rendering of still-life
in landscape had in general been long buried, although even to-day it
has scattered representatives in the younger Preller, Albert Hertel, and
Edmund Kanoldt. As antique monuments came into fashion with Classicism,
German ruins became the mode at the beginning of the romantic period and
the return to the national past. For Koch and his followers landscape
was only of value when, as the background of classical works of
architecture, it directed one's thoughts to the antique: shepherds had
to sit with their flock around them on the ruins of the temple of Vesta,
or cows to find pasture between the truncated pillars of the Roman
Forum. But now it could only find its justification by allying itself
with mediæval German history, by the portrayal of castles and
strongholds.
[Illustration: ROTTMANN. THE COAST OF SICILY.]
"What is beautiful?--A landscape with upright trees, fair vistas,
atmosphere of azure blue, ornamental fountains, stately palaces in a
learned architectural style, with well-built men and women, and well-fed
cows and sheep. What is ugly?--Ill-formed trees with aged, crooked, and
cloven stems, uneven and earthless ground, sharp-cut hills and mountains
which are too high, rude or dilapidated buildings, with their ruins
lying strewn in heaps, a sky with heavy clouds, stagnant water, lean
cattle in the field, and ungraceful wayfarers."
In these words Gérard de Lairesse, the ancestor of Classicism, defined
his ideal of landscape, and in the last clause, where he speaks of
ugliness, he prophetically indicated the landscape ideal of the
Romanticists, as this is given for the first time in literature in
Tieck's _Sternbald_. For the young knight in _Sternbald_ who desires to
become a painter exclaims with enthusiasm: "Then would I depict lonely
and terrible regions, rotting and broken bridges, between two rough
cliffs facing a precipice, through which the forest stream forces its
foaming course, lost travellers whose garments flutter in the moist
wind, the dreaded figures of robbers ascending from the gully, waggons
fallen upon and plundered, and battle against the travellers." Which is
all exactly the opposite to what Lairesse demanded from the landscapist.
Alexander Humboldt has shown that the men of antiquity only found beauty
in nature so far as she was kindly, smiling, and useful to them. But to
the Romanticists nature was uncomely where she was the servant of
civilisation, and beautiful only in tameless and awe-inspiring
savageness. The light, therefore, was never to be that of simple day,
but the gloom of night and of the mountain glens. Such phenomena are
neither to be seen in Berlin nor in Breslau, and to be a Romanticist was
to love the opposite of all that one sees around one. Tieck, who lived
in the cold daylight of Berlin with its modern North German rationalism,
has therefore--and not by chance--first felt the yearning for moonlight
landscapes of primæval forest; _Lessing_, from Breslau, was the first to
give it pictorial expression.
[Illustration: K. ROTTMANN. LAKE KOPAÏS.]
Even in the twenties Koch's classical heroic landscapes, executed with
an ideal sweep of line, were contrasted with castle chapels, ruins, and
cloister courts composed in a similarly arbitrary manner. Landscape was
no longer to make its appeal to the understanding by lines, as in the
work of the Classicists, but to touch the spirit by colour. The various
hues of moonlight seemed specially made to awaken sombre emotions. But
as yet the technique of painting was too inadequately trained to express
this preconceived "mood" through nature itself. To make his intentions
clearer, therefore, the painter showed the effect of natural scenery on
the figures in his pictures, illustrating the "mood" of the landscape in
the "accessories." Lessing's early works represent in art that
self-consciously elegiac and melancholy sentimental rendering of a mood
introduced into literature by _Sternbald_, in his knights, squires,
noble maidens, and other romantic requisites. The melancholy lingers
upon rocks savagely piled upon each other, tumble-down chapels and
ruined castles, in swamps and sombre woods, in old, decaying trees,
half-obliterated paths, and ghostly gravestones; it veils the sky with a
dark grey cerement. Amid hills and glens with wayside crosses, mills,
and charcoal-burners' huts may be seen lonely wanderers, praying
pilgrims, priests hurrying from the cloister to bring the last
consolation to the dying, riders who have lost their way, and mercenary
soldiers lying dead. His first picture of 1828 revealed a desolate
churchyard beneath a dark and lowering heaven, from which a solitary
sunbeam bursts forth to illumine a grave-stead. Then followed the castle
by the sea standing upon strangely moulded cliffs heaped in confusion;
the churchyard in the snow where the nuns in the cloisters are following
a dead sister to the grave; the churchyard cloister, likewise in
snow, where an old man has dug a fresh grave; the cloister in the light
of evening with a priest visiting the sick; the landscape with the
weary, grey-headed crusader, riding on a weary horse through a lonely
mountain district, probably meant as an illustration to Uhland's ballad
_Das Rosennest_--
"Rühe hab ich nie gefunden,
Als ein Jahr im finstern Thurm";
and then came the desolate tableland with the robbers' den burnt to
ashes, and the landscape with the oak and the shrine of the Virgin,
before which a knight and noble lady are making their devotions. As yet
all these pictures were an arbitrary _potpourri_ from Walter Scott,
Tieck, and Uhland, and their ideal was the Wolf's Glen in the
_Freischütz_.
[Illustration: FRIEDRICH PRELLER.]
The next step which Romanticism had to take was to discover such
primæval woodland scenes in actual nature, and as Italian landscape
seems, as it were, to have been made for Claude, nature, as she is in
Germany, makes a peculiar appeal to this romantic temperament. In
certain parts of Saxon Switzerland the rocks look as if giants of the
prime had played ball with them or piled them one on top of the other in
sport. Lessing found in 1832 a landscape corresponding to the romantic
ideal of nature in the Eifel district, whither he had been induced to go
by a book by Nöggerath, _Das Gebirge im Rheinland und Westfalen nach
Mineralogischem und Chemischem Bezuge_. Up to that time he had only
known the romantic ideal of nature through Scott, Tieck, and Uhland,
just as the Classicists had taken their ideal from Homer, Theocritus,
and Virgil: in the Eifel district it came before him in tangible form.
Flat, swampy tracts of shrub and spruce alternated with dark woods,
where gigantic firs, weird pines, and primæval oaks raised their
branches to the sky. At the same time he beheld the rude and lonely
sublimity of nature in union with a humanity which was as yet
uncultivated, and for that reason all the simpler and the healthier,
judged by the Romanticist's distaste for civilisation. Defiant cones of
rock and huge masses of mountain wildly piled upon each other overlooked
valleys in which a stalwart race of peasants passed their days in
patriarchal simplicity. Here, for the first time, a sense for actual
landscape was developed in him; hitherto it had been alloyed by a taste
for knights, robbers, and monks. "Oh, had I been born in the seventeenth
century," he wrote, "I would have wandered after the Thirty Years' War
throughout Germany, plundered, ruined, and run wild as she then was."
Hitherto only "composed" Italian landscapes had been painted, the soil
of home ostensibly offering no _sujets_, or, in other words, not suiting
those tendencies which subordinated everything to style: so Lessing was
now the first painter of German landscape. His "Eifel Landscape" in the
Berlin National Gallery, which was followed by a series of such
pictures, introduces the first period of German landscape painting. The
forms of the ground and of the rough sides of rock are rendered sharply
and decisively, from geological knowledge. On principle he became an
opponent of all artistic influence derived from Italy, and located
himself in the Eifel district. The landscapes which he painted there are
founded on immediate studies of nature, and are sustained by large and
earnest insight. He draws the picture of this quarter in strong and
simple lines: the sadness of the heath and the dark mist, the dull
breath of which rises from swampy moorland. Still he painted only scenes
in which nature had taken the trouble to be fantastic. The eye of the
painter did not see her bright side, approaching her only when she
looked gloomy or was in angry humour. Either he veils the sky with vast
clouds or plunges into the darkness of an untrodden forest. Gnarled
trees spread around, their branches stretching out fantastically
twisted; the unfettered tumult of the powers of nature, the dull sultry
atmosphere before the burst of the storm or its moaning subsidence, are
the only moments which he represents. But the whole baggage of
unseasonable Romanticism, the nuns and monks, pious knights and
sentimental robbers, at first used to embody the mood of nature, were
thrown overboard. A quieter and more melancholy though thoroughly manly
seriousness, something strong and pithy, lies in the representations of
Lessing. The Romanticists had lost all sense of the dumb silent life of
nature. They only painted the changing adornment of the earth: heroes
and the works of men, palaces, ruins, and classic temples. Nature served
merely as a stage scene: the chief interest lay in the persons, the
monuments, and the historical ideas associated with them. Even in the
older pictures of Lessing the mood was exclusively given by the lyrical
accessories. But now it was placed more and more in nature herself, and
rings in power like an organ peal, from the cloudy sky, the dim lights,
and the swaying tree-tops. For the first time it is really nature that
speaks from the canvas, sombre and forceful. In this respect his
landscapes show progress. They show the one-sidedness, but also the
poetry of the Romantic view of nature. And they are no less of an
advance in technique; for in making the discovery that his haunting
ideal existed in reality, Lessing first began to study nature apart from
preconceived and arbitrary rules of composition, and--learnt to paint.
[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
PRELLER. ULYSSES AND LEUCOTHEA.]
Up to 1840 there stood at his side a master no less powerful, the
refractory, self-taught _Karl Blechen_, who only took up painting when
he was five-and-twenty, and became one of the most original of German
landscapists, in spite of a ruined life prematurely closing in mental
darkness and suicide. He possessed a delicate feeling for nature,
inspiration, boldness, and a spirited largeness of manner, although his
technique was hard, awkward, and clumsy to the very end. He might be
called the Alfred Rethel of landscape painting. He was not moved by what
was kindly or formally beautiful in nature, but by loneliness,
melancholy, and solitude. Many of his landscapes break away from
peaceful melancholy, and are like the pictures in some horrible
nightmare, ghastly and terrifying; on the other hand, he often surprises
us by the pleasure he takes in homely everyday things, a characteristic
hitherto of rare occurrence. Whereas Lessing never crossed the Alps for
fear of losing his originality, Blechen was the first who saw even
modern Italy without the spectacles of ideal style. From his Italian
pictures it would not be supposed that he had previously studied the
landscapes of the Classicists, or that beside him in Berlin Schinkel
worked on the entirely abstract and ideal landscape. As a painter
Blechen has even discovered the modern world. For Lessing landscape
"with a purpose" was something hideous and insupportable. He cared
exclusively for nature untouched by civilisation, painted the murmuring
wood and the raging storm, here and there at most a shepherd who
indicated the simplest and the oldest employment on the earth's surface.
But the Blechen Exhibition of 1881 contained an entirely singular
phenomenon as regards the thirties, an evening landscape before the iron
works in Eberswald: a long, monotonous plain with a sluggish river,
behind which the dark outlines of vomiting manufactory chimneys rise
sullenly into the bright evening sky. Even in that day Blechen painted
what others scarcely ventured to draw: nature working in the service of
man, and thereby--to use Tieck's expression--"robbed of her austere
dignity."
[Illustration: CARL FRIEDRICH LESSING.]
Lessing's most celebrated follower, _Schirmer_, appears in general as a
weakened and sentimental Lessing. He began in 1828 with "A Primæval
German Forest," but a journey to Italy caused him in 1840 to turn aside
from this more vigorous path. Henceforth his efforts were directed to
nobility of form and line, to turning out Southern ideal landscapes with
classically romantic accessories. The twenty-six Biblical landscapes
drawn in charcoal, belonging to the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle, the four
landscapes in oil with the history of the Good Samaritan in the
Kunsthalle of Carlsruhe, and the twelve pictures on the history of
Abraham in the Berlin National Gallery, are the principal results of
this second period--his period of ideal style. They are tame efforts at
a compromise between Lessing and Preller, and therefore of no
consequence to the history of the development of landscape painting.
Amongst the many who regarded him as a model, _Valentin Ruths_ of
Hamburg is one of the most natural and delicate. His pictures, however,
did not display any new impulse to widen the boundary by proceeding more
in the direction of healthy and honestly straightforward observation of
nature, or by emancipating himself from the school of regular
composition and the rendering of an arbitrary mood.
[Illustration: LESSING. THE WAYSIDE MADONNA.]
Meanwhile this impulse came from another quarter. At the very time when
the _genre_ artists were painting their earliest pictures of rustic life
under the influence of Teniers and Ostade, the landscapists also began
to return to the old Dutch masters, following Everdingen in particular.
Thus another strip of nature was conquered, another step made towards
simplicity. The landscape ideal of the Classicists had been
architecture, that of the Romanticists poetry; from this time forward it
became pure painting. Little Denmark, which fifty years before had
exercised through Carstens that fateful influence on Germany which led
painters from the treatment of contemporary life and sent them in
pursuit of the antique, now made recompense for the evil it had done.
During the twenties and thirties it produced certain landscapists who
guided the Germans to look with a fresh and unfettered gaze, undisturbed
by the ideal, at nature in their own country, after the aberrations of
Classicism and the one-sidedness of the Romanticists. Under Eckersberg
the Academy of Copenhagen was the centre of a healthy realism founded on
the Dutch, and some of the painters who received their training there
and laboured in later years in Dresden, Düsseldorf, and Munich spread
abroad the principles of this school.
[Illustration: SCHIRMER. AN ITALIAN LANDSCAPE.]
_J. C. Dahl_ taught as professor in the Academy of Dresden. At the
present time his Norwegian landscapes seem exceedingly old-fashioned,
but in the thirties they evidently must have been something absolutely
new, for they raised a hue and cry amongst the German painters as "the
most wild naturalism." In 1788 Johann Christian Clausen Dahl was born in
Bergen. He was the son of one of those Norwegian giants who are one day
tillers of the soil and on the morrow fishers or herdsmen and hunters,
who cross the sea in their youth as sailors and clear the waste land
when they return home. As he wandered with his father through the dense,
solitary pine forests, along abrupt precipices, sullen lakes, rushing
waterfalls, silvery shining glaciers, the majesty of Northern nature was
revealed to him, and he rendered them in little coloured drawings,
which, in spite of their awkward technique, bear witness to an
extraordinary freshness of observation. The course of study at the
Copenhagen Academy, whither he proceeded in his twentieth year, enabled
him to become acquainted with Everdingen and Ruysdael, and these two old
masters, who had also painted Norwegian landscapes, stimulated him to
further efforts.
Dahl became the first representative of Norwegian landscape painting,
and remained true to his country even when in 1819 he undertook a
professorship in Dresden. Italy and Germany occupied his brush as much
as Norway, but he was only himself when he worked amongst the Norwegian
cliffs. Breadth of painting and softness of atmosphere are wanting in
all his pictures. They are hard and dry in their effect, and not seldom
entirely conventional; especially the large works painted after 1830. In
them he gave the impression of a bewildering, babbling personality. They
have been swiftly conceived and swiftly painted, but without artistic
love and fine feeling. In his later years Dahl did not allow himself the
time to bury himself in nature quietly and with devotion, and
finally--especially in his moonlight pictures--took to using a
violet-blue, which has a very conventional effect. Everdingen sought by
preference for what was forceful and violently agitated in nature;
Ruysdael felt an enthusiasm for rushing mountain streams. But for Dahl
even these romantic elements of Northern nature were not enough. He
approached nature, not to interpret her simply, but to arrange his
effects. In his picture the wild Norwegian landscape had to be wilder
and more restless than in reality it is. Not patient enough to win all
its secrets from the savage mountain torrent, he forced together his
effects, made additions, brought confusion into his picture as a whole,
and a crudeness into the particular incidents. His large pictures have a
loud effect contrasted with the simple intuition of nature amongst the
Netherlanders. Many of them are merely fantastically irrational
compositions of motives which have been learned by heart.
But there were also years in which Dahl stood in the front rank of his
age, and even showed it the way to new aims. He certainly held that
position from 1820 to 1830 in those pictures in which, instead of making
romantic adaptations of Ruysdael and Everdingen, he resembled them by
rendering the weirdness and eeriness and the rough and wild features of
Norwegian scenery: red-brown heaths and brownish green turf-moors,
stunted oaks and dark pine forests, erratic blocks sown without design
amid the roots of trees, branches snapped by the storm and hanging as
they were broken, and trunks felled by the tempest and lying where they
fell. In certain pictures in the Bergen and Copenhagen Galleries he
pointed out the way to new aims. The tendency to gloom and seriousness
which reigns in those Dutch Romanticists has here yielded to what is
simple and familiar, to the homely joy of the people of the North in the
crisp, bright day and the wayward sunbeams. He loves the glimmer of
light upon the birch leaves and the peacefully rippling sea. Like Adrian
van der Neer, he studied with delight the wintry sky, the snow-clad
plains, and the night and the moonshine. He began to feel even the charm
of spring. Poor peasant cots are brightly and pleasantly perched upon
moist, green hills, as though he had quite forgotten what his age
demanded in "artistic composition." Or the summer day spreads opulent
and real between the cliffs, and the warm air vibrates over the fields.
Peasants and cattle, glimmering birches and village spires, stand
vigorously forth in the landscape; even the execution is so simple that
with all his richness of detail he succeeds in attaining a great effect.
It is felt that this painting has developed amid a virgin nature,
surrounded by the poetry of the fjord, the lofty cliff, and the torrent.
In the same measure the Dutch had not the feeling for quietude and
habitable, humble, and familiar places. And perhaps it was not by chance
that this reformer came from the most virgin country of Europe, from a
country that had had no share in any great artistic epoch of the past.
[Illustration: MORGENSTERN. A PEASANT COTTAGE (ETCHING).]
_Caspar David Friedrich_, that singular painter who carried on his
artistic work in Greifswald, and later in Dresden also, is, if anything,
almost more original and startling. Like Dahl, he studied under
Eckersberg, at the Academy in Copenhagen, and it was this elder artist
who opened his eyes to nature, in which he saw moods and humours as
romantic as they were modern. His work was not seen in a right light
until shown in the German Centenary Exhibition of 1906, when his just
place was first, in the history of art, assigned to him.
For Munich a similar importance was won by the Hamburg painter
_Christian Morgenstern_, who, like all artists of this group, imitated
the Dutch in the tone of his colour, though as a draughtsman he remained
a fresh and healthy son of nature. Even what he accomplished in all
naïveté between 1826 and 1829, through direct study of Hamburg
landscape, is something unique in the German production of that age. His
sketches and etchings of these years assure him a high place amongst the
earliest German "mood" painters, and show that as a landscapist he had
at that time made the furthest advance towards simplicity and intimacy
of feeling. A journey to Norway, undertaken in 1829, and a sojourn at
the Copenhagen Academy, where he worked up his Norwegian studies, only
extended his ability without altering his principles; and when he came
to Munich in the beginning of the thirties his new and personal
intuition of nature made a revolution in artistic circles. The landscape
painters learnt from him that Everdingen, Ruysdael, and Rembrandt were
contemporaries of Poussin, that foliage need not be an exercise of
style, and is able properly to indicate the nature of the tree. He
discovered the beauty of the Bavarian plateau for the Munich school.
Even the first picture that he brought with him from Hamburg displayed a
wide plain shadowed by clouds--a part of the Lüneberg heath--and to this
type of subject he remained faithful even in later days. Himself a child
of the plains, he sought for kindred motives in Bavaria, and found them
in rich store on the shore of the Isar, in the quarries near Polling, at
Peissenberg, and in the mossy region near Dachau. His pictures have not
the power of commanding the attention of an indifferent spectator, but
when they have been once looked into they are seen to be poetic, quiet,
harmless, sunny, and thoughtful. He delighted in whatever was ordinary
and unobtrusive, the gentle nature of the wood, the surroundings of the
village, everything homely and familiar. If Rottmann revelled in the
forms of Southern nature, Morgenstern abided by his native Germany;
where Lessing only listened to the rage of the hurricane, Morgenstern
hearkened to the quiet whisper of the breeze. The shadows of the clouds
and the radiance of the sun lie over the dark heath, the moonlight
streams dreamily over the quiet streets of the village, the waves break,
at one moment rushing noisily and at another gently caressing the shore.
Later, when he turned to the representation of the mountains, he lost
the intimacy of feeling which was in the beginning peculiar to him. In
mountain pictures, often as he attempted ravines, waterfalls, and snowy
Alpine summits, he never succeeded in doing anything eminently good.
These pictures have something petty and dismembered, and not the great,
simple stroke of his plains and skies.
What Morgenstern was for Munich, _Ludwig Gurlitt_ was for
Düsseldorf--the most eminent of the great Northern colony which migrated
thither in the thirties. His name is not to be found in manuals, and the
pictures of his later period which represent him in public galleries
seldom give a full idea of his importance. After a journey to Greece in
1859 he took to a brown tone, in which much is conventional. Moreover,
his retired life--he resided from 1848 to 1852 in a Saxon village, and
from 1859 to 1873 in Siebleben, near Gotha--contributed much to his
being forgotten by the world. But the history of art which seeks
operative forces must do him honour as the first healthy, realistic
landscape painter of Germany, and--still more--as one who opened the
eyes of a number of younger painters who have since come to fame.
Gurlitt was a native of Holstein, and, like Morgenstern, received his
first instruction in Hamburg, where at that time Bendixen, Vollmer, the
Lehmanns, and the Genslers formed an original group of artists. After
this, as in the case of Morgenstern also, there followed a longer
sojourn in Norway and Copenhagen. In Düsseldorf, where he then went, a
Jutland heath study made some sensation on his arrival. It was the first
landscape seen in Düsseldorf which had not been composed, and Schadow is
said to have come to Gurlitt's studio, accompanied by his pupils, to
behold the marvel. In 1836 he migrated to Munich, where Morgenstern had
worked before him, and here he produced a whole series of works, which
reveals an artist exceedingly independent in sentiment, and one who even
preserves his individuality in the presence of the Dutch. His pictures
were grey in tone, and not yellowish, like those of the Dutch; moreover,
they were less composed and less "intelligently" dressed out with
accessories than the pictures of Dahl; they were glances into nature
resulting from earnest, realistic striving. Even when he began to paint
Italian pictures, as he did after 1843, he preserved a straightforward
simplicity which was not understood by criticism in that age, though it
makes the more sympathetic appeal at the present day. The strength of
his realism lay, as was the case with all artists of those years, rather
in drawing; but at times he reaches, even in painting, a remarkable
clearness and delicacy, which at one time verges on the silver tone of
Canaletto, at another on the fine grey of Constable.
[Illustration: GURLITT. ON THE SABINE MOUNTAINS.]
Realism begins in German art with the entry of these Northern painters
into Düsseldorf and Munich. They were less affected by æsthetic
prejudices, and fresher and healthier than the Germans. Gurlitt was
specially their intellectual leader, the soul, the driving force of the
great movement which now followed. Roused by him, _Andreas Achenbach_
emancipated himself from the landscape of style, and, in the years from
1835 to 1839, painted Norwegian pictures even before he knew Norway.
Roused by Gurlitt, Achenbach set forth upon the pilgrimage thither, the
journey which was a voyage of discovery for German landscape painting.
Until Achenbach's death in 1905 he yearly exhibited works which were no
longer in touch with the surrounding efforts of younger men, and there
was an inclination to make little of his importance as a pioneer. What
is wanting in his pictures is artistic zeal; what he seems to have too
much of is routine. Andreas Achenbach is, as his portrait shows, a man
of great acuteness. From his clear, light blue eyes he looks sharply and
sagaciously into the world around; his short, thick-set figure, proud
and firm of carriage, in spite of years, bears witness to his tough
energy. His forehead, like Menzel's, is rather that of an architect than
of a poet; and his pictures correspond to his outward appearance. Each
one of his earlier good pictures was a battle fought and won. Realism
incarnate, a man from whom all visionary enthusiasm lay at a world-wide
distance, he conquered nature by masculine firmness and unexampled
perseverance. He appears as a _maître-peintre_, a man of cool, exact
talent with a clear and sober vision. The chief characteristic of his
organism was his eminent capacity for appreciating the artistic methods
of other artists, and adapting what was essential in them to his own
manner of production. One breathes more freely before the works of the
masters of Barbizon, and merely sees good pictures in those of
Achenbach. The former are captivating by their intimate penetration,
where he is striking by his bravura of execution. His landscapes have no
chance inspiration, no geniality. Everything is harmonised for the sake
of pictorial effect. The structure and scaffolding are of monumental
stability. Yet fine as his observation undoubtedly is, he has never
surprised the innermost working of nature, but merely turned her to
account for the production of pictures. For the French artists colour is
the pure expression of nature and of her inward humour, but for
Achenbach it is just the means for attaining an effectiveness similar to
that of the Dutch. Penetrating everything thoroughly with those
sparkling blue eyes of his, he learnt to render conscientiously and
firmly the forms of the earth and its outward aspect, but the moods of
its life appealing to the spirit like music were never disclosed to him.
The paintings of the Dutch attracted him to art, not the impulse to give
token to his own peculiar temperament. He thinks more of producing
pictures which may equal those of his forerunners in their merits than
of rendering the impression of nature which he has himself received. His
intelligence quickens at the study of the rules and theories set up by
the Dutch, and he seeks for spots in nature where he may exercise these
principles, but remains chill at the sight of sky and water, trees and
mountains. It is not mere love of nature that has guided his brush, but
a refined calculation of pictorial effect; and as he never went beyond
this endeavour after rounded expression, as it was understood by the
Dutch, though he certainly set German landscape free from a romantic
subjection to style like Schirmer's, he never led it to immediate
personal observation of nature. It is not the fragrance of nature that
is exhaled from his pictures, but the odour of oil and varnish; and as
the means he made use of to attain his effects never alter, the result
is frequently conventional and methodic.
[Illustration: ACHENBACH. SEA COAST AFTER A STORM.]
But this does not alter the fact that, when the development of German
landscape painting is in question, the name of Andreas Achenbach will be
always heard in connection with it. He united technical qualities of the
higher order with the capacity of impressing the public, and therefore
he completed the work that the Danes had begun. He was the reformer who
gave evidence that it was not alone by cliffs and baronial castles and
murmuring oaks that sentiment was to be awakened; he hated everything
unhealthy, mawkish, and vague, and by showing the claws of the lion of
realism in the very heart of the romantic period he came to have the
significance of a hero in German landscape painting. He forced demure
Lower German landscape to surrender to him its charms; he revealed the
fascination of Dutch canal scenes, with their quaint architecture and
their characteristic human figures; he went to the stormy, raging North
Sea, and opposed the giant forces of boisterous, unfettered nature to
the tame pictures of the school of Schirmer. Achenbach's earliest North
Sea pictures were exhibited at the very time when Heine's North Sea
series made its appearance, and they soon ousted the wrecks of the
French painter Gudin, which, up to that time, had dominated the picture
market. For the first time in the nineteenth century sea-pieces were so
painted that the water really seemed a fluent, agitated element, the
waves of which did not look as if they had been made of lead, and the
froth and foam of cotton wool. The things which he was specially
felicitous in painting were Rhine-land villages with red-tiled roofs,
Dutch canals with yellow sandbanks and running waves breaking at the
wooden buttresses of the harbour, Norwegian scenes with stubborn cliffs
and dark pines, wild torrents and roaring waterfalls. He did not paint
them better than Everdingen and Ruysdael had done, but he painted them
better than any of his contemporaries had it in their power to do.
As Gurlitt is connected with the present by Achenbach, Morgenstern is
connected with it by _Eduard Schleich_. The Munich picture rendering a
mood took the place of Rottmann's architectural pictures. Instead of the
fair forms of the earth's surface, artists began to study the play of
sunlight on the plain and amid the flight of the clouds, and instead of
the build of the landscape they turned to notice its atmospheric mood.
Through Morgenstern Schleich was specially directed to Ruysdael and
Goyen. In Ruysdael he was captivated by that profound seriousness and
that sombre observation of nature which corresponded to something in his
own humour; in Goyen by the pictorial harmony of sunlight, air, water,
and earth. Schleich has visited France, Belgium, Hungary, and Italy, yet
it is only by exception that he has painted anything but what the most
immediate vicinity of Munich might offer. He chose the plainest spot in
nature--a newly tilled field, a reedy pond, a stretch of brown moorland,
a pair of cottages and trees; and under the guidance of Goyen he
observed the changes of the sky with great care--the retreat of
thunderclouds, the sun shrouded by thin veils of haze, the tremulous
moonlight, or the hovering of the morning and evening mists. The Isar
district and the mossy Dachauer soil were his favourite places of
sojourn. He had a special preference for rain and moonlight and the mood
of autumn, in rendering which he toned brown and grey hues to fine Dutch
harmonies. His keynote was predominantly serious and elegiac, but he
also loved scenes in which there was a restless and violent change of
light. Over a wide plateau the sunlight spreads its radiance, whilst
from the side an army of dense thunderclouds approaches, threatening
storm and casting dark shadows. Over a monotonous plain, broken by
solitary clumps of trees, the warm summer rain falls dripping down.
Trees and shrubs throw light shadows, and the plain glistens in the
beams of the sun. Or else there is a wide expanse of moor. Darkling the
clouds advance, the rushes bend before the wind, and narrow strips of
moonlight glitter amid the slender reeds. By such works Schleich became
the head of the Munich school of landscape without having ever directed
the study of pupils. Through him and through Achenbach capacity for the
fresh observation of the life of nature was given to German painters.
[Illustration: ACHENBACH. FISHING BOATS IN THE NORTH SEA.]
Undoubtedly amongst the younger group of artists there was a great
difference in regard to choice of subject. The modern rendering of mood
has only had its origin in Germany; it could not finally develop itself
there. Just as figure painting, after making so vigorous a beginning
with Bürkel, turned to _genre_ painting in the hands of Enhuber and
Knaus, until it returned to its old course in Leibl, landscape also went
through the apprentice period of interesting subject, until it once more
recognised the poetry of simpleness. The course of civilisation itself
led it into these lines. When Morgenstern painted his first pictures the
post-chaise still rattled from village to village, but now the whistle
of the railway engine screams shrill as the first signal of a new age
throughout Europe. Up to that time the possibility of travelling had
been greatly circumscribed by the difficulties of traffic. But
facilitated arrangements of traffic brought with them such a desire for
travel as had never been before. In literature the revolution displayed
itself by the rise of books of travels as a new branch of fiction.
Hackländer sent many volumes of touring sketches into the market.
Theodor Mügge made Norway, Sweden, and Denmark the scene of his tales.
But America was the land where the Sesame was to be found, for Germany
had been set upon the war-trail with Cooper's Indians, it had Charles
Sealsfield to describe the grotesque mountain land of Mexico, the magic
of the prairie, and the landscapes of Susquehannah and the Mississippi,
and read Gerstäcker's, Balduin Möllhausen's, and Otto Ruppius'
transatlantic sketches with unwearying excitement. The painters who
found their greatest delight in seeing the world with the eyes of a
tourist also became cosmopolitan.
[Illusration: CALAME. LANDSCAPE.]
In Geneva _Alexander Calame_ brought Germany to the knowledge of what is
to be seen in Switzerland. Calame was, indeed, a dry, unpoetic
landscapist. He began as a young tradesman by making little coloured
views of Switzerland which foreigners were glad to bring away with them
as mementoes of their visits, just as they now do photographs. Even his
later pictures can only lay claim to the merit of such "mementoes of
Switzerland." His colour is insipid and monotonous, his atmosphere
heavy, his technique laborious. By painting he understood the
illumination of drawings, and his drawing was that of an engraver. An
excellent drawing-master, he possessed an unusual mastery of
perspective. On the other hand, all warmth and inward life are wanting
in his works. Sentiment has been replaced by correct manipulation, and
in the deep blue mirror of his Alpine lakes, as in the luminous red of
his Alpine summits, there is always to be seen the illuminator who has
first drawn the contours with a neat pencil and pedantic correctness.
His pictures are grandiose scenes of nature felt in a petty way--in
science too it is often the smallest spirit that seeks the greatest
heroes. "The Ruins of Pæstum," like "The Thunderstorm on the Handeck"
and "The Range of Monte-Rosa at Sunrise," merely attain an external,
scenical effect which is not improved by crude and unnatural contrasts
of light. And as, in later years, when orders accumulated, he fell a
victim to an astounding fertility, many of his works give one the
impression of a dexterous calligrapher incessantly repeating the same
ornamental letters. "_Un Calame, deux Calame, trois Calame--que de
calamités_," ran the phrase every year in the Paris Salon.
[Illustration: FLAMM. A SUMMER DAY.]
But if France remained cool he found the more numerous admirers in
Germany. When, in 1835, he exhibited his first pictures in Berlin, a
view of the Lake of Geneva, his appearance was at once hailed with the
warmest sympathy. The dexterity, the rounded form, the finish of his
pictures, were exactly what gave pleasure, and the distinctness of his
drawing made its impression. His lithograph studies of trees and his
landscape copies attained the importance of canonical value, and for
whole decades remained in use as a medium of instruction in drawing.
Amongst German painters _Carl Ludwig_, _Otto von Kameke_, and _Count
Stanislaus Kalkreuth_ were specially incited by Calame to turn to the
sublimity of Alpine nature. Desolate wastes of cliffs, still, clear blue
lakes, wild, plunging torrents, and mountain summits covered with
glaciers and glowing to rose colour in the reflection of the setting sun
are the elements of their pictures as of those of the Genevan master.
After Achenbach there came a whole series of artists from the North who
began to depict the mountains of their native Norway under the strong
colour effects of the Northern sun. The majestic formations of the
fjords, the emerald green walls of rock, the cloven valleys, the
terrible forest wildernesses, and the mountains of Norway dazzlingly
illuminated and reflecting themselves like glittering jewels in the
quiet waters of sapphire blue lakes, were interesting enough to afford
nourishment for more than one landscapist.
_Knud Baade_, who worked from 1842 in Munich, after a lengthy sojourn at
the Copenhagen Academy and with Dahl in Dresden, delighted in moonlight
scenes, gloomy fir forests, and midnight suns. The sea rises in waves
mountain high, and tosses mighty vessels like withered leaves or dashes
foaming against the cliffs of the shore. Fantastic clouds chase each
other across the sky, and the wan moonlight rocks unsteadily upon the
waves. More seldom he paints the sea lit up afar by the moon, or the
fjord with its meadows and silver birches; and in such plain pictures he
makes a far more attractive effect than in those which are wild and
ambitious, for his diffident, petty execution is, as a rule, but little
suited to restless and, as it were, dramatic scenes of nature.
Having come to Düsseldorf in 1841, _Hans Gude_ became the Calame of the
North. Achenbach taught him to approach the phenomena of nature boldly
and realistically, and not to be afraid of a rich and soft scale of
colour. Schirmer, the representative of Italian still landscape, guided
him to the acquisition of a certain large harmony and sense for style in
the structure of his pictures, to beauty of line and effective
disposition of great masses of light and shade. This quiet, sure-footed,
and robust realism, which had, at the same time, a gift of style, became
the chief characteristic of his Northern landscapes, in which, however,
the mutable and fleeting moods of nature were all the more neglected.
Here are Norwegian mountain landscapes with lakes, rivers, and
waterfalls, then pictures of the shore under the most varied phases of
light, or grand cliff scenery with a sombre sky and a sea in commotion.
Hans Gude, living from 1864 in Carlsruhe, and from 1880 in Berlin, is
one of those painters whom one esteems, but for whom it is not possible
to feel great enthusiasm--one of those conscientious workers who from
their very solidity run the risk of becoming tedious. His landscapes are
good gallery pictures, soberly and prosaically correct, and never
irritating, though at the same time they seldom kindle any warm feeling.
Like Gude, _Niels Björnson Möller_ devoted himself to pictures of the
shore and the sea. Undisturbed by men in his sequestered retreat,
_August Capellen_ gave way to the melancholy charms of the Norwegian
forest. He represented the tremulous clarity of the air above the
cliffs, old, shattered tree-trunks and green water plants, sleepy ponds,
and far prospects bounded by blue mountains; but he would have made an
effect of greater originality had he thought less of Schirmer's noble
line and compositions arranged in the grand style. _Morten-Müller_
became the specialist of the fir forest. His native woods where the
valleys stretch towards the high mountain region offered him motives,
which he worked up in large and excessively scenical pictures. His
strong point was the contrast between sunlight playing on the mountain
tops and mysterious darkness reigning in the forest depths, and his
pictures have many admirers on account of "their elegiac melancholy,
their minor key of touching sadness." The Norwegian spring changing the
earth into one carpet of moorland, broken by marshes, found its
delineator in _Erik Bodom_. _Ludwig Munthe_ became the painter of wintry
landscape in thaw, when the snow is riddled with holes and a dirty brown
crust of earth peeps from the dazzling mantle. A desolate field, a pair
of crippled trees stretching their naked branches to the dark-grey sky,
a swarm of crows and a drenched road marked with the tracks of wheels, a
tawny yellow patch of light gleaming through the cloud-bank and
reflected in the wayside puddles, such are the elements out of which one
of Munthe's landscapes is composed. Through _Eilert Adelsten Normann_
representations of the fjords gained currency in the picture market. His
specialty was the delineation of the steep and beetling rocky fastnesses
of Lofodden with their various reflections of light and colour, the
midnight sun glaring over the deep clear sea, the contrast between the
blue-black masses of the mountains and the gleaming fields of snow.
[Illustration: BAADE. MOONLIGHT NIGHT ON THE COAST.]
Others, such as _Ludwig Willroider_, _Louis Douzette_, and _Hermann
Eschke_, set themselves to observe the German heath and the German
forest from similar points of view; the one painted great masses of
mountain and giant trees, the other the setting sun, and the third the
sea. _Oswald Achenbach_, _Albert Flamm_, and _Ascan Lutteroth_ set out
once more on the pilgrimage to the South, where, in contrast to their
predecessors, they studied no longer the classic lines of nature in
Italy, but the splendour of varied effects of colour in the
neighbourhood of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples. The most enterprising
turned their backs on Europe altogether, and began to paint the primæval
forests of South America, to which Alexander Humboldt had drawn
attention, the azure and scarlet wonders of the tropics, and the gleam
and sparkle of the icy world at the ultimate limits of the Polar
regions. _Ferdinand Bellermann_ was honoured as a new Columbus when in
1842 he returned home with his sketches, botanically accurate as they
were, of the marvels of the virgin forest. _Eduard Hildebrandt_, who in
1843 had already gone through the Canary Islands, Italy, Sicily, North
Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Sahara, and the Northern sea of ice, at the
mandate of Frederich Wilhelm IV in 1862 undertook a voyage round the
world "to learn from personal view the phenomena that the sea, the air,
and the solid earth bring forth beneath the most various skies." _Eugen
Bracht_ traversed Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, and returned with a
multitude of studies from the sombre and majestic landscape of the
desert, and from that world of ruins and mountains in the East, and
developed them at home into as many pictures.
A modicum of praise is due to all these masters for having continually
widened the circuit of subject-matter, and gradually disclosed the whole
world; and if their works cannot be reckoned as the products of a
delicate landscape painting, that is a result of the same taste which
prescribed anecdotic and narrative subjects to the _genre_ picture of
those years. The landscape painters conquered the earth, but, above all,
those parts of it which were geographically remarkable. This they did in
the interest of the public. They went with a Baedeker in their pocket
into every quarter of the globe, brought with them all the carmine
necessary for sunsets, and set up their easels at every place marked
with an asterisk in the guidebook. And in these fair regions they noted
everything that was to be seen with the said Baedeker's assistance.
Through satisfying the interest of the tourist by a rendering, faithful
to a hair's breadth, of topographically instructive points, they could
best reckon on the sale of their productions.
At the same time, their pictures betray that, during this generation,
historical painting was throned on a summit whence it could dictate the
æsthetic catechism. The historical picture represented a humanity that
carried about with it the consciousness of its outward presence, draped
itself in front of the glass, and made an artificial study of every
gesture and every expression of emotion. _Genre_ painting followed, and
rendered the true spirit of life, illustrating it histrionically, but
without surprising it in its unconstrained working. And so trees,
mountains, and clouds also were forced to lay aside the innocence of
unconscious being and wrap themselves in the cloak of affectation.
Simple reality in its quiet, delicate beauty, the homely "mood" of
nature, touching the forms of landscape with the play of light and air,
had nothing to tell an age overstrained by the heroics of history and
the grimaces of _genre_ painting. A more powerful stimulus was
necessary. So the landscapists also were forced to seek nature where she
was histrionic and came forth in blustering magnificence; they were
forced to send off brilliant pyrotechnics to fire out sun, moon, and
stars in order to be heard, or, more literally, seen.
Instruction or theatrical effect--the aim of historical painting--had
also to be that of the landscape painter. And as railroads are
cosmopolitan arrangements, he was in a position to satisfy both demands
with promptitude. As historical painters in the chase of striking
subjects directed their gaze to the farthest historical horizon, and the
_genre_ painters sought to take their public captive principally through
what was alien and strange, Oriental and Italian, the landscape
painters, too, found their highest aim in the widest possible expansion
of the geographical horizon. "Have these good people not been born
anywhere in particular?" asked Courbet, when he contemplated the German
landscapes in the Munich Exhibition of 1869. What would first strike the
inhabitant of a Northern country in foreign lands was made the theme of
the majority of the pictures. But as the historical painting, in
illustrating all the great dramatic scenes from the Trojan War to the
French Revolution, yielded at one time to a pædagogical doctrinaire
tendency and at another to theatrical impassionedness, so landscape
painting on its cosmopolitan excursions became partly a dry synopsis of
famous regions, only justifiable as a memento of travel, partly a
tricked-out piece of effect which, like everything obtrusive, soon lost
its charm. Pictures of the first description which chiefly borrowed
their motives from Alpine nature, so imposing in its impressiveness of
form--grand masses of rock, glaciers, snow-fields, and abrupt
precipices--only needed to have the fidelity of a portrait. Where that
was given, the public, guided by the instinct for what is majestic and
beautiful in nature, stood before them quite content, while Alpine
travellers instructed the laity that the deep blue snow of the picture
was no exaggeration, but a phenomenon of the mountain world which had
been correctly reproduced. In all these cases there can be no possible
doubt about geographical position, but there is seldom any need to make
inquiries after the artist. The interest which they excite is purely of
a topographical order; otherwise they bear the stamp of ordinary prose,
of the aridity and unattractiveness which always creeps in as a
consequence of pure objectivity. Works of the second description, which
depict exotic regions, striking by the strangeness of various phenomena
of light and the splendour and glow of colour, are generally irritating
by their professional effort to display "mood." The old masters revealed
"mood" without intending to do so, because they approached nature
piously and with a wealth of feeling. The new masters obtain a purely
external effect, because they strain after a "mood" in their painting
without feeling it; and though art does not exclude the choice of exotic
subjects, it is not healthy when a tendency of this sort becomes
universal. Really superior art will, from principle, never seek the
charm of what is strange and distant, since it possesses the magical
gift of bestowing the deepest interest on what lies nearest to it. In
addition to this, such effects are as hard to seize as the moment of
most intense excitement in the historical picture. As an historical
painter Delacroix could render it, and Turner as a landscape painter,
but geniuses like Delacroix and Turner are not born every day. As these
phenomena were painted at the time in Germany, the right "mood" was not
excited by them, but merely a frigid curiosity. Almost all landscapes of
these years create an effect merely through their subject; they are
entertaining, astonishing, instructive, but the poetry of nature has not
yet been aroused. It could only reveal itself when the preponderance of
interest in mere subject was no longer allowed. As the figure painters
at last disdained through narrative and "points" to win the applause of
those who had no sensitiveness for art, so the landscape painters were
obliged to cease from giving geographical instruction by the
representation of nature as beloved by tourists, and to give up forcing
a "mood" in their pictures by a subterfuge. The necessary degree of
artistic absorption could only go hand in hand with a revolt against
purely objective interest of motive, and with a strenuous effort at the
representation of familiar nature in the intimate charm of its moods of
light and atmosphere. It was necessary for refinement of taste to follow
on the expression of subject-matter; and this impulse had to bring
artists back to the path struck by Dahl, Morgenstern, and Gurlitt. To
unite the simple, moving, and tender observation of those older artists
with richer and more complex methods of expression was the task given to
the next generation in France, where _paysage intime_, the most refined
and delicate issue of the century, grew to maturity in the very years
when German landscape painting roamed through the world with the joy of
an explorer.