GERMAN ART.
An "Exhibition of the Works of Modern German Artists" is open to the public at No. 168 New Bond Street. The name of Leasing heads the published list of contributing painters, and is the most eminent on the roll : his handiwork, however, does not appear. Some pictures have been added to the collection since its opening on the 2d instant ; but it still remains incomplete.
Being unaware of the antecedents, aims, and management of the ex- hibition, we can speak of it only as of the certain number of pictures as yet arrived—some two score or so. Landscapes predominate—by Achenbach, Weber, Hildebrandt, Leu, and others; Mticke, the author of that very lovely St. Catharine and Angels the engraving of which Englishmen know and admire, sends an exceedingly poor "Ecce Homo." A garden-scene with an old man smoking his pipe as he contemplates his bee-hives, by Kraus, and a small unnamed picture of children with paper lanterns, pleased us best among the figure subjects, as the most natural in style and treatment. The degrees of merit and demerit vary, of course, in the others and in the landscapes : but a few words of general criticism may suffice. They display generally a low, gloomy, slaty tone, a want of the signs of a hearty love of nature or feeling for art, and a manner formed upon that of the old masters in the spirit rather of apprentices than of students. Their best feature consists in the study of form ; yet this too looks more like observation or reminiscence than forcible representation. In England, artists, and even amateurs, have a way of their own of looking at nature—comparatively free and unconventional—from which we would venture to predict more hopeful results than from the vision— trained, it may be, but hoodwinked—of these German painters.
We can hardly accept the exhibition, however, as any serious aid to the knowledge of German art in this country. The announcement of it was tempting ; but the realization produces an incomplete if not an er- roneous impression,
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