RICHARD WITHER.* IT may be an open question in what
country the best pictures of modern art were painted, but the most exhaustive book on the subject seems decidedly to have been written at Munich. Herr Richard Muther, who is at the head of the State collection of prints and engravings, has furnished all lovers of modern painting with complete information as to its origin and development. His three volumes describe the work, and in most cases give a brief sketch of the lives, of 1,417 artists. They contain 1,300 illustrations sufficiently good to recall the originals to the reader's memory. The book is characterised by large-mindedness, and freedom from national prejudice. The author has a keen eye for the literary movements and the surroundings which have inspired the painting of the nineteenth century, and have alternately awakened in it the throbbing pulse of life, or infused into its veins the subtle poison of decay. He also possesses an enviable privilege. Like the artists whom he criticises, he believes with the unfaltering confidence of rising strength in the powers of the day and the promises of the morrow. To him and to them routine is the curse, imitation the peril, tradition the doom of all true artistic inspiration. For moderns such
* History of Painting in the Nineteenth Century. By Richard Danther. Munich
Q. Birth. as he, the classical days, the days of the union of Faust and• Helena, are indeed a thing of the past. Winkelman dwindles down to a misleading person, to the inventor of the antiquarian formula, by which the Germans were cheated of their Shakespeare, when the inspired poet of The Robbers became the constructive artist who wrote The Bride of Messina and when the glowing ardours of the creator of Getz and Werther, chilled by contact with the marble of classic beauty, were petrified into the statuesque grandeur of Iphigenia and The Natural Daughter. The frankness of the avowal is a source of relief to us. Henceforth we know where to look for the victims which are to bleed under the knife of this modern Calohas. To the theory of La Bruyere, according to which the imitation of the ancients is the sole criterion of excellence, to "this idealism of all ages of decline," the author opposes the method which governs the research of Renan, the criticism of Taiue, and the drama of Ibsen. The a priori conception of beauty vanishes, art is the supreme ex- pression of national life, the unavoidable and necessary result of individual character, of the existing political and social conditions, the language constructed by every nation according to the dictates of its innermost life. Herr Muther quotes Diirer : " Truly, art is hidden in nature ; whoever suooeeda in extricating it, conquers it." He also quotes Ibsen : " A normally constructed truth reaches the age of twelve, fifteen, twenty years at the outside," and from this depressing state- ment he draws the conclusion that the truth of previous judg- ments on modern art has reached the dangerous age where it begins to turn into falsehood. The weapon is double-edged. The doctrine which denies the possibility of lasting conolusiona resigns itself to the fate that its own artistic perception must stand or fall according to the varying moods of the hour. Examples will show how thoroughly the author submits to the verdict of his own teaching. Who but Zola could be the literary godfather of naturalism in painting,—Zola, whose maxim, " L'art, c'est la nature, vue a travera an temperament," is Herr Muther's favourite and constantly recurring interpre- tation of realistic art, Nevertheless, the author, at the end of Vol. III., sobers down to this unexpected avowal :— "In the days when Zola reigned supreme, the walls of exhibi- tions were almost exclusively covered with subjects taken from modern rural and factory life, Prose and the struggle for existence confronted us everywhere. Nowadays the exclamation of Louie XIV., Otez-moi ces magas, seems to have become the watchword of the intellectual upper ten thousand. Scenes from. the Bible, pagan mythology, and saintly legends predominate. Music is in the air. A hazy archaism supersedes naturalism, a mystical chiaroscuro, harmonies in light blue, pale grey, or pink, arrangements in orange or opal, replace the glaring light of day.
The wearisome monotony of life made the soul more sen- sitive to the subtle charm of ancient myths, the beauty of which
we have learnt to see with a more childlike intuition, since the void created by their absence has been brought home to us. We have become more religious, more desirous of faith. Positivist philosophy promoted but did not satisfy research, and a yearning for the supernatural was the ultimate result."
These remarks are absolutely true, but we are somewhat sur- prised to read them just after a eulogy of realism by one of its most convinced adherents. For this new idealism is but another expression of that very idealism of classical days, for which Herr Mother seemed, until just now, to have nothing but harsh condemnation and unmitigated contempt. If there- fore we accept his guidance, we must be prepared for sudden changes and unforeseen evolutions. The criticism of to-day is not answerable for the changing mood of to-morrow ; it follows the fashion of the hour and does not lead, and we may have to burn what we were formerly told to adore.
A retrospective glance at the development of art since the sixteenth century is Herr Muther's introduction to the history of modern painting. The Italians of the Cinque-cento had forgotten the precept of their teacher, Michael Angelo, that " he who walks behind others will never succeed in overtaking them." The first stage on the journey from heaven to earth, to the conquest of reality, was the study of classical art. The worship of plastic, sensuous beauty supplied the Christian ideal. Instead of the living, contemporary world, which the great masters of the fourteenth century had endowed with immortal life, this new generation borrowed its subjects from ideal types, and the art of the Renaissance perished on the Italian soil which had witnessed its glory. The new artistic formula found expression at the other pole of European culture, in the country where political freedom had paved the way for national greatness, inthe England of the eighteenth century. An English school of painting received its impulse from tb e Dutch, while De Foe, Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith depicted contemporary life, its daily joys, sorrows, and struggles, and the stage exchanged its solemn Roman dress for the homely garb of the rising middle classes. The plebeian art of Hogarth marks a new departure ; David Young's Thoughts on Original Works, Shaftesbnry's axiom " that truth and nature constitute beauty," modified the a3sthetic code. The Italians had proclaimed the supreme dominion of form. Colour was the creed in which the Dutch believed. British artists first insisted on the necessity of expressing character, of reproducing individual life and the painter's immediate surroundings. It so happened that the greatest among these English reformers, Sir Joshua Reynolds, was not only a great painter, but also a great scholar. He learnt the secrets of his craft from Titian and from Michael Angelo before he came back to England to illustrate the history of a great age, with the portraits of the most famous or the most charming of his contemporaries. The work of his great rival Gainsborough, its softened grace and melancholy charm, reveal characteristic qualities of the coming romantic age. In his landscapes he is the first painter of the paysage intime, discovered by James Thomson thirty years before J. J. Rousseau.
The English painted what they saw. The French, Watteau, Lancret, Pater, Boucher, and Fragonard, evoked, in park and drawing-room, an artificial world, and celebrated the vanishing splendour of a doomed society, which Gretna, inspired by Rousseau, in vain admonished on canvas. In Lessing's days, Germany had only Chodowiecky to boast of. The greatest revolutionary, the pioneer of " Impressionistes " and " Decadents," appeared in the country which had en- gendered the grandest visions of mysticism. Goya, the Nihilist, is Muther's favourite, but he fails to show that an incomparably greater artist than Goya—Velasquez--is not less " modern " than he. It is a common error with people to think they have invented, when, in reality, they have only forgotten or remembered. The nineteenth century opens with the history of classic reaction, with the art of pro- ducing colourless "bloodless statues." Germany admired Carstens, a noble dreamer, but no painter. France pro- duced David, who ruled supreme down to Henner, Bau- dry, Regnault, and Rochegrosse. The romantic move- ment did not extricate art from the dilemma in which these retrograde tendencies had involved it ; for it main- tained the doctrine that contemporary life is not an ade- quate subject for painters. Herr Muther, when speaking of Overbeck, Gteinle, and the Dusseldorf School, strives hard to do justice to tendencies he dislikes. His patience is ex- hausted when Munich comes to the front. The Cartoons of Cornelius are condemned as " pensums in Michael Angelo's manner." Kaulbach's frivolous satire fares worse. Two artists of those days win his heart ; the majestic Rethel, and Moritz Schwind, whose fancy leads us back into fairy-land. Artists such as these knew how to draw and to construct their pictures. The French and the Belgians reminded them that colour existed. After the International Exhibition of 1842, the younger German generation went to Paris and Brussels. In their ranks were Feuerbach, Leasing, Piloty, Menzel; later on, Gabriel Max and Makart.
At this stage of Herr Muther's narrative there is a break. Vol. II. takes us a hundred years back, to the great masters of drawing and the caricaturists, as the first who considered modern life worth noticing. Once more the English are to the front, Rowlandson, Cruiksha.nk, Keene, Leech, and Du Manrier. With Oberliinder and Busch German comic art became international. In France, Rabelais inspired Daumier; Balzac influenced Gavarni, and Cham became the satirist of the Second Empire. Drawing, however, is a mere intermezzo ; we are taken back to the English contemporaries of Sir Joshua, the painters of genre, and through them we reach the Continental military painters. Little country towns and villages were celebrated in idylls; eastern and mountain scenery abounded. In the meantime politics dramatised art.
From Delacroix's picture of the barricades of 1830, Muther dates the birth of Naturalism. But genius defies chronology.
The first "plain air" work of the Continent bears the date of 1805, and is signed Otto Runge, Hamburg. Turner, the greatest "Impressioniste," the herald of light, was Napoleon's contem- porary. It was not through Turner, who remains unrivalled and solitary, but through Constable and Bonington, that the English once more taught the Continent. The full light of Herr Muther's work is concentrated on the school of Barbizon, the little village near Fontainebleau, where the greatest of French landscape painters created the paysage intime, the climax and triumph of modern art. What they discovered in woods and fields in the varying effects of full daylight was fixed by Manet on the canvas which illustrated modern so-called high life. The new technical art, the fiat lux of the colourists, was realised. From New York to St. Petersburg, from Japan to Rome, Madrid, and Copenhagen, great representatives of modern art compete for imperishable fame.
But once more their paths have divided, and identical definitions fail to convey identical ideas. At the helm of French Realism stands Courbet, Caravaggio's pupil, the brutal, cynical painter of democracy, the preacher of the gospel of ugliness, the propounder of "la v6rite vraie." In England, the foremost realists are Preraphaelites, who place their technical skill at the service of lofty ideals, of the highest psychological and religious problems. Velasquez taught Millet the secret of colour, but like Dante Rossetti and Burne-Jones, Millet strove after the revelation of spiritual life as the highest aim of the artist. Paris de Chavannes and his disciples in France, and nearly all the greatest living artists, bold similar convictions. Lenbach, the unrivalled portrait-painter of Germany ; Menzel, a genius of well-nigh unlimited power ; Leibl, one of the metres. peintres of the age; Boklin, whose potent art evokes fantastic visions ; Herkomer, for whom the soul has no secrets,— much as they differ in other respects, proclaim the triumph of the mental over the material world. Idealism is not lowered, because idealists know how to paint, and the public has learnt how to see. The realm of beauty is enlarged. It receives the disinherited, the poor, all the valiant toilers in the battle of life, and prefers the light and charm from within to the pathos of the academical pose of the past. The book which tells the tale of this moral conquest marks a progress, not only in art, but in life.
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