Richard Muther

“ In reality one cannot venture on more than a swift glance into blinding masses of light, but the impression remained in the painter’s memory. He painted what he saw, and knew how to make his effect convincing. And at the same time his composition became ever freer and easier, the work of his brush ever more fragrant and unfettered, the colouring and total sentiment of the picture ever more imaginative and like those of a fairy-tale. His world is a land of sun, where the reality of things vanishes, and the light shed between the eye and the objects of vision is the only thing that lives. ”

“ He scrutinises himself in despair, and one day comes to feel that his power of production is exhausted. Splendid and unapproachable, from the walls of the galleries, the art of the classic masters stares him in the face; and he enters into a dramatic life-and-death struggle with it. He will not be Feuerbach, and cannot become a Classic. The curtain falls and the tragedy is over. Such destinies have been before in the world, no doubt; but in our time they have multiplied, and seem so much the sadder because they never come to the average man, but only to great and peculiarly gifted natures. ”

“ The towering oaks are the buttresses, the tracery of branches the choir screen, the clouds the incense, the wind sighing through the boughs the peal of the organ, and the sun the altar-piece. Man is once more a fire-worshipper, as in his childhood; the church has become the world, and the world has become the church.
How the spirit soars at the trill of a blackbird beneath the leafy roof of mighty primæval oaks! One feels as though one had been transplanted into the Saturnian age, when men lived a joyous, unchequered life in holy unison with nature. ”

“ Amongst trees he did not care to paint the oak, the favourite tree with all artists who have a passion for form, nor the chestnut, nor the elm, but preferred to summon, amid the delicate play of sunbeams, the aspen, the poplar, the alder, the birch with its white slender stem and its pale, tremulous leaves, and the willow with its light foliage. In Rousseau a tree is a proud, toughly knotted personality, a noble, self-conscious creation; in Corot it is a soft tremulous being rocking in the fragrant air, in which it whispers and murmurs of love and joy. ”

“ What this age possessed of beauty and charm, its peculiar grace and wanton vivacity, its reckless, inassailable frivolity, was proper also to its art. Light and gracious as the whole life of that harmless, merry generation, it glided through the age untroubled, led by Cupidons, and kissed by the wandering winds. It is only to-day that we understand once more the charming masters of that elegant century.
The painters of every epoch looked at nature with their own eyes, and also with the eyes of their age and of their country. ”

“ Almost at the same hour a tornado swept through the branches of the old French oaks, and bent the rustling corn; the sky was covered with clouds, and the waters, which had been hard-bound for so long, sped purling once more along their wonted course. The little paper temples, built on classic heights, toppled down, and there rose lowly rustic cottages, from the chimneys of which the smoke mounted wavering to the sky. Nature awoke from her wintry sleep, and the spring of modern landscape painting broke with its sadness and its smiles. ”

“ As Frans Hals in his last days, when his fellow-creatures allowed him only the bare necessities of life, accorded to the figures in his pictures only so much colour as would give them the appearance of living human beings; as Rembrandt’s magical golden tone changed in the sad days of his bankruptcy into a sullen, monotonous brown, so a deep sadness broods over the pictures of Feuerbach,—something that savours of memory and remorse, the mournful atmosphere and dark mood of evening which the bat loves. Even as a colourist he has the melancholy lassitude of the end of the century. ”

“ Whoever loves painting for painting’s sake need never visit the museum.
There there are battles, conflagrations, floods, and earthquakes; heaven and earth are in commotion. Giants hurl rocks at one another, and try, like Jupiter, to shake the earth with their frown. All of them delight in force, and bring their muscles into play like athletes. But the painter himself is no athlete, no giant as Thorwaldsen called him, and no genius as he fancied himself to be. ”

“ Madame Copia, the wife of the engraver, with her delicately veiled eyes, has become in Prudhon’s hands the very essence of a beautiful soul. A languishing weariness, a remarkable 206 mingling of Creole grace and gentle melancholy, breathes over the portrait of the Empress Josephine. She is represented seated on a grassy bank in a dignified yet negligent attitude, her head slightly bent, her gaze wandering afar with a look of uncertain inquiry, as though she had some faint presentiment of her coming misfortune; and the dreamy twilight-shadows of a mysterious landscape are gathering around her. ”

“ Delacroix, all brain, caught fire from his inward visions; Courbet, all eye and maw, with the sensuousness of an epicure and the satisfaction of a gourmet, gloats over the shining vision of things which can be devoured—a Gargantua with a monstrous appetite, he buried himself in the navel of the generous earth. Plants, fruit, and vegetables take voluptuous life beneath his brush. He triumphs when he has to paint a déjeuner with oysters, lemons, turkeys, fish, and pheasants. His mouth waters when he heaps into a picture of still-life all manner of delicious eatables. ”

“ The atmosphere of Vienna sends forth a soft and sensual breath which encircles us as though with women’s arms; songs and dances slumber in the air, waiting only for a call to be awakened. Vienna is a place for enjoyment rather than for work, for pensive dreaming rather than for sober wakefulness of mind. Moritz Schwind was a child of this city of beautiful women, songs, and dances, as may be observed in the feminine nature of his art, in its melody and rhythm: in music, indeed, it had its source. ”

“ Without doubt it is a pleasure to look at her fresh and sunny maiden picture of 1840, “Ploughing in Nivernois,” with its yoke of six oxen, its rich red-brown soil turned up into furrows, and its wide, bright, simple, and laughing landscape beneath the clear blue sky. She had all the qualities which may be appreciated without one’s being an epicure of art—great anatomical knowledge, dexterous technique, charming and seductive colouring. ”

“ Nowhere is there anything that takes hold upon the soul, nowhere any touch to prove that the artist has felt anything in his painting, or force the beholder to feel for himself. The unvarying faces of his figures, with their eternal dark-rimmed eyes, resemble not living human beings but painted plaster casts. One would take his “Cleopatra,” apathetically observing the operation of the poison, to be stuffed, like the panther at her feet. One seeks in vain for a figure that is sincere or interesting, for a face alluring in its truth to nature. ”

“ The nature of Théodore Rousseau was devoid of all excitable enthusiasm. Thus the world he painted became something austere, earnest, and inaccessible beneath his hands. He lived in it alone, fleeing from his fellows, and for this reason human figures are seldom to be found in his pictures. He loved to paint nature on cold, grey impassive days, when the trees cast great shadows and forms stand out forcibly against the sky. He is not the painter of morning and evening twilight. There is no awakening and no dawn, no charm in these landscapes and no youth. ”

“ In her heart as in nature it is spring. Yet even as a landscape painter Max generally has that tender, suffering trait which runs through his creative work elsewhere. Twilight, autumn, pale sky and dead leaves have made the deepest impression on his spirit. Thin, half-stunted trees, in the leaves of which the evening wind is playing, grow upon an undulating, poverty-stricken soil. The landscape spreads around with a kind of lyrical melancholy: a region which gives no exuberant assurance of being beautiful, but which, in its poverty, attunes the mind to melancholy ”

“ 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 landscape painter through and through—almost in Bœcklin’s sense, who transformed the temper of Nature into the contemplation of living beings—he spoke of the rest and peace of German forests, of that hour of summer’s night when no wind blows, no leaflet moves, when to the solitary wanderer in the woods the mists rising from the meadows are transformed into white veils of the elves, and the gold-rimmed waves of the sea into the yellow hair of mermaids frolicking in the moonlight to the magic notes of their golden harps. ”

“ All effects are attained with the minimum expenditure of strength and material. The drawing lies as if behind colour that has been blown on to the canvas; it is as if one looked through a thin gauze into the distance. Whoever has studied reality so many years, with patient and observant eye, as Corot did, whoever has daily satiated his imagination with the impressions of nature, may finally venture on painting, not this or that scenery, but the fragrance, the very essence of things, and render merely his own spirit and his own visions free from all earthly and retarding accessories. ”

“ The god himself, who in the midst of a sea of light ascends into heaven in a golden chariot drawn by radiant steeds, shows in his sturdy limbs and attitude ready for defence, and in his wrathful face, no trace of the proud majesty and joyous splendour which Greece connected with the name of Apollo. He is a mortal who has fought and conquered, not a god who triumphs in tranquil power. He is Delacroix, not Rubens; a Titan, not an Olympian god.
The artistic power in Delacroix could in no wise submit to the confinement imposed by the French spirit of his time. ”

“ How much may be felt and thought when one saunters of a dreamy evening, lost in one’s own meditations, across the heath of the plateau de la Belle Croix and through the arching oaks of Bas Bréau to Barbizon, the Mecca of modern art, where the secrets of paysage intime were revealed to the Parisian landscape painters by the nymph of Fontainebleau! There was a time when men built their Gothic cathedrals soaring into the sky, after the model of the majestic palaces of the trees. ”

“ Seduced by beauty, he renounced all irony, thought only of those big, wide-opened eyes of velvet, those rosy young lips; of that warm carnation and the elegant slimness of that soft young neck that rose in delicate contour from the shoulders. Or again, that marvellous double portrait of La Maja in the Academy of San Fernando: a young girl painted once clothed and once nude, both pictures in exactly the same pose, and both flooded with the same extraordinary sensuous charm. This is not the uncertain, sarcastic painter of those State pictures. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These he found in that time of evening, which one might call Henner’s hour, when the landscape, overshadowed by the twilight, gradually loses colour, and only a small blue space in the sky or a silent forest-lake still for a moment preserves the reflection of vanishing daylight. In this tranquil harmony of nature after sunset, the white pallor of the human body seems to have absorbed all the daylight and to be giving it forth again, while the surrounding landscape is already merging into colourless shadow. ”

“ In his pictures there is something of Byronic poetry; the conception is rich and powerful, the symphony of colour passionately dramatic. In every one of his landscapes there breathes the human soul with its unrest, its hopelessness, and its doubts. Huet was the child of an epoch, which at one moment exulted to the skies and at another sorrowed to death in the most violent contrast; and he has proclaimed this temper of the age with all the freedom and power possible, where it is only earth and sky, clouds and trees that are the medium of expression. ”

“ Tall cavaliers advance to their sprightly partners, gossip and smiles fly around, Knights of Malta and abbés hang over the chairs and pay their court. Yes, this autumn of the old French culture was of a marvellous beauty for the fortunate, and those fortunate ones knew, as no other generation has ever done, how to enjoy life with serenity, in a fairy glamour of rooms gleaming with Venetian chandeliers, where rosy Cupidons laughed down bewitchingly from their light, gold moulded panels. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Menzel was a strenuous worker, who never knew the passion for woman, either because he had no time for it, or because he despised women after being despised by them as a poor, hard-featured student of art; a man whose great bald head appeared at Berlin subscription-balls amid groups of brilliant cavaliers and queens of beauty, fashion, and grace, surrounded by the rustle of their silks and in the whirlpool of a dancing throng, gleaming with colour and sparkling with gold and jewels ”

“ He delighted in an agitated sky, in clouds driven before the wind and losing their form in indeterminate contours; in nature he saw merely reflections of his own restless spirit, striving after colour and movement. Dawson painted those clouds which stand firm in the sky like piles of building—cloud-cathedrals, as Ruskin has called them. There are pictures of his consisting of almost nothing but great clouds. But that wide space, the earth, which our eyes regard as their own peculiar domain, is wanting. ”

“ They do not speak, and do not laugh, and do not cry; they know no passions and sorrows which express themselves by the straining of the limbs. Everything bears the impress of sublime peace, of that same peace by which the works of Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, and Burne-Jones are to be distinguished from the ecstatic and sentimental tirades of the Romanticists. In Feuerbach’s works this is the stamp of his own nature. The antique beauty becomes shrouded in a mysterious veil; and life is illuminated as by a mournful light, which rests over bygone worlds. ”

“ Fromentin’s East is Algiers. While Marilhat tried to render the marvellous clearness of the Southern light, and Decamps depicted the glowing heat of the East, its dark brooding sky in the sultry hours of summer and the grand outlines of its landscape, Fromentin has tried—and perhaps with too much system—to express the grace and brilliant spirit of the East. Taste, refinement, ductility, distinction of colouring, and grace of line are his special qualities. His Arabs galloping on their beautiful white horses have an inimitable chivalry; they are true princes in every pose and movement. ”

“ In the studio of the master were the finest blossoms of all epochs of art; richly ornamented German chests of the Renaissance stood near Chinese idols and Greek terra-cotta, Smyrna carpets and Gobelins, and old Italian and Netherlandish pictures were mingled with antique and mediæval weapons. And amid this rich still-life of splendid vessels, weapons, sculpture, and costly stuffs and costumes, which crowded all the walls and corners, there rose to the surface as further pieces of decoration a velvet coat, a pair of riding breeches, and a smart pair of Wallenstein boots. ”

“ At one time he paints the atmosphere, veiling the contours of objects with a light mist recalling Corot, and yet saturated with clear sunshine; at another he sends his heavy, fattened droves in the afternoon across field-paths bright in the sunlight and dark green meadows, or places them beneath a sky where dense thunderclouds are swiftly rolling up. Troyon is no poet, but a born painter, belonging to the irrepressibly forceful family of Jordaens and Courbet, a maître peintre of strength and plastic genius, as healthy as he is splendid in colour. ”

“ A portion of Delacroix’s charm in colour descended to Eugène Isabey. He is certainly not a great artist, but a delightful, sympathetic individuality, a painter who affords one pleasure even at this day. Amid the group of Classicists of his time he has the effect of a beautiful patch of colour, of a palette on which shades of tender blue, mauve, lilac, brilliant green, silver-grey, red faded by sunshine, and opalescent mother-of-pearl combine in subtle harmony. ”

“ But, compared with the orgies of colour indulged in by Romanticism, his works are generally characterised by the most delicate reserve in painting. A bright silvery sheet of water and the ivory skin of a nymph are usually the only touches of colour that hover in the pearly grey mist of his pictures. As a man Corot avoided all dramas and strong contrasts; everything abrupt or loud was repellent to his nature. Thus it was that the painter, too, preferred the clear grey hours of evening, in which nature envelops herself as if in a delicate, melting veil of gauze. ”

“ But the “Symposium of Plato” will always assert its high value as one of the finest pictorial creations of an imagination nourished on the great art of the ancients, and filled brimful with the splendour of the antique world. There is nothing in it superfluous, nothing accidental. The noblest simplicity of speech, a Greek rhythm in all gradations, the beautiful lines of bas-relief, decisive colour and stringent form—that is the groundwork of Feuerbach’s art. And through it there speaks a spirit preoccupied with greatness and heroism. ”

“ At one time he renders the morning mist lying over the fields, at another the haze of sultry noon, veiling and as it were absorbing the outlines and colours of all objects, the light of sunset streaming over field and woodland with a tender, tremulous glimmering, the delicate silver tone which veils the landscape on clear moonlight nights.
There is not another artist of the century who renders night as Millet does in his pastels. ”

“ The brightest sunshine laughed over the Greece of the Renaissance; over that of Feuerbach there rests a rainy, overcast November mood. Even works of his like the “Children on the Sea-shore” and the “Idyll” reveal a pained and suffering conception of nature, that tender and subdued spirit that Burne-Jones has; it is as if these blossoms of humanity were there to waste away in buds that never come to fruition, as if it were no longer possible to breathe into creation the true joyousness of youth. ”

“ This Zeitgeist, this spirit of the age which had grown earnest, necessarily guided art into another course; the painted humour and childlike optimism of the first genre painters began to turn out a lie. In spite of Schiller, art cannot be blithe with sincerity when life is earnest. It can laugh with the muscles of the face, but the laughter is mirthless; it may haughtily declare itself in favour of some consecrated precinct, in which nothing of the battles and struggles of the outside world is allowed to echo; but, for all that, harsh reality demands its rights. ”

“ This divine, spiritual sea of light, this fairyland of adjusted light and shade, is the business of painting: why should we fight against nature, and not allow every art to do what it alone can do and do best? ”

“ Every day, when nature put on her spring garb, he sailed along the banks in a small craft, with his son Charles. His most vigorous works were executed in the cabin of this vessel: spirited sketches of regions delicately veiled in mist and bound with a magical charm of peace, regions with the moon above them, shedding its clear, silver light—refined etchings which assure him a place of honour in the history of modern etching. The painter of the banks of the Oise saw everything with the curiosity and the love of a child, and remained always a naïve artist in spite of all his dexterity. ”