Richard Muther

“ On a torn visiting-card could still be read the name, Baron Gros. A little farther on they saw the corpse, and as they were afraid to touch a drowned man, they drew lots with straws to decide which of them should pull him out. “I feel it within me, it is a misfortune for me to be alone. One begins to be disgusted with one’s self, and then all is over,” he had once in his youth written to his mother with gloomy foreboding. Such was the end of a master every fibre of whose being was in revolt against Classicism, and who had so great a love for colour, truth, and life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They dreamed of an art of painting which should find its expression in blood, purple, light, movement, and boldness; they held in sovereign contempt the correct, pedantic, colourless tendency of their elders. An inner flame should glow through and liberate the forms, absorb the lines and contours, and mould the picture into a symphony of colour. What was desired and sought for, in poetry and in music, in plastic art and in painting, was colour and passion: colour so energetic, that drawing was, as it were, consumed by it ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Reynolds is one of the greatest English portrait painters, and, resembling most the classical masters, showed in the highest degree the qualities we admire in them. His colouring is of an amazing softness, depth, and strength; his chiaroscuro is warm and vaporous. There are portraits by him which, in the subtlety of their tone, resemble the best of Rembrandt’s; others, whose noble colouring approaches the chef-d’œuvres of Van Dyck. Master of the whole mechanism of the human body, he possessed in the highest degree the rare art of setting persons surely and unconstrainedly on their feet. ”

“ De Musset, the famous child of the century, the idol of the young generation, the poet with the burning heart, who rushed through life with such eagerness and haste that at the age of forty he broke down altogether, worn out like a man of seventy, deliberately wrote bad rhymes in his first poems, for the purpose of thoroughly infuriating the Classicists. So, too, he wrote his dramas, in which love is glorified as a serious and terrible power with which one may not trifle, as the fire with which one must not play, as the electric spark that kills. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The feverish disposition which he brought with him into the world was heightened by the acrimonious feuds in which, as a painter, he was forced to engage, and which left great bitterness behind them in his mind. His life and his art were in accord, in as much as both were battles. It is not easy to live when one is always ill; not easy to meet with recognition when one proclaims the exact opposite of that which for a generation past all the world has held to be true. And Delacroix took not a single step to meet his opponents half-way. ”

“ A deep-blue wave, towering on high and crowned with foam, has washed a charming woman ashore like a costly pearl. She seems to have just awakened out of slumber, and her roguish, moistly gleaming eyes are smiling. Saucily she leans forward her fair-haired head under her bended arms, and stretches out in easy motion her youthfully slender yet fully proportioned body. Bouguereau’s and even Cabanel’s female beauties are waxen and spoiled by retouching, but Baudry’s Cypris is a living being, and preserves some of the individual charm of the model. ”

“ There was no more of the petty, motley, bodyless painting which had hitherto been dominant. The manner in which the grey of morning falls upon the murdered man in the eerie chamber, the way the clothes and the silken curtains glimmer, were things which enchanted artists, whilst the lay public philosophised with the thoughtful Seni over the greatness of heroes and the destiny of the world. At one bound Piloty took rank as the first German “painter”; he was the future, and he became the leader to whom young Munich looked up with wonder. ”

“ Colour was the battle-cry of the day, the battle-cry of youth, to whom the world belongs. In place of the ideal of contour came the ideal of hue and pigment. Cartoons, in the sense of the old cartoon school, no one would draw any longer. To paint pictures, finished pictures, was the tendency of the day. And since painting is to be learnt from the living only, and such as could paint lived in Germany no longer, they packed their trunks, and set out to learn from the “go-ahead neighbour.” As Rome had been hitherto, so was Paris now, the high school of German art. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He draws and stipples, he works like an engraver in line, and goes over what he has painted again and again with a fine and feeble brush. He has an eye for form, but the effect of light upon the body escapes him. His pictures therefore give the impression of china, and his colour is hard and dead. What distinguishes him is a watchful observation, a chilling correctness, enclosing everything in characterless outlines. And this marble coldness remained with him later when, moving with the development of historical painting, he gradually took to working on more tragical subjects. ”

“ In Antonio Canale’s town pictures of Venice, Rome, and London there is at once so subtle an atmospheric movement, the water is so clear, the air so transparent, that even if they represent mere streets and buildings, they yet leave an impression of landscape achieved in a broad, pictorial method. Bernardo Canaletto produces an effect by the fine, cool, damp light of his northern studies even simpler and more intimate, while by his discovery that sunshine does not—as it was hitherto believed—gild but silver the object it falls on, he became one of the fathers of realistic landscape. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For all other nations, too, the eighteenth century was a transition period, in which the old and the new civilisation of culture were parting—an age of prodigious controversy, full of Sturm und Drang. Men did homage to every kind of extravagance, and went into ecstasies over virtue. The sarcasm of scoffers went hand in hand with the deepest sentimental feeling for nature; superstition flourished by the side of enlightenment and learning; in the salons of the aristocracy courtly abbés file past with the greatest thinkers, glowing with a holy zeal for the rights of man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One must not look for life in his pictures; they are to the truth much what Gounod’s Faust is to Goethe’s. Watteau is his spiritual ancestor; but he is not so full of life and wit as the painter of the gallant world of the eighteenth century. He does not depict his contemporaries, but the life of a vanished age; yet he has the same predilection for scenes of high life, and a studied, mannered gracefulness which is often charming and always pleasant to the eye. He shares with Delacroix the latter’s broad style, freedom from constraint, and delight in colour. ”

“ But what must art be in order to produce truth? “The strictest imitation of nature.” By this word Shaftesbury does not understand what we understand by the word “nature”; not, in the first instance, so much the nature surrounding us, in its outward manifestations, but, above all, an intimate human reality. Let the painter represent the reality of human inwardness. Still life, the animal world, landscape,—all that, Shaftesbury explains, is most valuable. But another and a higher life exists in man than in the beasts and the woods, and there is the true object of art. ”

“ Whoever has reached that height of artistic power where the artist may with impunity put his model out of his head—like Delacroix, grand, volcanic, stormy, and excited to a fever heat by his inspiration,—that man will be capable of giving the effect of truth to such scenes, and of running through the whole gamut of emotion with a crushing power of conviction. But the joint-stock historical painter had to get his models to pull faces, and then no less laboriously to render with his oils those grimaces so laboriously produced. ”