CHAPTER VII

THE DÜSSELDORFERS

On the Rhine there existed a school of painting instead of a school of drawing, a fact which at that time placed Düsseldorf next in importance to Munich. Wilhelm Schadow, its first director, was lacking in any personal distinction as an artist, but he had received from his great father a tendency towards perfection of technique, which brought him and his school into direct opposition with the purely philosophical painters of the severe Cornelian tradition, and which has even in our days been able to exercise an authoritative influence. In Rome he was the only one of the Nazarenes amenable to the French influence, while the others nervously held aloof from the members of the French Academy. And this formal bent of his talent later gave him the qualifications of a sound teacher. Immediately upon his arrival at Düsseldorf, in November 1826, he was escorted by a stately throng of students: Carl Friedrich Lessing, Julius Hübner, Theodor Hildebrandt, Carl Sohn, H. Mücke, and Christian Koehler, who were afterwards joined by Eduard Bendemann, Ernest Deger, and others. These became the mainstay of the celebrated Old Düsseldorf School, which was soon supported by the jubilant enthusiasm of its contemporaries. At the Berlin exhibitions the new school of painting passed from one triumph to the other. Young men fresh from school suddenly made names that were honoured throughout Germany, by reason of the remarkable manner in which their works succeeded in expressing the sentimental romanticism of the time.

The Wars of Liberty of 1813, which had caused a gust of joyous enthusiasm to penetrate even into the peaceful seclusion of the Nazarenes, were not, like the wars of 1870, the outcome of careful calculation, but the result of a sudden burst of ardour, and the disillusion had now followed upon the enthusiasm. In 1810, with the French bayonets gleaming outside the windows, and the French kettledrums drowning the sound of his voice, Fichte delivered at the Berlin University his famous speeches which sounded the réveillé for Germany. At the same time Kleist wrote his _Hermannschlacht_: Napoleon was to be treated as Hermann had treated Varus. "_Was blasen die Trompeten, Husaren heraus_," pealed through the air; the song of "_Got, der Eisen wachsen liess_" rose heavenwards in brazen accords. And not long after, the same lions who had beaten the Corsican at Leipzig, and had with Arndt conceived the idea of a great, united fatherland, had once more become the same easy-going people, drinking their beer and smoking their pipes in their little duodecimo principalities as of old. Those dreary times, which saw no prospect of relief in their own days, must needs nourish a devotion to the past. That haughty antiquity, which had been possessed of the ideal to which the present had not been able to attain, became the object of a fanatical adoration. Men lost themselves in the old storehouses of faded German reminiscences, and fled for inspiration to the times of a consolidated German Empire. This return to the ruins of the past was a protest against the grey, colourless present. The patriotic frenzy of the poets of freedom changed into enthusiasm for the vanished glories of mediæval Germany. They remembered with longing and yearning the days when the robber-knights ruled town and country from their strongholds. Schenkendorff sang hymns inspired by the old cathedrals, rummaged with holy horror among the skeletons of knights and heroes in the chapel, and wrote a poem in memory of the thousandth anniversary of the death of Charlemagne; Arndt, the bard of the wars of freedom, violently attacked the "industrialism" of the time, declaiming against steam and machinery; Zacharias Werner composed his poem, "_Das Feldgeschrei sei: alte Zeit wird neu_."

This revival of romanticism opened up a wide field to science and poetry. The apotheosis of the old imperial times was made manifest amid fairy-like glamour. Poetry grasped the pilgrim's staff, or rode with beauteous dames on milk-white palfreys through forest and glade. Enchanted genii, elves, fairies, and goblins were encountered on the road. Nowhere is there so sweet a scent of blossoms, so innocent a sound of children's merriment, as in Tieck's delightful and dainty fairy-tales, or in the works of Clemens Brentano, those precious stories of Father Rhine, of the water-nymphs and the crystal castles at the bottom of the green current, pictures full of charming wilfulness, dreamily winsome, like summer evenings on the Rhine. Uhland sang, as once had sung the knightly poets with the golden harps--

"Von Gottesminne, von kühner Helden Muth, Von lindem liebesinne, von süsser Maiengluth."

To this day we seem to peep between the weather-beaten castles, standing on their grey rocks along the Rhine Valley, into the realm of romance as into an enigma propounded by mountain and dale. Rhine and romance!

No spot in Germany was better fitted to become the cradle of a romantic art than Düsseldorf, the peaceful town on the legend-haunted banks of the green river. In the fifteenth century, in addition to the school of Florence, where flowed a rich current of political and human life, where great buildings, monuments, and frescoes kept architects and sculptors and painters uniformly busied, there existed in the remote Umbrian valleys, in the land of miracles and visions, that school of painting in oils which saw its only eternal ideal in the deep eyes and soft aspect of the Madonna, and made the visionary aspirations of the soul, emotions, and sentiment the exclusive subject of their pictures. In the same manner, in the nineteenth century, we find in contrast with the Munich school, with its numerous architectural products, its massive statuary, and the epic-dramatic fresco painting of Cornelius--"wedding the German to the Greek, and Faust to Helen"--that lyrico-sentimental Düsseldorf school of painting which embraced Madonnas and prophets, knights and robbers, gipsies and monks, water-nymphs and nuns with the same languishing tenderness. In matter and technique it completes the art of Cornelius and the Nazarenes; that of the Munich master by its encouragement of oil-painting; that of the Nazarenes by the stress which it lays upon the more worldly side of mediæval life, upon chivalry, and in a less degree upon that other pillar of mediævalism the Church. The Nazarenes are archæological and ascetic; the Düsseldorf school is insipid in a modern way, feeble, colourless, and sentimental.

Count Raczynski and Friedrich von Uechtritz have given us interesting descriptions of life at Düsseldorf at that time, and their story reads like a chapter of Tacitus' _Germania_. "_Grand dieu! Bons et affectueux allemands!_" exclaimed a Parisian critic of the Count's book in sad emotion, and held up this virtuous German life, as an example worthy of imitation, to his compatriots, the decadents of fashionable artistic Paris, fallen into modern luxury. Undisturbed by the hum of a big city, and without any communication with its surroundings, the Düsseldorf colony of artists lived its life of seclusion. The painters saw none but painters. They herded together in the studios, and the sole recreation in the intervals of their work was a visit to another studio. The whole of the day was devoted to painting; when the picture was complete it went to the art union; and the hours of tediousness were overcome with the assistance of a little intrigue. Hildebrandt possessed the nucleus of a collection of beetles. Lessing, the hunter, collected pipes and antlers, and only felt himself at home in the little room which he occupied with Sohn when it assumed the appearance of a gamekeeper's cottage. Convinced that politics were the ruin of character, they allowed no questions of the day to interfere with the calmness of their artistic life. Few of them ever read a newspaper. In the year of revolution, 1830, their sole interest in the events around them was concentrated in the fear that a war might disturb their idyllic life. The end of the day's work saw them in summer-time bent on a pilgrimage to the Stockkämpchen, to refresh themselves with a cup of buttermilk, to play at bowls, or to enjoy a race among the cabbage patches of the garden. In winter they made a point of meeting at seven o'clock every Saturday night at the inn for a literary reading. Each taking his part they recited the dramas of Tieck, of Calderon, and Lopez; or Uechtritz read extracts from German history, the Crusades, the period of the emperors, the riots of the Hussites. Every Sunday night there met at Schadow's a very distinguished intellectual circle, consisting of Judge Immermann (the reformer of the stage at Düsseldorf), Felix Mendelssohn the composer, Kortum, author of the _Jobsiade_, and Assessor von Uechtritz, with their ladies. But the great gala-days were the theatrical performances which took place twice a week. Under the leadership of Immermann the theatre had become the place whence the young painters gathered their liveliest suggestions. Some of them went even so far as to take part in amateur performances, conducted by Immermann, and given in Schadow's house, under the auspices of the whole of the distinguished society. And thus the pictures of this school were not conceived under the influence of life, but of the theatre. The Düsseldorf artists were youths whose productions were not rooted in life, but in reading and culture; youths who always moved in good society, and who had passed through the great ordeals of life, but only on "the boards representing the universe."

_Theodor Hildebrandt_ became the Shakespeare of Düsseldorf. The translation of the works of the English poet by Schlegel had been published some time earlier, and Immermann, in Düsseldorf, had been the first to offer Shakespeare a home on the German stage. The performances of his tragedies were regarded as red-letter days. During the three years of Immermann's leadership (1834-37), _Hamlet_, _Macbeth_, _King John_, _King Lear_, _The Merchant of Venice_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Othello_, and _Julius Cæsar_ were performed on fifteen occasions in all.[1] To give the titles of these plays is at once to characterise the subject-matter of Hildebrandt's paintings. He very often had a hand in the staging of the plays, and is said to have shown a remarkable histrionic talent in the performances at Schadow's. He rarely went to other poets for his inspiration, as in his "Pictures from Faust" and his "Beware of the Water Nymph," where he honoured Goethe, and in his "Brigands," where he may have been inspired by one of the many variations on _Rinaldo Rinaldini_ that flooded the market at the time, or perhaps also by Byron, whose influence was very marked on the Düsseldorf school.

Goethe's _Frauengestalten_, more especially the Leonoras, were reproduced in oils by old father _Sohn_. _Eduard Steinbruck_ painted Genevièves, Red Riding Hoods, Elves, and Undines, after Tieck and Fouqué; _H. Stilke's_ "Pictures from the Crusades" introduced Walter Scott to the German public. Uhland's first ballads had brought into fashion the damsels who from the ramparts of their castles wave a sad farewell to the lonely shepherds; the ancestral tombs, in which the last knight of his race takes his everlasting rest; the lists, where melancholy heroes stab themselves. His _Love-song of the Shepherd to the Shepherdess_--

"Und halt ich dich in den Armen Auf freien Bergeshöhn, Wir sehn in die weiten Lande Und werden doch nicht gesehn,"

gave Bendemann the motive for his picture of the same name. Young Lessing had to thank Uhland for the subject of his first success, "The Sorrowing Royal Pair," which at one bound made his name one of the most honoured in German art.

"Wohl sah ich die Eltern beide Ohne der Kronen Licht Im schwarzen Trauerkleide, Die Jungfrau sah ich nicht."

After Bürger he painted a Leonora--of course in so-called mediæval costume, in order "to avoid the unpicturesque attire in fashion during the Seven Years' War"; and at the same time as Hildebrandt, "A Mourning Brigand," who, in the full light of the evening sun, sits brooding on a rock over the depravity of the world. That all of them were frantically enthusiastic for the Hohenstaufens is due to the publication of Von Rainer's History in 1823, which took a greater hold of the public than did Schiller's _History of the Thirty Years' War_, and inspired numerous dramas.

[Illustration: HILDEBRANDT. THE SONS OF EDWARD.]

[Illustration: STEINBRUCK. ELVES.]

Even the idyllic and touching scenes from the Old Testament and the Hebrew elegies are easily traced back to theatrical inspirations. With the exception of the frescoes of the Casa Bartholdy, the subjects of which were selected with an eye to the religious belief of their purchaser, the Nazarenes found all the subject-matter they wanted in the New Testament. The Passion of Our Lord was unable to inspire the Düsseldorf school. As compared to the few Christian paintings by W. Schadow, and the dreamy Madonnas of Deger, Ittenbach, and little Perugino Mintrop, we find a far greater number of scenes from the Old Testament, which at the time gave birth to numerous dramas. Hübner, always inclined to idyllic and melancholy scenes, painted Ruth and Boaz, his first great picture, which established his reputation. After Klingemann had utilised the whole life of Moses by turning it into a theatrically effective sequence, Christian Koehler scored a success with his "Moses hidden in the Bulrushes" and his "Finding of Moses," and then, incited by Raupach's "Semiramis," abandoned his biblical heroines for Oriental ones. Theodor Hildebrandt took Tieck's "Judith" as an inspiration for his picture of this Jewish heroine. Kehren's "Joseph reveals Himself to his Brethren" was begun after the opera _Joseph in Egypt_ had been performed at Düsseldorf. Bendemann, in 1832, played his trump card with his "Lament of the Jews," now in the Cologne Museum, after Byron had made his propaganda, suggested by the sad lives of the children of Israel, and Friedrich von Uechtritz had caused his drama, _The Babylonians in Jerusalem_, to be performed, ending as it does with the sending of the Jews into captivity in Babylon--

"Wein' über die die weinen fern in Babel, Ihr Tempel brach, ihr Land ward, ach! zur Fabel! Wein'! es erstart der heil 'gen Harfe Ton, Im Haus Jehovas haust der Spötter Hohn."

And his oil-paintings of a later date, "Jeremiah on the Ruins of Jerusalem" (1834), now in the German Emperor's collection, and the "Sending of the Jews into Captivity in Babylon" (1872), in the Berlin National Gallery, were variations on the same theme.

The productions of the Düsseldorf school were thus in perfect harmony with the programme issued by Püttmann in his book. Pictorial representations may be taken from two ranges, History or Poetry; the painter may choose an historical fact as a subject for representation, or reproduce in visible form the rhythmically shaped fancy of a stranger. History shows him figures full of expression, and even a less powerful artist will find it possible to make a true copy of them. If the painter works from poems his representations are sure to meet with approval, as they render the beautiful and the attractive in visible shape. "But the greatest success lies in store for those works which depict in harmony with the mood of the times historical or poetical performances which express human suffering in its various stages, from homely and everyday griefs to the silent sorrow of irretrievable catastrophe."

[Illustration: SOHN. THE TWO LEONORAS.]

Thus the scale of sorrow from sad melancholy to painful suffering became the speciality of the Düsseldorf school. At the foot of the scale we find the pictures which "represent the common, yet keen sorrow of parents at the death or the sad future of their children." Lessing's "Royal Pair" mourn the death of their daughter; Hagar grieves because she is forced to abandon her son Ishmael in the desert; Genoveva, because the roe is so long in coming to the rescue. The mortal grief of love is represented by Lessing's "Leonora"; grief of love at separation by Sohn's and Hildebrandt's pictures of "Romeo and Juliet." Even the murderers of the "Sons of Edward" mourn at their crime when they see the children--

"Girdling one another Within their innocent alabaster arms: Their lips were four red roses on a stalk, Which in their summer beauty kissed each other."

Job grieves at the downfall of his house; Hübner's "Ruth," because her weeping mother-in-law entreats her to depart; Stilke's "Pilgrim in the Desert," because his horse has died of thirst; Plüddeman's "Columbus," because he knows himself to be unworthy of the grace of God which enabled him to discover America; Kiederich's "Charles V", because he has retired too early to his monastery, and is plagued by the ticking of his watch. The Hohenstaufens, of course, appealed more to the pity of the public: the misfortunes of the beautiful Enzin, of Manfred and Conrad, gave birth to a sentiment of profoundest sadness. Even brigands mourn at the depravity of the world. The age had come to despise its own Philistine situation so deeply that it looked up to the brigands, the adversaries of civil order, as to representatives of justice. All depravity, it was said, originated with the public functionaries, and to the noble brigands was allotted the task of revolutionising existing things. Their ally in this was to be the poacher. At a time when a revision of the game-laws was the sole timid wish the people ventured to lay before its princes, it was only logical that the poacher should be looked upon as the victim of injustice, as the rescuer of the small man from the claws of feudal despotism. The numerous pictures that glorify him, as he falls weltering in his blood beneath the guns of the gamekeepers, make pendants to Raupach's "Smugglers," and to the rest of the highly esteemed literature which turned the life of the poacher into sentimental dramas or novels.

[Illustration: LESSING. THE SORROWING ROYAL PAIR.]

Fortunately we, in our days, find great difficulty in entering into the spirit which gave birth to these productions. A world lies between it and the present, just as between the Germany of to-day and the Germany of 1830. Men of the younger generation, who were still at school when Bismarck spoke his word of blood and iron, can hardly understand how this modern, realistic Germany can have been, two generations ago, a sentimental Germany. Now the significance of the Düsseldorf school in the history of civilisation lies in the fact that they are the real representatives of that age of sentimentality. A generation that melted away in tearful dreamings must needs enthusiastically recognise its own flesh and blood in those knights and damsels, squires and pages, monks and nuns, who, infinitely amorous or infinitely religious, were all infinitely sentimental; and things that now only evoke a smile or a shrug must needs have moved them to tears. Look where you will, you meet the same world. It hung on the walls, it displayed itself in engravings, lithographs, and coloured prints; if one lay down for a siesta, one found a lovelorn knight and damsel or a praying nun stitched on the cushion; if one put one's foot on a carpet, one trod upon noble hunting-dames on horseback, falcon on wrist; one carried them in one's pockets on cigar-cases and handkerchiefs; the traveller and the cheap tripper took them abroad on their knapsacks.

[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._

BENDEMANN. THE LAMENT OF THE JEWS.]

Technically, the pictures of this school were not without their merits. "The greatness of Michael Angelo" may not have been Bendemann's, and Sohn's carnations are far removed from "the melting colouring of Titian." But as opposed to the one-sidedness to which fresco painting at Munich was given up, the encouragement of oil-painting at Düsseldorf must be looked upon as praiseworthy. These painters were the first in Germany to try again to learn how to paint in oils. The extreme artistic clumsiness that had reigned under Cornelius was followed by a period in which, under Schadow, earnest studies and serious work were devoted to an effort again to master a technical medium. Their friendly emulation led to surprising progress, which assured to the Düsseldorf school a technical superiority over all the other German schools of the period.

[Illustration: SOHN. THE RAPE OF HYLAS.]

If, nevertheless, their pictures have not maintained their position as vital works of art, it is due to the fact that they were produced under the pressure of that mechanical idealism which makes all their productions so utterly unattractive to us. The ideal "line of beauty" has turned the figures into bloodless shadows and washed-out theatrical forms. As philosophy was to Cornelius, so to the Düsseldorfers was poetry their Noah's Ark. The interest aroused by the poet was their ally; the breath of the wind that set their boat afloat; the general poetical tendency made up for the deficiency in artistic interest. Had it not been for the support of the poets, their sugary, insipid figures would have from the beginning been unable to hold their own. For after having been retouched by "Idealism," nothing vital remained in those romantic kings, fantastic knights, Jews, and stage princesses; nothing

## particular and characteristic in their generalisation, nothing generally

human. With them a king is always an heroic prince in black harness, a woolly beard, and a scarlet cloak. A queen is represented as proud and dark, or tender and fair-haired. In the much-beloved "couples" from poems, characterisation goes no further than general contrasts: the _brunette_ in red attire with white sleeves; the tender _blonde_ with the complementary garment of pale violet; the one with luxurious _embonpoint_, the other languidly slender--men brown, women white, youths rosy. Knights wear silvery helmets with or without plumes; now with open, now with shut visor; sometimes they sit on poetic palfreys, now of slender, now of sturdy build. The only impressions they are subject to may be interpreted with the assistance of the plaster bust: honour, fidelity, love. And as sentiment and heroism are national virtues of the Germans, they are bound to show sentimental expression whilst killing their adversaries. Even the brigands are generalised lay figures. The Düsseldorf ideal of beauty aimed at a certain tender, vaguely graceful swing of outline that anxiously avoided all manly and strong, energetic and characteristic expression, all that could remind one of nature. They rejected Leonardo da Vinci's advice, to tug at the nipple of Mother Nature, but looked upon her merely as their aunt; and for this, despised Nature took her revenge by making their figures shapeless and phantom-like. And as their "dread of painted stupidities" did not once bring them to make bold mistakes, we can neither praise nor censure their pictures, cannot enjoy them or take offence at them, but look at them _sine ira et studio_, with a lukewarm feeling of utter indifference.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] As is still the case in most of the German theatres, the programme changed every night. Two or three consecutive performances of one play remain a rarity.

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