656 MODERN PAINTING 



in the fables and legends of the Middle Age. Then, in further course 

 of the development, they proceeded to modern times, and there came 

 a period of historical painting which found its chief aim in glorifying, 

 in large paintings, rich in figures, the principles and political actions 

 of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The painters of genre 

 and of landscape also accommodated themselves to this point of 

 view; for the latter did not paint nature as it existed before their 

 eyes, but sought rather, in a reconstructive manner, to revive the 

 vision of the earth as it appeared in the days of ancient Hellas 

 or of the Middle Ages. The genre painters did not exhibit the 

 people of the present; rather, in their peaceful painting of peasants, 

 they depicted an idyllic world, which, like an immovable piece of 

 the past, had survived in modern life. Paintings were not conceived 

 as representations of the present, but as hymns of praise of the 

 good old times. The windows of the studios were hung with heavy 

 curtains to avoid seeing anything of the ugly world without. 



Yet events were gradually taking place which caused the artist, 

 instead of lingering in the past, to turn his eyes to the present, and 

 to paint not only the world of long ago, but the world of his own day. 

 The most important of these events were certainly the great changes 

 in transportation which have taken place since the forties. Until 

 that time the coach had lumbered heavily from village to village; 

 now the steamship and the locomotive established rapid connection 

 between the most distant parts of the earth. The world came under 

 the influence of this traffic, and it would have been strange, indeed, 

 if painters had not made use of the possibilities of travel thus made 

 so easy. They took up the wanderer's staff and became globe-trotters, 

 traversing in every direction the Orient, Scandinavia, and even 

 America. In numerous genre paintings they recounted the manners 

 and customs of strange people, and in numerous landscape pictures 

 they exhibited the sights of the Universe, 



Wenn jomand cino Reise tut, 

 So kan ner was erzahlen; 



such is the content of these pictures. 



While artists were thus wandering in distant countries in order to 

 depict an exotic nature, there occurred contemporaneously another 

 event which caused them to occupy themselves with what was going 

 on in their own home and their immediate neighborhood. The great 

 social problem of the nineteenth century arose after the revolution 

 of 1780, which had been a struggle of the people against feudal des- 

 potism; the fruits of these struggles fell into the lap of the bour- 

 geoisie. The feudal knights had been followed by knights of fortune, 

 and a chasm yawned between bourgeoisie and proletariat, between 

 the possessors of property and the poor. The year 1848 passed like 

 a threatening storm over Europe. When the workmen were fighting 



