From Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) we pass on to an admirable mezzotint, after Morland, by Maria Prestel, who died in 1794; and then we are brought into the heart of the 19th century by the searching industry and skill of Anna Maria Ellenrieder, a very capable painter-etcher, who lived between the years 1791 and 1863. Ellenrieder looked to the past for her inspiration, going to the art of the early Dutch masters. She has little or nothing in common with the other German women artists of her time. How different is her ideal, for instance, from that of the well-known painter of historical subjects, the Baroness Hermione von Preuschen, whose dramatic and sensational spirit appeals so strongly to the great public, as in that canvas in which is represented the Corpse of Irene von Spilimberg, young and beautiful, lying in state in her Venetian gondola, draped with black and covered with flowers. Artists do not often care for pictures of this romantic type; and they find higher and more subtle qualities in the quiet wisdom of Julie Wolfthorn, a Berlin painter of note, and a follower of the modern school of psychological portraiture. Julie Wolfthorn combines depth of feeling and refinement of taste with keenness of penetration into the mystery of individual character. Her portrait of a young sculptor, given in the illustration on page 304, is a good example of the painter's methods.
Another Berlin artist of note is Fräulein Käthe Kollwitz, whose principal field of artistic expression has hitherto been restricted to the burin and copper plate. She has studied etching almost entirely by herself, and by dint of persistent courage and skill has developed her gifts in a direction all her own. The subjects that appeal most forcibly to her mind are taken with scarcely an exception from the darkest and most painful sides of social life and social unrest. Take a glance at the father, mother, and child, reproduced on page 302, and entitled "Destitution and Despair." Are you not inclined to marvel, almost, how a woman had the courage to depict, without flinching, the sad truths of such bitter poverty? Can you not fancy that you hear the moan of misery, the shrill scream of starvation, the cries of rebellion and death, as when, on the outbreak of the strike, the bulk of the working classes casts itself upon the streets? Such masses in motion have been made real to us in her series of plates from the "Peasants' War."