While not disagreeing with the French altogether, we can not unite with the Germans entirely in believing that “he drew the human body as though he saw it for the first time, and had never seen it painted or drawn by others.” He certainly received many impressions, before going to Rome, from the old German and Netherland masters, and adding to all what he learned in Rome, this idea of total individualism seems preposterous. What one must feel in studying his works is, that he did not obliterate from his memory what he had studied from Grecian, Roman, and German Art, but he reconciled them in his own mind, and worked out in his own way results from this reconciliation, giving to Germany productions as faithful to her own instincts as ever Albert Dürer or Lucas Cranach did.
The Düsseldorf Academy was the first result. Of this school even Frenchmen have been willing to write: “The school of Düsseldorf, from Kaulbach and Lessing to Knaus, and the school of Munich, with Piloty, Adam, Horschelt, Lier, etc., by returning to picturesque truth have returned to their own times and to their own country.”
The “National Gallery,” as yet, has but two cartoons from Kaulbach; no painting. The fine old “Treppen Haus,” in the Royal Museum, should be in this modern gallery to make the collection chronological, for these frescoes belong essentially to modern art, and would be in their place, leading from the Cornelius Saals, as Kaulbach was one of his favorite pupils.
As the Düsseldorf Academy is the oldest of German schools, a glance at the first artists educated there will be proper. Schadow, who was born in 1789, and who succeeded Cornelius as director of this academy, is represented by two pictures, “The Walk to Emmaus,” and a female head. One discovers at once more poetical feeling than in the pictures of his master, who delighted, like Milton, in painting
“Dread horror plumed— Dire tossings and deep groans.”
Schadow died in Düsseldorf in 1862, leaving such pupils as Hübner, Lessing, Bendemann, etc., the latter being appointed, in 1859, his successor. Bendemann carries many honors—and paints good pictures—the gold medal from the Paris Exposition of 1837, and the medal from Vienna in 1873. He is knight of the “Order of Merit,” Fellow of the Societies at Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Cassel, Antwerp, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Philadelphia. He belongs intimately to that class of German artists who began to modify the rigid dignity and formal tendencies of historical pictures by freedom of style and warmth of color. In this sense his great picture (now in the National Gallery), “Jeremiah at the Fall of Jerusalem,” was said to produce an epoch in art. Bendemann resigned his position as director of the Düsseldorf Academy in 1867.