Art in America: A Critical and Historial SketchBenjamin, S. G. W. (Samuel Greene Wheeler)
History
Art in America: A Critical and Historial Sketch
Benjamin, S. G. W. (Samuel Greene Wheeler)
Art, American
We would not be understood as saying that all the works of Leutze are
worthy of unqualified acceptance; we refer rather to their general
character. His art was very prolific, and as a pupil of Lessing and
Schadow it bore the unmistakable stamp of Düsseldorf. Much of his work,
partaking also of the grandiose style of Kaulbach, was of a
semi-decorative character, like the "Landing of the Norsemen," which
represents two fresh, sturdy Scandinavian rovers stepping out of an
impossible ship, bearing aloft a noble princess, and in the very act of
landing snatching the grapes "hanging wanton to be plucked." Spirited as
it is, the manifest absurdity of the composition as a representation of
reality yet requires us to accept it as decorative in design. "Godiva"
is a somewhat coarse but characteristic work of Leutze, and the
"Iconoclast" one of his most interesting and artistic works. In America,
Leutze will be remembered longest by his large and magnificent painting
of "Washington at Princeton," his "Emigration to the West" (a decorative
composition in one of the panels of the stairway of the Capitol at
Washington), and his "Washington Crossing the Delaware." The latter was
executed at Düsseldorf, and the ice was painted from an unusual mass of
shattered ice floating down the Rhine on the breaking up of the winter.
It is another illustration of the apparent caprice with which man is
treated by destiny, that scarcely had Leutze closed his eyes in his last
sleep, at the early age of fifty-one, when a letter arrived from Germany
bringing official tidings that he had just been elected to succeed
Lessing as president of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A LADY.--[WILLIAM PAGE.]]
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