In the fourth and last year of the painter's apprenticeship in the Austrian capital, was begun a really arduous composition, _Christ's Entry into Jerusalem_.[7] The picture is of the utmost import as affording the only evidence of the artist's attainments in Vienna. In the first place to be remarked is the striking fact that not a vestige remains of the French school of David, or of the showy masters of the Italian decadence; the work, indeed, might have been designed as a protest against the Viennese Academy, and as a justification of the painter's revolt. The style adopted is conjointly that of the Italian pre-Raphaelite and of the early German and Flemish masters. The background is built up into a high horizon giving support to the foreground figures; the colours are deep and lustrous, and so far contrast favourably with the weaker and cruder tones unfortunately adopted at a later period. The costume is a deliberate compromise between the classic and the naturalistic. Nowhere does the artist venture, as Horace Vernet, on the Bedouin dress. Christ is clothed in a flowing robe, while the Apostles, as in the compositions of Raphael, belong less to the Holy Land than to the Roman Forum. This treatment of draperies was adhered to through all subsequent works, the only change being further generalisation and a wider departure from naturalism. In fact it is curious to observe in this early work how much nature enters; figures and incidents come direct from life, as witness portraits of contemporaries, groups of little children, young mothers and aged women. Such passages are happily destitute of what the Viennese academicians called "style;" they have more of the old German angularity than of "the Grecian bend." Yet always with Overbeck Beauty is present, only not thrust in, as by the academicians of the period, in violation of Truth and Goodness. Also very noteworthy is the impress of thought in the heads, hands, and attitudes; the painter, as we have seen, came of a family of thinkers, and the purport of his art was to give expression to mind. Here again he took as his teachers the early masters, so that these figures, though more or less studied from nature, might seem to have walked out from an old panel picture, yet they are more than complications, they are impressed with the painter's own individuality. Altogether the work marks not only a starting-point in Overbeck's life, but a new era in the art of the nineteenth century.