Overbeck about this time, in letters to Emilie Linder, begins to express ultra views, to the prejudice of his art. He pleads that certain Biblical drawings may have for her more worth because the religious meaning dominates over the art skill. In like manner he writes apologetically concerning _The Death of St. Joseph_. The picture, he urges, embodies not so much a historic fact as an idea, the intent being not to lead the spectator to the real, but to something beyond. The purist painter then proceeds to express his invincible reluctance to study the subject from the side of life; models he had carefully avoided, because he feared that a single glance at nature would destroy the whole conception. It is with sincere regret that I have to record so pernicious a doctrine. Surely the artist's special function must always be to find out the divine element in nature, and fatal is the day when first he calls into question the essential oneness between Nature and God. But Overbeck's peculiar phase of Catholicism marred as well as made his art. Through the Church he entered a holy, heavenly sphere, and his pictures verily stand forth as the revelation of his soul. But the sublimest of doctrines sometimes prove to be utterly unpaintable, and certainly the tenets to which Overbeck gave a super-sensuous turn, in the end perplexed and clouded his art. Outraged nature took her revenge, and the sequel shows that Overbeck so diverted his vision and narrowed his pictorial range that his art fell short of the largeness of nature and humanity. Northern Germany claimed the illustrious painter as her son, and so fitly came commissions from Cologne, Lübeck, and Hamburg. For the great Hospital in this last commercial town was painted the large oil-picture, _Christ's Agony in the Garden_. This impressive composition represents the Saviour kneeling; the head is bowed in anguish, the hands are raised in ecstasy; below, the three disciples lie asleep, and in the glory of the upper sky amid rolling clouds appears as a vision the angel bearing the cross. I paid a visit to Hamburg in order to judge of a work of which I could find but slight mention. Its characteristics are just what might have been anticipated. The drawing is studious, the expression intense, the execution feeble; in short, the technique becomes wholly subordinate to the intention. The conception has Giottesque simplicity: the shade of night brings solemnity, and the longer I stood before the canvas the more I became impressed with the quietude and fervour of the scene.[8]