Kaulbach is not an artist to be taken seriously. Woltmann, who made the same observation twenty years ago, tried at least to vindicate the illustrator, and expressed his regret that a man who had the stuff in him of a German Hogarth should unfortunately have been caught in the toils of the Cornelian school. But this comparison does little justice to Hogarth. There is nothing in the illustrations of Kaulbach which many other artists could not have improved upon. In his "Reynard the Fox" he adapted, for the benefit of the German public, Grandville's _Scènes de la Vie privée et publique des Animaux_, published in 1842. His illustrations for _éditions de luxe_ ("The Women of Goethe," etc.) marked the first steps of the road which ended in Thuman. And Thuman stands higher than Kaulbach. The faint, unaccented drawing, the oval "beauty" of heads, declamatory and expressionless, the academic touch are common to both of them. But only with Kaulbach do we find the penetrating perfume of the demi-monde, the voluptuous, satirical laughter which is not even stilled before Goethe, the pandering sensuality which cannot touch the purest and tenderest figures in German poetry without using them as a pretext to fling nudities to the public like bones to a dog. In his "Dance of Death" suite, Kaulbach turned into frivolity what Rethel had before expressed solemnly and earnestly. Like the two augurs, who could not meet without laughing, so at last the satirical designer began to laugh at his own monumental pictures. After completing in his series of mural paintings at the Berlin Museum his "Apotheosis of the Evolution of Human Culture," he explained in his friezes that the whole was, after all, nothing but a dustbin and a lumber-room. When he was commissioned to depict a suite of paintings for the upper walls of the new Pinakothek at Munich, the artistic life of that town, as glorified by King Ludwig--a suite which the weather has since been kind enough to render almost invisible--he fulfilled his task by mocking at what he should have glorified. "All die Meister Kunstbahnbrecher, wie die Herren selbst sich nennen, Wahrlich Widderköpfe sind sie, Mauern damit einzurennen. Mit dem Loche in der Mauer ist's noch lange nicht geschehen, Da muss erst der Held erscheinen, siegreich dadurch einzugehen. Gegen jenes Ungeheuer ziehen sie zu Feld mit Phrasen, Wie die sieben Schwaben einstmals ritterlich bekämpft den Hasen. Voran zieht der edle Ritter Schnorr, der Künste Don Quixote, Seine Rosinante setzt er, statt des Pegasus in Trotte; Heiliger Hess, sein Sancho Pansa, Du nicht liebst das offene Streiten, Und du lässt dich sachte, sachte, 'rab von Deinem Esel gleiten. Was ist denn so grosses Neues in der Neuen Kunst geschehen? Nichts, als was sie nicht der aften, längst vergangnen abgesehen. Wände ich auch Lorbeerkränze all um diese Alltagsfratzen, Würden sie sie doch nur zieren zu bedecken hohle Glatzen."