Since the wars of liberation Germany had been very reserved in her attitude towards the French. Until the year 1842 original works of the French and Belgian school had never been hung in any German exhibition. But in spite of this, a high, even enthusiastic, appreciation of French and Belgian painting was being spread, especially amongst the younger generation. Even in engravings and lithographs after French pictures it was believed that qualities of colour were discoverable which were wanting in German painting. Heine and other authors, who had wandered to Paris, "the lofty tower of Freedom," to escape from the depressing condition of German affairs, had done what in them lay for the dissemination of this cult. The rising generation of the forties had been driven by Heine's notices of the Salon into an almost hostile attitude towards the dominant art schools of Germany, the schools of Düsseldorf and Munich. The stylists on the Isar and the sentimental elegiac painters on the Rhine met with the same antipathy from the younger generation. The appearance of the two Belgian historical pictures, which were really nothing more than offshoots of the great French school, gave nourishment of doubled strength to this tendency to seek salvation in Paris. The German painters were startled out of contentment with their beloved cartoons, and to many a man it seemed as if the scales had fallen from his eyes. They perceived what an admirable thing it is that a painter should be able to paint. What they could have learnt long before from any good old picture, and in their turbulent enthusiasm for ideas had not learnt, was made suddenly clear to them by these new paintings. They came to the conclusion that it was impossible for God Almighty to have poured light and colour over the objective world with the intention that painters should transform it into a world of shadowless contours. They recognised that the style of cartoon work had led away from all painting, and that it was therefore necessary to do honour once more to the despised handiwork and technique of art, as the fundamental condition of its well-being. However much the æsthetic party might warn them not to renounce "the Reformation of painting, which had been begun and perfected forty years before," and not "with modern technique to sink back into the pre-Cornelian, ornamental model painting," the demand for colour, which had been so long neglected, asserted its rights more and more loudly. King Ludwig's saying was repeated as though it were a new revelation: "The painter must be able to paint." Colour was the battle-cry of the day, the battle-cry of youth, to whom the world belongs. In place of the ideal of contour came the ideal of hue and pigment. Cartoons, in the sense of the old cartoon school, no one would draw any longer. To paint pictures, finished pictures, was the tendency of the day. And since painting is to be learnt from the living only, and such as could paint lived in Germany no