In the full possession of these powers, which he acquired amid the elementary simplicity and heroic majesty of Roman landscape by constant intercourse with the great painters of the past, he determined in the summer of 1873 to accept an invitation from the Vienna Academy. His friends rejoiced. At last this worker, who had been abandoned in a foreign land, seemed to have found in his native country a place which offered him a new life. He was but little more than forty: yet all was so soon to be over. From Rome he came to the restless capital which had just lived through the birththroes of a new epoch; from the side of Michael Angelo to the side of Makart! The sketches for a series on the wars of the Titans, which he began after his arrival, promised the greatest things. They display a sureness and majesty which find no parallel in the German art of those years. But they were destined never to be completed. Feeling himself, like Antæus, strong only on Roman soil, he lost his power in Vienna. Reserved, innately delicate, a mystical, ideal nature like that of Faust, and one which only with reluctance permitted to a stranger a glimpse of its inner being; in his life, as in his art, high-bred and simple, hating both as painter and as man everything overstrained or sentimental; in his judgment harsh, severe, and uncompromising, lonely and proud, he was but little adapted to make friends for himself. The indifference with which his study for the "Fall of the Titans" was received in the Vienna Exhibition wounded him mortally. Vienna, which is so much disposed to laughter, laughed. Criticism was rough and unfavourable. He left Vienna and went to Venice. The tragical fate of a party of voyagers, drowned as they were playing and singing together on a night journey to the Lido, gave him the motive for his last picture, "The Concert," which was found unfinished after his death, and came into the possession of the Berlin National Gallery. On 4th January 1882 he died, alone in a Venetian hotel. "Hier ruht Anselm Feuerbach, Der im Leben manches malte, Fern vom Vaterlande, ach, Das ihn immer schlecht bezahlte." So runs the epitaph which he made for himself. And posterity might alter it into-- "Hier ruht ein deutscher Maler, Bekannt im deutschen Land; Nennt man die besten Namen, Wird auch der seine genannt."