But a different judgment is formed when one compares him with the French and the old masters. A meteor Feuerbach was not; for he stood on the ground of the Couture school, and raised himself later to yet greater simplicity, going back to purer sources, to the Venetians and the Romans. He is more austere and manly than Couture, but he is, as he stands in his finished pictures, a Roman of the Cinquecento, who has been in Venice; not an original genius of the nineteenth century, like Boecklin. Boecklin paints the antique figures in their eternal fulness and youth; but he is quite modern in sentiment and in his highly developed technique. Feuerbach in regard to technique stands now on French soil, now on Venetian or Roman; and in his sentiment he is an imitator of the Cinquecentists, or, if you will, a phenomenon of atavism. His writings and drawings show him concerned with the present, his paintings with the past. The modern temperament, artistically restrained, breaks out no more, the nerves have no rôle, no human sound is forced from his figures. He learnt through the spectacles of the great old masters to look away from everything petty in life, but he never laid those spectacles down. This modern man, who was so neurotic as a writer, sought as a painter, for the sake of the ideal, to have no nerves at all. Before many of his pictures one wishes for a fire; they make an effect so cold that one shivers. The quality in them which calls for boundless admiration is his splendid artistic earnestness. There speaks out of them a sacred peace. Yet, when he is set up as a pioneer, it must never be forgotten that he is not self-sufficient as, shall we say, Millet, but has attained his majesty of conception only in the leading-strings of masterpieces of a great period, and precisely in the leading-strings of those masterpieces from the numbing influence of which modern art was forced to set itself free, before it could come to the consciousness of itself. [Illustration: GUSTAV RICHTER. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]