Together with Feuerbach--and having, like him, previously received enlightenment as to colouring at the Antwerp Academy--_Victor Müller_, of Frankfort, had gone to Couture in 1849. He resided until 1858 on the banks of the Seine, and was especially influenced by Delacroix, and perhaps also a little affected by Courbet. At least his "Wood Nymph"--a voluptuous woman lying in a wood--which first made him known in Germany in 1863, seems but little removed from the healthy realism and exuberant vigour of the master of Ornans. Otherwise, like Delacroix, he has occupied himself almost exclusively with Shakespeare. "Hamlet at the Grave of Yorick," "Ophelia," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hero and Leander," were pictures of a deep, sonorous glow of colour; the characters in them were seized with great intellectual concentration, and the surrounding landscape filled with that sombre poetry of nature which in the hands of Delacroix so mystically heightens the impression of human tragedies. Victor Müller was of a bold, uncompromising talent, full of southern glow and wild Romanticism; a powerful, forcible realist, who never sought the empty, sentimental, ideal beauty known to his age. In a period dominated almost from end to end by a jejune and rounded beauty, he gives pleasure by a healthy, refreshing "ugliness." All the heads in his pictures were painted after nature with a religious devoutness; painted by a man who openly loved the youthful works of Riberas and Caravaggio. And just as surprising is the power of expression, the deep and earnest sentiment, which he attained in gestures and physiognomy. While Makart, in his balcony scene from _Romeo and Juliet_, never got away from a hollow, theatrical affectation, Müller's picture glows throughout with a sensuous passion that saps the blood. A new Delacroix seemed to have been born; an extraordinary talent seemed to be rising above the horizon of our art, but Germany had to follow to the grave her greatest offshoot of Romanticism before he had spoken a decisive word, just as she lost Rethel, the greatest son of the cartoon era, in the flower of his age. Of the others who made the pilgrimage to Paris with Feuerbach and Müller, not one has a similar importance as an artist. Their merit was that they made themselves comparatively able masters of technique, and taught the new gospel when they returned to Germany. To their superiority in technique and colour, given them by a sound French schooling, they owed their brilliant success in the fifties. They were, at the time, the best German painters, and great at a time when ability was novel and infrequent. As soon as it became customary and commonplace, there remained little to raise them above the average. [Illustration: RICHTER. A GIPSY.]