"How exceedingly abhorrent to me are our berouged puppet painters," cries the young Goethe, in his essay on German style and art, "I could not sufficiently protest; they have caught the eyes of the women with theatrical poses, false complexions, and gaudy costumes; the wood engravings of manly old Albrecht Dürer, at whom tyros scoff, are more welcome to me.... Only where intimacy and simplicity exist is all artistic vigour to be found, and woe to the artist who leaves his hut to squander himself in academic halls of state." [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ CHODOWIECKI. ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF WOMEN.] _Daniel Chodowiecki_, with all his commonplaceness, is a genuine expression of this phase of German art. He in Germany, Hogarth in England, and Chardin in France, are products of the same tendency of the age. After Lessing had produced in _Minna_ the first domestic German tragedy, Chodowiecki, following the road of Hogarth and Chardin, was able to become the painter of the German middle class. He is not a master of such penetrating strength as they were, but he is no less an artist of notable merit. He is certainly no genius--in fact almost a handicraftsman, sober and philistine, but, like Hogarth, a self-made man who in his whole artistic and personal outlook was rooted in the soil of his city and of his age. Berlin society of that day was the basis of his art, the daily life of house and street his domain. He began by illustrating poems and depicting scenes out of the _Seven Years' War_ and the _History of Charles the Great_, and went on from that to the pleasant, homely life of the small _bourgeoisie_. Himself of the middle classes, he chiefly worked for them, and with his sensitive and dexterous graving tool he kept the liveliest and most exhaustive chronicle of the German _bourgeoisie_ of that age. At times almost too reasonable and prosaic, a genuine Nicolai, he has in other plates an enchanting freshness, and--which should not be forgotten--is more of an artist than Hogarth, since he is neither moralist nor satirist. His object, without any moral after-thought, was the true and kindly observation of life as displayed in the world around him. He took the wholly naïve delight of the genuine artist in turning everything he saw into a picture. These chronicles of his have some, it may be but a particle, of the spirit of Dürer. Simultaneously, the young _Tischbein_ delved into the past of the nation, the age of Conradin and the Hohenstaufen, with the intention of finding there the simplicity which the academic pictures had come to lack; and, later on, he painted in Hamburg extremely realistic historical pictures of his own period, such as that which is to be found in the Oldenburg Gallery: "Entry of General Benigsen into Hamburg, 1814." He did good work too as a portrait painter. In his best picture, "Goethe amongst the Ruins of Rome," the head of the poet is energetic and full of strength, the colouring of an excellent clear grey.