For, as every artist is the result of two factors, of which one lies in himself and the other in his age and surroundings, the performances of Bürkel are to be judged, not only according to the requirements of the present day, but according to the conditions under which they were produced. What is weak in him he shares with his contemporaries; what is novel is his own most peculiar and incontestable merit. In a period of false idealism worked up in a museum--false idealism which had aped from the true the way in which one clears one's throat, as Schiller has it, but nothing more indicative of genius--in a period of this accomplishment Bürkel preferred to expose his own insufficiency rather than adorn himself with other people's feathers; at a time which prided itself on representing with brush and pigment things for which pen and ink are the better medium, he looked vividly into life; at a time when all Germany lost itself aimlessly in distant latitudes, he brought to everything an honest and objective fidelity which knew no trace of romantic sentimentalism; and by these fresh and realistic qualities he has become the father of that art which rose in Munich in a later day. Positive and exact in style, and far too sincere to pretend to raise himself to the level of the old masters by superficial imitation, he was the more industrious in penetrating the spirit of nature and showing his love for everything down to its minutest feature; weak in the sentiment for colour, he was great in his feeling for nature. That was Heinrich Bürkel, and his successors had to supplement what was wanting in him, but not to wage war against his influence. [Illustration: BÜRKEL. A SMITHY IN UPPER BAVARIA.] The peculiarity of all his works, as of those of the early Dutch and Flemish artists, is the equal weight which he lays on figures and on landscape. In his eyes the life of man is part of a greater whole; animals and their scenic surroundings are studied with the same love, and in his most felicitous pictures these elements are so blended that no one feature predominates at the expense of another. Seldom does he paint interiors, almost always preferring to move in free and open nature. But here his field is extraordinarily wide. Those works in which he handled Italian subjects form a group by themselves. Bürkel was in Rome from 1829 to 1832, the very years in which Leopold Robert celebrated his triumphs there; but curious is the difference between the works of the Munich and those of the Swiss painter. In the latter are beautiful postures, poetic ideas, and all the academical formulas; in the former unvarnished, naturalistic bluntness of expression. Even in Italy he kept romantic and academic art at a distance. They had no power over the rough, healthy, and sincere nature of the artist. He saw nothing in Italy that he had not met with at home, and he painted things as he saw them, honestly and without beatification.