_Carl Spitzweg_, in whose charming little pictures tender and discreet sentiment is united with realistic care for detail, must likewise be reckoned with the few who strove and laboured in quiet, apart from the ruling tendency, until their hour came. Thrown entirely on his own resources, without a teacher, he worked his way upwards under the influence of the older painters. By dint of copying he discovered their secrets of colour, and gave his works, which are full of poetry, a remarkable impress of sympathetic delicacy, suggestive of the old masters. One turns over the leaves of the album of Spitzweg's sketches as though it were a story-book from the age of romance, and at the same time one is astonished at the master's ability in painting. He was a genius who united in himself three qualities which seem to be contradictory--realism, fancy, and humour. He might be most readily compared with Schwind, except that the latter was more of a romanticist than a realist, and Spitzweg is more of a realist than a romanticist. The artists' yearning carries Schwind to distant ages and regions far from the world, and a positive sense of fact holds Spitzweg firmly to the earth. [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ SPITZWEG. THE POSTMAN.] Like Jean Paul, he has the boundless fancy which revels in airy dreams, but he is also like Jean Paul in having a cheery, provincial satisfaction in the sights of his own narrow world. He has all Schwind's delight in hermits and anchorites, and witches and magic and nixies, and he plays with dragons and goblins like Boecklin; but, for all that, he is at home and entirely at his ease in the society of honest little schoolmasters and poor sempstresses, and gives shape to his own small joys and sorrows in a spirit of contemplation. His dragons are only comfortable, Philistine dragons, and his troglodytes, who chastise themselves in rocky solitudes, perform their penance with a kindly irony. In Spitzweg a fine humour is the causeway between fancy and reality. His tender little pictures represent the Germany of the forties, and lie apart from the rushing life of our time, like an idyllic hamlet slumbering in Sunday quietude. Indeed, his pictures come to us like a greeting from a time long past.