_Jacob Becker_ went to the Westerwald to sketch little village tragedies, and won such popularity with his "Shepherd Struck by Lightning" that for a long time the interest of the public was often concentrated on this picture in the collection of the Staedel Institute. _Rudolf Jordan_ of Berlin settled on Heligoland, and became by his "Proposal of Marriage in Heligoland" one of the most esteemed painters of Düsseldorf. And in 1852 _Henry Ritter_, his pupil, who died young, enjoyed a like success with his "Middy's Sermon," which represents a tiny midshipman with comical zeal endeavouring to convert to temperance three tars who are staggering against him. A Norwegian, _Adolf Tidemand_, became the Leopold Robert of the North, and, like Robert, attained an international success when, after 1845, he began to present his compatriots, the peasants, fishers, and sailors of the shores of the North Sea, to the public of Europe. There was no doubt that a true ethnographical course of instruction in the life of a distant race, as yet unknown to the rest of Europe, was to be gathered from his pictures, as from those of Robert, or from the Oriental representations of Vernet. In Tidemand's pictures the Germans learnt the Norwegian usage of Christmas, accompanied the son of the North on his fishing of a night, joined the bridal party on the Hardanger Fjord, or listened to the sexton giving religious instruction; sailed with fishing girls in a skiff to visit the neighbouring village, or beheld grandmother and the children dance on Sunday afternoon to father's fiddle. Norwegian peasant life was such an unknown world of romance, and the costume so novel, that Tidemand's art was greeted as a new discovery. That the truth of his pictures went no further than costume was only known at a later time. Tidemand saw his native land with the eyes of a Romanticist, as Robert saw Italy, and, in the same one-sided way, he only visited the people on festive occasions. Though a born Norwegian, he, too, was a foreigner, a man who was never familiar with the life of his country people, who never lived at home through the raw autumn and the long winter, but came only as a summer visitor, when nature had donned her bridal garb, and naturally took away with him the mere impressions of a tourist. As he only went to Norway for recreation, it is always holiday-tide and Sabbath peace in his pictures. He represents the same idyllic optimism and the same kindly view of "the people" as did Björnson in his earliest works; and it is significant that the latter felt himself at the time so entirely in sympathy with Tidemand that he wrote one of his tales, _The Bridal March_, as text to Tidemand's picture "Adorning the Bride."