The History of Modern Painting, Volume 2 (of 4): Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX centuryMuther, Richard
History
The History of Modern Painting, Volume 2 (of 4): Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX century
Muther, Richard
Painting -- History
_Genre_ painting was developed here as elsewhere from the military
picture. As early as 1813 _Peter Krafft_, an academician of the school
of David, had exhibited a great oil-painting, "The Soldier's
Farewell"--the interior of a village room with a group of life-size
figures. The son of the family, in grey uniform, with a musket in his
hand, is tearing himself from his young wife, who has a baby on her arm
and is trying in tears to hold him back. His old father sits in a corner
with folded hands beside his mother, who is also crying, and has hid her
face. In 1820 Krafft added "The Soldier's Return" as a pendant to this
picture. It represents the changes which have taken place in the family
during the warrior's absence: his old mother is at rest in her grave;
his grey-headed father has become visibly older, his little sister has
grown up, and the baby in arms is carrying the musket after his father.
They are both exceedingly tiresome pictures; the colour is cold and
grey, the figures are pseudo-classical in modern costume, and the pathos
of the subject seems artificial and forced. Nevertheless a new principle
of art is declared in them. Krafft was the first in Austria to recognise
what a rich province had been hitherto ignored by painting. He warned
his pupils against the themes of the Romanticists. These, as he said,
were worked out, since no one would do anything better than the "Last
Supper of Leonardo da Vinci or the Madonnas of Raphael." And he warmly
advocated the conviction "that nothing could be done for historical
painting so long as it refused to choose subjects from modern life."
Krafft was an admirable teacher with a sober and clear understanding,
and he invariably directed his pupils to the immediate study of life and
nature. The consequence of his career was that _Carl Schindler_,
_Friedrich Treml_, _Fritz L'Allemand_, and others set themselves to
treat in episodic pictures the military life of Austria, from the
recruiting stage to the battle, and from the soldier's farewell to his
return to his father's house. A further result was that the Viennese
_genre_ painting parted company with the academical and historic art.
Just at this time Tschischka and Schottky began to collect the popular
songs of the Viennese. Castelli gave a poetic representation of
_bourgeois_ life, and Ferdinand Raimund brought it upon the stage in his
dramas. Bauernfeld's types from the life of the people enjoyed a rapid
popularity. Josef Danhauser, Peter Fendi, and Ferdinand Waldmüller went
on parallel lines with these authors. In their _genre_ pictures they
represented the Austrian people in their joys and sorrows, in their
merriment and heartiness and good-humour; the people, be it understood,
of Raimund's popular farces, not those of the pavement of Vienna.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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