ante-chamber rubbing his hands in the picture "I can Wait"; the frightened little girl who sees her bit of bread-and-butter imperilled by geese in "In Great Distress,"--they have all the same deliberate comicality, they are all treated with the same palpable carefulness, the same pointed and impertinently satirical sharpness. Even in "The Funeral" he is not deserted by the humorous proclivity of the anecdotist, and the schoolmaster has to brandish the bâton with which he is conducting the choir of boys and girls as comically as possible. Knaus uses too many italics, and underlines as if he expected his public to be very dull of understanding. In this way he appeals to simple-minded people, and irritates those of more delicate taste. The peasant sits in his pictures like a model; he knows that he must keep quiet, and neither alter his pose nor his grimace, because otherwise Knaus will be angry. All his pictures show signs of the superior and celebrated city gentleman, who has only gone into the country to interest himself in the study of civilisation: there he hunts after effectively comical features, and, having arranged his little world in _tableaux vivants_, he coolly surrenders it to the derision of the cultivated spectator. [Illustration: KNAUS. IN GREAT DISTRESS. (_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the copyright._)] [Illustration: KNAUS. THE CARD PLAYERS. (_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the copyright._)] But such a judgment, which seems like a condemnation, could not be maintained from the historical standpoint. Germany could not forget Knaus, if it were only for the fact that in the fifties he sided with those who first spread the unusual opinion that painting was incomprehensible without sound ability in the matter of colour. He was not content, like the elder generation, to arrange the individual characters in his pictures in well-disposed groups. He took care to make his works faultless in colouring, so that in the fifties he not only roused the enthusiasm of the great public by his "poetic invention," but made even the Parisian painters enthusiastic by his easy mastery of technique.