To the following effect wrote Edmond About in 1855: "I do not know whether Herr Knaus has long nails; but even if they were as long as those of Mephistopheles, I should still say that he was an artist to his fingers' ends. His pictures please the Sunday public and the Friday public, the critics, the _bourgeois_, and (God forgive me!) the painters. What is seductive to the great multitude is the clearly expressed dramatic idea, while artists and connoisseurs are won by his knowledge and thorough ability. Herr Knaus has the capacity of satisfying every one. His pictures attract the most incompetent eyes, because they tell pleasant anecdotes; but they likewise fascinate the most jaded by perfect execution of detail. The whole talent of Germany is contained in the person of Herr Knaus. So Germany lives in the Rue de l'Arcade in Paris." In the fifties all the technical ability which was to be gained from the study of the old Dutch masters and from constant commerce with the modern French reached its highest point in Knaus. Even in his youth the great Netherlandish painters, Ostade, Brouwer, and Teniers, must have had more effect upon him than his teachers, Sohn and Schadow, since his very first pictures, "The Peasants' Dance" of 1850 and "The Card Sharpers" of 1850, had little in common with the Düsseldorf school, and therefore so much the more with the Netherlandish _chiaroscuro_. "The Card Sharpers" is precisely like an Ostade modernised. By his migration to Paris in 1852 he sought to acquire the utmost perfection of finish; and when he returned home, after a sojourn of eight years, he had at his command such a sense for effect and fine harmony of tone, such a knowledge of colour, and such a disciplined and refined taste, that his works indicate an immeasurable advance on the motley harshness of his predecessors. His "Golden Wedding" of 1858--perhaps his finest picture--had nothing of the antiquated technique of the older type of Düsseldorf pictures of peasant life; technically it stood on a level with the works of the French. [Illustration: KNAUS. THE GOLDEN WEDDING. (_By permission of Messrs. Goupil & Co., the owners of the copyright._)]