Thus the German _genre_ painting ran approximately the same course as the English had done at the beginning of the century. At that time the kingdom of German art was not of this world. Classicism taught men to turn their eyes on the art of a past age. Art in Germany had progressed slowly, and at first with an uncertain and hesitating step, before it learnt that what blossoms here, and thrives and fades, should be the subject of its labours. Gradually it brought one sphere of reality after the other into its domain. Observation took the place of abstraction, and the discoverer that of the inventor. The painter went amongst his fellow-creatures, opened his eyes and his heart to share their fortunes and misfortunes, and to reproduce them in his own creation. He discovered the peculiarities of grades of life and professional classes. Every one of the beautiful German landscapes with its peasantry, every one of the monastic orders and every manufacturing town found its representative in _genre_ painting. The country was mapped out. Each one took over his plot, which he superintended, conscientiously, like an ethnographical museum. And just as fifty years before, Germany had been fertilised by England, so it now gave in its turn the principles of _genre_ painting to the powers of the second rank in art. Even France was in some degree influenced. As if to indicate that Alsace would soon become German once more, after 1850 there appeared in that province certain painters who busied themselves with the narration of anecdote from rustic life quite in the manner of Knaus and Vautier. _Gustave Brion_, the grand-nephew of Frederica of Sesenheim, settled in the Vosges, and there gave intelligence of a little world whose life flowed by, without toil, in gentle, patriarchal quietude, interrupted only by marriage feasts, birthdays, and funeral solemnities. He appears to have been rather fond of melancholy and solemn subjects. His interiors, with their sturdy and honest people, bulky old furniture, and large green faïence stoves, which are so dear to him, are delightful in their familiar homeliness and their cordial Alsatian and German character, and recall Vautier; in fact, he might well be termed the French Vautier. He lives in them himself--the quiet old man, who in his last years occupied himself solely with the management of his garden and the culture of flowers, or sat by the hour in an easy-chair at the window telling stories to his old dog Putz. But pictorial unity of effect must be asked from him as little as from Vautier.