That landscape would become for the nineteenth century even more important than it was for the Holland of the seventeenth century had been clearly announced since the days of Watteau and Gainsborough, and since this tendency, in spite of all coercive rules, could be only momentarily delayed by Classicism, it came to pass that the era which began with Winckelmann's conception of "vulgar nature" ended a generation later with her apotheosis. The thirty years from 1780 to 1810 denoted no more than a brief imprisonment for modern landscape, the luxuriantly blooming child being arbitrarily confined meanwhile in the strait-waistcoat of history. At first the phrase of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, which declared that landscape was no subject for painting because it had no soul, held painters altogether back from injuring their reputation by such pictures. And when, after the close of the century, some amongst them overcame this dread, Poussin the Classicist was of course set up as the only model. For an age which did not paint men but only statues, nature was too natural. As the figure painter subordinated everything to style and moulded the human body accordingly, landscape became mannered to suit an historical idea, and was used merely as a theatrical background for Greek tragedies. As the draughtsmen of the age freed the human figure from all "individual blemishes," and thereby abandoned the most essential points of life and credibility which are bound up with personality, the landscapists wished to purify nature from everything "accidental," with the result that dreary commonplaces were produced from her, the infinitely manifold. As the former sought the chief merit of their works in "well-balanced composition," the latter regarded trees and mountains, temples and palaces, clouds and rivers, merely as counters which only needed to be changed in their mutual position according to acquired rules of composition to make new pictures. They did not reflect that nature possesses a more original force than the most able self-conscious work of man, or, as Ludwig Richter has so well expressed it, that "what God Almighty has made is always more beautiful than what men can invent." There were summary rules for landscapes in the Poussin style, the beauty of which was sought above all in an opulent play of noble lines, corresponding to the fine and flowing lines of Carstens' figures. But the conception was all the more pedantic whilst the drawing was hard and dry and the colour feeble and vitreous. The most familiar of the group is the old Tyrolese _Josef Anton Koch_, who came to Rome in 1796, and, during two years, had an opportunity of allying himself with Carstens. His pictures are usually composed with motives taken from the Sabine Mountains. A landscape with "The Rape of Hylas" is possessed by the Staedel Institute in Frankfort, a "Sacrifice of Noah" by the Museum in Leipzig, and a landscape from the Sabine Mountains by the New Pinakothek in Munich.