All three show little promise in technique; it was only in water-colour that he painted with more freedom. [Illustration: JOSEF ANTON KOCH.] Without a doubt nature in Italy is favourable to this "heroic" style of landscape. In South Italy the country is at once magnificent and peaceful. The naked walls of rock display their majestic lines with a sharp contour; the sea is blue, and there is no cloud in the sky. As far as the eye reaches everything is dead and nugatory in its colour, and rigid and inanimate in form: a plastic landscape, full of style but apparently devoid of soul. Nowhere is there anything either stupendous or familiar, though, at the same time, there is no country on the earth where there is such a sweep of proud majestic lines. It was not the composition of Poussin, but the classic art of Claude--which aimed at being nothing but the transparent mirror of sunny and transparent nature--that gave perfect expression to this classic landscape; and in the nineteenth century _Karl Rottmann_, according to what one reads, has most completely represented this same classical form of art. His twenty-eight Italian landscapes in the arcades of the Munich Hofgarten are said to display a sense of the beauty of line and a greatness of conception paralleled by few other landscape works of the century. And those who draw their critical appreciations from books will probably continue to make this statement, with all the greater right since the world has been assured that the Arcade pictures are but a shadow of earlier splendour. To a spectator who has not been primed and merely judges with his own eyes without knowing anything about Rottmann's celebrity, these pictures with their hard, inept colouring and their pompous "synthetic" composition seem in the majority of cases to be excessively childish, though it is not contested that before their restoration by Leopold Rottmann and their present state of decay they may very possibly have been good. Rottmann's Grecian landscapes in the New Pinakothek are not ranked high even by his admirers. Standing in the beginning entirely upon Koch's ground, he was led in these pictures to give more importance to colour and light, and even to introduce unusual phenomena, such as lowering skies, with rainbows, sunsets, moonlight scenes, thunderstorms, and the like. This mixture of classical principles of drawing with effect-painting in the style of Eduard Hildebrandt brought a certain confusion into his compositions, to say nothing of the fact that he never got rid of his harsh and heavy colour, Bengal lights, and a crudeness of execution suggestive of tapestry. His water-colours, probably, contain the only evidence from which it may be gathered that Rottmann really had an eminent feeling for great characteristic lines, and did not unsuccessfully go through the school of Claude with his finely moulded, rhythmically perfected, and yet simple conception of nature. [Illustration: _Gräphische Künst._