KARL ROTTMANN.] Otherwise _Friedrich Preller_ is the only one of all the stylists deriving from Koch who rose to works consistent in execution. To him only was it granted to assure his name a lasting importance by exhaustively working out a felicitous subject. The _Odyssey_ landscapes extend through his whole life. During a sojourn in Naples in 1830 he was struck by the first idea. After his return home he composed for Doctor Härtel in Leipzig the first series as wall decoration in tempera in 1832-34. Then there followed his journeys to Rügen and Norway, where he painted wild strand and fell landscapes of a sombre austerity. After this interruption, so profitably extending his feeling for nature, he returned to the _Odyssey_. The series grew from seven to sixteen cartoons, which were to be found in 1858 at the Munich International Exhibition. The Grand Duke of Weimar then commissioned him to paint the complete sequence for a hall in the Weimar Museum. In 1859-60 Preller prepared himself afresh in Italy, and as an old man completed the work which he had planned in youth. This Weimar series, executed in encaustic painting, is artistically the maturest that he ever did. Of the entire school he only had the secret of giving his figures a semblance of life, and concealed the artificiality of his compositions. Nature in his pictures has an austere, impressive sublimity, and is the worthy home of gods and heroes. During his long life he had made so many and such incessant studies of nature in North and South--even at seventy-eight he was seen daily with his sketch-book in the Campagna--that he could venture to work with great, simple lines without the danger of becoming empty. At the time when these pictures were painted the rendering of still-life in landscape had in general been long buried, although even to-day it has scattered representatives in the younger Preller, Albert Hertel, and Edmund Kanoldt. As antique monuments came into fashion with Classicism, German ruins became the mode at the beginning of the romantic period and the return to the national past. For Koch and his followers landscape was only of value when, as the background of classical works of architecture, it directed one's thoughts to the antique: shepherds had to sit with their flock around them on the ruins of the temple of Vesta, or cows to find pasture between the truncated pillars of the Roman Forum. But now it could only find its justification by allying itself with mediæval German history, by the portrayal of castles and strongholds. [Illustration: ROTTMANN. THE COAST OF SICILY.]