Up to 1840 there stood at his side a master no less powerful, the refractory, self-taught _Karl Blechen_, who only took up painting when he was five-and-twenty, and became one of the most original of German landscapists, in spite of a ruined life prematurely closing in mental darkness and suicide. He possessed a delicate feeling for nature, inspiration, boldness, and a spirited largeness of manner, although his technique was hard, awkward, and clumsy to the very end. He might be called the Alfred Rethel of landscape painting. He was not moved by what was kindly or formally beautiful in nature, but by loneliness, melancholy, and solitude. Many of his landscapes break away from peaceful melancholy, and are like the pictures in some horrible nightmare, ghastly and terrifying; on the other hand, he often surprises us by the pleasure he takes in homely everyday things, a characteristic hitherto of rare occurrence. Whereas Lessing never crossed the Alps for fear of losing his originality, Blechen was the first who saw even modern Italy without the spectacles of ideal style. From his Italian pictures it would not be supposed that he had previously studied the landscapes of the Classicists, or that beside him in Berlin Schinkel worked on the entirely abstract and ideal landscape. As a painter Blechen has even discovered the modern world. For Lessing landscape "with a purpose" was something hideous and insupportable. He cared exclusively for nature untouched by civilisation, painted the murmuring wood and the raging storm, here and there at most a shepherd who indicated the simplest and the oldest employment on the earth's surface. But the Blechen Exhibition of 1881 contained an entirely singular phenomenon as regards the thirties, an evening landscape before the iron works in Eberswald: a long, monotonous plain with a sluggish river, behind which the dark outlines of vomiting manufactory chimneys rise sullenly into the bright evening sky. Even in that day Blechen painted what others scarcely ventured to draw: nature working in the service of man, and thereby--to use Tieck's expression--"robbed of her austere dignity." [Illustration: CARL FRIEDRICH LESSING.]