Lessing's most celebrated follower, _Schirmer_, appears in general as a weakened and sentimental Lessing. He began in 1828 with "A Primæval German Forest," but a journey to Italy caused him in 1840 to turn aside from this more vigorous path. Henceforth his efforts were directed to nobility of form and line, to turning out Southern ideal landscapes with classically romantic accessories. The twenty-six Biblical landscapes drawn in charcoal, belonging to the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle, the four landscapes in oil with the history of the Good Samaritan in the Kunsthalle of Carlsruhe, and the twelve pictures on the history of Abraham in the Berlin National Gallery, are the principal results of this second period--his period of ideal style. They are tame efforts at a compromise between Lessing and Preller, and therefore of no consequence to the history of the development of landscape painting. Amongst the many who regarded him as a model, _Valentin Ruths_ of Hamburg is one of the most natural and delicate. His pictures, however, did not display any new impulse to widen the boundary by proceeding more in the direction of healthy and honestly straightforward observation of nature, or by emancipating himself from the school of regular composition and the rendering of an arbitrary mood. [Illustration: LESSING. THE WAYSIDE MADONNA.] Meanwhile this impulse came from another quarter. At the very time when the _genre_ artists were painting their earliest pictures of rustic life under the influence of Teniers and Ostade, the landscapists also began to return to the old Dutch masters, following Everdingen in particular. Thus another strip of nature was conquered, another step made towards simplicity. The landscape ideal of the Classicists had been architecture, that of the Romanticists poetry; from this time forward it became pure painting. Little Denmark, which fifty years before had exercised through Carstens that fateful influence on Germany which led painters from the treatment of contemporary life and sent them in pursuit of the antique, now made recompense for the evil it had done. During the twenties and thirties it produced certain landscapists who guided the Germans to look with a fresh and unfettered gaze, undisturbed by the ideal, at nature in their own country, after the aberrations of Classicism and the one-sidedness of the Romanticists. Under Eckersberg the Academy of Copenhagen was the centre of a healthy realism founded on the Dutch, and some of the painters who received their training there and laboured in later years in Dresden, Düsseldorf, and Munich spread abroad the principles of this school. [Illustration: SCHIRMER. AN ITALIAN LANDSCAPE.]