He thinks more of producing pictures which may equal those of his forerunners in their merits than of rendering the impression of nature which he has himself received. His intelligence quickens at the study of the rules and theories set up by the Dutch, and he seeks for spots in nature where he may exercise these principles, but remains chill at the sight of sky and water, trees and mountains. It is not mere love of nature that has guided his brush, but a refined calculation of pictorial effect; and as he never went beyond this endeavour after rounded expression, as it was understood by the Dutch, though he certainly set German landscape free from a romantic subjection to style like Schirmer's, he never led it to immediate personal observation of nature. It is not the fragrance of nature that is exhaled from his pictures, but the odour of oil and varnish; and as the means he made use of to attain his effects never alter, the result is frequently conventional and methodic. [Illustration: ACHENBACH. SEA COAST AFTER A STORM.] But this does not alter the fact that, when the development of German landscape painting is in question, the name of Andreas Achenbach will be always heard in connection with it. He united technical qualities of the higher order with the capacity of impressing the public, and therefore he completed the work that the Danes had begun. He was the reformer who gave evidence that it was not alone by cliffs and baronial castles and murmuring oaks that sentiment was to be awakened; he hated everything unhealthy, mawkish, and vague, and by showing the claws of the lion of realism in the very heart of the romantic period he came to have the significance of a hero in German landscape painting. He forced demure Lower German landscape to surrender to him its charms; he revealed the fascination of Dutch canal scenes, with their quaint architecture and their characteristic human figures; he went to the stormy, raging North Sea, and opposed the giant forces of boisterous, unfettered nature to the tame pictures of the school of Schirmer. Achenbach's earliest North Sea pictures were exhibited at the very time when Heine's North Sea series made its appearance, and they soon ousted the wrecks of the French painter Gudin, which, up to that time, had dominated the picture market. For the first time in the nineteenth century sea-pieces were so painted that the water really seemed a fluent, agitated element, the waves of which did not look as if they had been made of lead, and the froth and foam of cotton wool. The things which he was specially felicitous in painting were Rhine-land villages with red-tiled roofs, Dutch canals with yellow sandbanks and running waves breaking at the wooden buttresses of the harbour, Norwegian scenes with stubborn cliffs and dark pines, wild torrents and roaring waterfalls. He did not paint them better than Everdingen and Ruysdael had done, but he painted them