His illustrations present an almost exhaustive picture of the life of the German people at home and in the world, at work and in their pleasure, in suffering and in joy. He follows it through all grades and all seasons of the year. Everything is true and genuine, everything seized from life in its fulness: the child splashing in a tub; the lad shouting as he catches the first snowflake in his hat; the lovers seated whispering in their cosy little chamber, or wandering arm in arm on their "homeward way through the corn" amid the evening landscape touched with gold; the girl at her spinning-wheel and the hunter in the forest, the travelling journeyman, the beggar, the well-to-do Philistine. The scene is the sitting-room or the nursery, the porch twined with vine, the street with old-fashioned overhanging storeys and turrets, the forest and the field with splendid glimpses into the hazy distance. Children are playing round a great tree, labourers are coming back from the field, or the family is taking its rest in some hour of relaxation. A peaceful quietude and chaste purity spread over everything. Certainly Richter's drawing has something pedantic and unemphatic, that weak, generalising roundness which, beside the sharp, powerful stroke of the old artists, has the spirit of a drawing-master. But what he has to give is always influenced by delicate and loving observation, and never stands in contradiction to truth. He does not give the whole of nature, but neither does he give what is unnatural. He is one of the first of Germans whose art did not spring from a negation of reality, produced by treating it on an arbitrary system, but rested instead upon tender reverie, transfigured into poetry. When in the fifties he stayed a summer in pleasant Loschwitz, he wrote in his diary: "O God, how magnificent is the wide country round, from my little place upon the hill! So divinely beautiful, and so sensuously beautiful! The deep blue heaven, the wide green world, the bright and fair May landscape alive with a thousand voices." [Illustration: WILHELM BUSCH.] In all that generation, to whom existence seemed so sad, Ludwig Richter is one of the few who really felt content with the earth, and held the life around them to be the best and healthiest material for the artist. And that is the substance of the plate to which he gave the title "Rules of Art." A wide landscape stretches away with mighty oaks slanting down, and a purling spring from which a young girl is drawing water, whilst a high-road, enlivened by travellers young and old, runs over hill and dale into the sunny distance. In the midst of this free rejoicing world the artist is seated with his pencil. And above stands the motto written by Richter's hand-- "Und die Sonne Homer's, siehe sie lächelt auch uns."