In Germany, where "the yearning for Italy" had been ventilated in an immoderate quantity of lyrical poems ever since the time of Wackenroder's _Herzensergiessungen_, _August Riedel_ represented this phase of modern painting; and as Leopold Robert is still celebrated, Riedel ought not to be forgotten. Riedel lived too long (1800-1883), and, as he painted nothing but bad pictures during the last thirty years of his life, what he had done in his youth was forgotten. At that time he was the first apostle of Leopold Robert in Germany, and as such he has his importance as an innovator. When he began his career in the Munich Academy in 1819 Peter Langer, a Classicist of the order of Mengs, was still director there. Riedel also painted classical subjects and church pictures--"Christ on the Mount of Olives," "The Resurrection of Lazarus," and "Peter and Paul healing the Lame." But when he returned from Italy in 1823 he reversed the route which others had taken: the classic land set him free from Classicism, and opened his eyes to the beauty of life. Instead of working on saints in the style of Langer, he painted beautiful women in the costume of modern Italy. His "Neapolitan Fisherman's Family" was for Germany a revelation similar to that which Robert's "Neapolitan Improvisator" had been for France. The fisherman, rather theatrically draped, is sitting on the shore, while his wife and his little daughter listen to him playing the zither. The blue sea, dotted with white sails, and distant Ischia and Cape Missene, form the background; and a blue heaven, dappled with white clouds, arches above. Everything was of an exceedingly conventional beauty, but denoted progress in comparison with Robert. It already announced that search for brilliant effects of light which henceforward became a characteristic of Riedel, and gave him a peculiar position in his own day. "Even hardened connoisseurs," wrote Emil Braun from Rome about this time, "stand helpless before this magic of colouring. It is often long before they are able to persuade themselves that such glory of colour can be produced by the familiar medium of oil painting, and with materials that any one can buy at a shop where pigments are sold." Riedel touched a problem--diffidently, no doubt--which was only taken up much later in its full extent. And if Cornelius said to him, "You have fully attained what I have avoided with the greatest effort during the course of my whole life," it is none the less true that Riedel's Italian girls in the full glow of sunlight have remained, in spite of their stereotyped smile, so reminiscent of Sichel, better able to stand the test of galleries than the pictures of the Michael-Angelo of Munich. Before his "Neapolitan Fisherman's Family," which went the world over like a melody from Auber's _Masaniello_, before his "Judith" carrying the head of Holofernes in the brightest light of morning, before his "Girls Bathing"